More than 1,000 Christians in Nigeria have been slaughtered by Islamic militants since January, a report by the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust (HART) revealed.
The report, Your Land or Your Blood, was presented at the International Organisation for Peace and Social Justice crisis conference in London last month and found more than 6,000 believers have been murdered in the region in the last four years.
According to the Church Times, “Since January, there have been five serious attacks in Kaduna State, in the center of the country, resulting in an estimated 500 deaths. There were at least another five attacks in the counties of Bassa and Riyom, and more in Taraba State. The militant Islamist group Boko Haram remains in power around the Chad border region, including parts of Borno State in the north.”
Open Doors reported Nigeria as one of the most violent countries for Christians in the world, accounting for 90% of Christian deaths in the 2019 World Watch List reporting period.
HART founder, Baroness Cox, said the Fulani, a nomadic ethnic group of about 20 million people across 20 West- and Central-African countries, were largely responsible for the new wave of violence.
“The terrorist group was listed as the fourth most deadly in the Global Terrorism Index in 2016 and 2017,” the Times report said.
“While the underlying causes of violence are complex, the asymmetry and escalation of attacks by well-armed Fulani militia upon predominantly Christian communities is stark, and must be acknowledged,” Cox said.
Cox went on to explain, “Unless the U.K. and Nigerian governments are willing to address the massacre’s ideological roots, they will never be able to help the innocent victims being slaughtered on the killing fields of Plateau, Benue, Taraba, Southern Kaduna, and parts of Bauchi.”
Earlier this year a report commissioned by the British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt found persecution of Christians is spreading geographically and increasing in severity.
According to the findings, Christians are the most widely persecuted religion in the world. In some regions, persecution is so severe, that it’s arguably coming “close to meeting the international definition of genocide, according to that adopted by the UN.”
Despite this, the widespread persecution of Christians around the world has been largely ignored in the West for fear of being labelled Islamophobic.