Christians watch their families burned alive in Nigeria – The Telegraph

Trump rhetoric prompts fears that military intervention could further destabilise a country racked by bloodshed
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The killers, as they so often do, descended under cover of darkness, the sound of their arrival masked by falling rain. Most residents of Yelewata, a Christian farming village in central Nigeria’s Benue state, were still asleep – until the first gunshots rang out.
Those who could fled into the surrounding bush. Others, trapped, squatted silently in the village church, school and market stalls, holding their breath as the attackers hunted their prey, shooting or hacking to death anyone they found.
Their hiding places proved no match for the gunmen’s murderous intent. The assailants set the buildings ablaze, burning alive the men, women and children praying for deliverance within.
At least 100 died in the massacre at Yelewata in early June, according to Amnesty International. Others said the toll was twice as high. The slaughter quickly drew the attention of campaigners for Nigeria’s Christians, who have suffered repeated violence in Benue and elsewhere.
Pope Leo offered prayers. For some on the Republican Right in the United States, it was further evidence that Nigeria’s Christians were facing “genocide”. 
In September, Senator Ted Cruz introduced a bill to impose sanctions on Nigerian officials “who facilitate violence against Christians” and to designate Nigeria a “country of particular concern”, a label reserved for states that have tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom.
Over the weekend, Donald Trump dramatically escalated the rhetoric, ordering the Pentagon to plan potential military action in Nigeria and threatening to “go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing’” if its government failed to protect Christians.
“They’re killing record numbers of Christians in Nigeria,” he told reporters. “They’re killing them in very large numbers. We’re not going to allow that to happen.”
Mr Trump gave no indication of what kind of action he has in mind, but Pete Hegseth, his defence secretary, declared that “the department of war was preparing for action: Either the Nigerian government protects Christians, or we will kill the Islamic terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities”.
Nigerian officials, country experts and Western diplomats suspect the threats amount to bluster. But they warn that far from protecting Christians, any US military action would risk deepening Nigeria’s religious divides. By focusing narrowly on faith, they argue, Washington risks misreading a crisis with many interlocking causes.
For some US Republicans, and perhaps for Mr Trump himself, the massacre at Yelewata was the final straw. Senator Cruz cited it to justify his bill, saying the killings had been carried out by “jihadists” from the Fulani, a cattle-herding ethnic group that forms the world’s largest nomadic pastoral community.
Yet few Nigerians, even among Christians, would argue that Yelewata’s victims died primarily because of their faith.
A country of 220 million people with a roughly even Christian-Muslim split, Nigeria has endured Islamist violence for more than two decades. Boko Haram and its offshoot Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) dominate much of the country’s predominantly Muslim north-east. Last year the two groups killed more than 3,500 people, according to think-tank estimates.
Both have murdered Christians, massacred worshippers in churches and executed clergy. But Boko Haram has also slaughtered thousands of Muslims – bombing mosques, firing on worshippers at prayer and executing imams – branding any Muslim who co-operates with the state or rejects its ideology an apostate deserving death.
Shadowy criminal gangs complicate the picture even further. Gunmen killed at least 50 people after bursting into a mosque in Katsina state in August, burning 20 of them alive.
Yelewata, however, lies not in Islamist-controlled territory but in Nigeria’s so-called middle belt, where predominantly Christian southern communities meet the largely Muslim north.
Here the violence is often just as severe, particularly in Benue state, where repeated night raids, mass killings and village burnings have claimed nearly 7,000 lives since mid 2023, according to Amnesty International.
Although many victims have been Christian, few have died because of their Christianity, analysts say. A 2022 study by the international conflict-monitor ACLED found that killings explicitly linked to Christian religious identity accounted for just 5 per cent of civilian conflict deaths.
The Yelewata massacre was carried out by gunmen from the Muslim Fulani ethnic group. Yet few Fulanis are jihadists. Much of the violence between Fulani herders and mostly Christian crop farmers in the middle belt has been driven by other forces.
Desertification, shrinking pasture, blocked migration routes and jihadi violence have pushed the Fulani southwards in search of grassland and water, bringing them into deadly conflict with farming communities already struggling to survive on fragile land.
Local Christian leaders such as James Ayaste, king of the Tiv, Benue’s largest ethnic group, describe the conflict as “genocidal” but in ethnic rather than religious terms.
“What we are dealing with here in Benue is a calculated, well-planned, full-scale genocidal invasion and land-grabbing campaign by herder terrorists and bandits, which has been going on for decades and is worsening every year,” he said.
Some observers fear that the Trump administration has not grasped the complexity.
“The situation is much more complicated than is being portrayed by the US government,” said Nnamdi Obasi, Nigeria senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, a think-tank.
“Nigeria is battling overlapping security challenges from religious extremism, banditry and resource competition, to communal disputes and separatist agitation. A narrative that frames the situation as the mass slaughter of Christians grossly misrepresents reality. People on both sides of the religious divide have suffered great harm.”
Many Nigerians hope Mr Trump’s words will increase pressure on Bola Tinubu, the country’s president, to act more decisively to stem the bloodshed. A Muslim married to a Christian pastor, Mr Tinubu has been accused of failing to prioritise the violence since taking office in mid 2023.
Yet analysts and diplomats caution that US military action would likely prove counterproductive. Islamist groups are dispersed and embedded among civilians, making collateral casualties inevitable. Moreover, Mr Trump risks appearing to champion Christian Nigerians over Muslim ones, deepening sectarian suspicions.
“The perception that the United States is defending one group against another when both face the same threats could destabilise the country and polarise its citizens along religious lines more deeply than anything we’ve seen in the past,” said Mr Obasi.
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