Christmas Eve was balmy in Nigeria’s Plateau State, where the Rev. Gideon Dawel’s family has lived for decades. Mr. Dawel, 45, pastor of Christ Apostolic Church, was musing about the next day’s service when men in this area of villages, Bokkos, decided to post a patrol. Muslim Fulani herdsmen—some of whom had been terrorizing the region—had shown up nearby. Mr. Dawel phoned a Fulani he knew to ask what might happen. Nothing, he was told.
Thirty minutes later that changed. “We could not recognize them from afar in the dark,” Mr. Dawel says in an interview. “They were about 100 men with AK-47 rifles. They had the guns, machetes and petrol to burn with. They shot at everyone and everything—rapidly, rapidly, rapidly.”
Before the watchmen could reach police, the attackers set fire to homes and Mr. Dawel’s church. They torched crops and fields. As the gunmen vanished, Mr. Dawel returned home to find his wife and five daughters dead. He fainted at the sight and had to be carried from the village. The next day survivors buried his family without him.
For 48 hours last Christmas, seemingly coordinated attacks struck 37 communities across a 250-mile stretch of Nigeria’s Middle Belt. Fulani terrorists reportedly killed at least 160 people, set more than 220 homes ablaze, burned vehicles and churches. “What ought to be a night of glad tidings turned out to be that of horror,” wrote Dawari George, a former member of Nigeria’s National Assembly.
Gaza and Ukraine are deadly, but if you’re a Christian, the most likely place in the world to be hunted and killed is Nigeria—a diverse country with a constitutional federal government and one of Africa’s largest economies. According to the monitor Open Doors, during the year ending in September some 4,100 Christians were killed and 3,300 kidnapped in raids across the country. From December 2023 to February 2024, 1,336 people were killed in Plateau State, Amnesty International reports. At least 750 churches and other Christian sites were reportedly targeted, many forced to close.
Nigeria’s Middle Belt, a cultural and political hub, was once a buffer between the Muslim north and the Christian south. Plateau State’s capital, Jos, has hosted a university for decades that produced leading politicians, novelists, actors and academics. Mr. Dawel’s village is barely 40 miles south.
But now Christians are being wiped off the map.
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Author: Ruth King
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