CSI is launching a new campaign to highlight the impact of the religiously motivated violence against Christians in Nigeria’s Middle Belt.
CSI wants to raise awareness of the plight of Christians in Nigeria’s Middle Belt. csi
One Christian is killed almost every two hours in attacks across Nigeria, on average. This stark statistic is cited by the Lausanne Movement in a report covering the period from 2020 to 2023.
To understand what Christians in the Middle Belt, where many of the attacks are concentrated, face, a team from Christian Solidarity International (CSI) traveled there in June 2026. They met with survivors, civil society activists, journalists and lawyers. Christians in Nigeria: Under Siege draws on what the team witnessed and learned there.
The Middle Belt lies between Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north and largely Christian south and is home to both communities. The team from CSI, which supports humanitarian work through local partners and advocates for the protection of Christians in Nigeria, spent two weeks in Plateau State. At least 50 Christians were killed there during their visit.
In one of the attacks, armed men descended on a village. Community members said they called a military unit about a mile away, but the officer who answered told them their vehicle was out of fuel. Twenty-five people were killed.
Survivors said they were made to bury the dead that same day, without death certificates or autopsies, and without coffins or even sheets to cover the bodies.
Journalists and lawyers CSI met said this was part of a wider pattern. Their accounts left us wondering how the killers could be identified if evidence was buried with the victims.
Attacks are not the only danger Christians face in these communities. A journalist CSI met with said he had documented at least 150 communities in one southern local government area of Kaduna State living under the control of armed groups.
Under an unwritten arrangement, the armed groups promise not to attack the Christian communities if residents pay levies, seek permission before leaving their villages and submit to armed men entering their homes and sexually abusing women.
The journalist suspects that Christian communities in other parts of Kaduna and in other states have been similarly enslaved, and is investigating those reports.
Christian leaders, survivors and journalists CSI met with accused armed Fulani militias of carrying out most attacks on Christian communities in the Middle Belt and enslaving entire villages.
A study by the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa lends weight to their account of the militias’ role in the killings.
It attributed 18,577 civilian deaths between October 2019 and September 2025 to armed Fulani groups, nearly four times the number attributed to Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province combined.
CSI was moved to launch Christians in Nigeria: Under Siege after seeing how little the world knows about the violence and suffering Christians face there. No one hears the people’s accounts of what is happening.
The campaign will bring the stories of Middle Belt Christians to the attention of the international community and press for action to protect them. It is our hope that these personal stories will also prompt Christians around the world to pray for the bereaved and for those who bravely continue to practise their faith while living under threat.
