President Trump escalated his attacks on Nigeria on Friday, accusing the West African nation of failing to protect the country’s Christians, and using the term “genocide” for the first time to describe the violence there.
“I think Nigeria is a disgrace. The whole thing is a disgrace,” he said on Fox News Radio’s The Brian Kilmeade Show. “They’re killing people by the thousands. It’s a genocide. And I’m really angry about it.”
Mr. Trump threatened to take military action against the country after a campaign by several U.S. lawmakers and religious activists called for more attention to the attacks on Christians.
Nuhu Ribadu, Nigeria’s national security adviser, met with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon on Friday to discuss Mr. Trump’s allegations.
Kidnappings and terror attacks in Nigeria are common and widespread, with more than 8,000 people killed this year alone. But the attacks are not new, and there is no clear evidence to suggest Christians are attacked any more frequently than Muslims.
On Friday, gunmen abducted at least 52 students from a Catholic school in central Nigeria. On Monday, kidnappers took about 25 Muslim students from a school in the northwestern part of the country. The fate of the kidnapped students is not known.
Contrary to Mr. Trump’s claim of a genocide, there are different types of violence happening across the country, with no one-size-fits-all explanation. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous nation, with by some estimates more than 230 million people. It’s geographically huge and ethnically diverse, with over 300 languages spoken.
Even within a single region, attributing the violence to a single group or motivation is tricky.
Jihadist groups are responsible for violence in the northeast against Christians and Muslims. They are also involved in economically motivated attacks by so-called bandits in the northwest.
In the central part of Nigeria, clashes have long taken place between herders and farmers battling for scarce resources, which also involve ethnic and religious tensions. Lately, these attacks have become more about land grabbing by influential people, according to local residents.
One unifying factor: Across the country, perpetrators can commit acts of violence with impunity. Few are ever captured or tried, and government and security officials are rarely held accountable for security lapses on their watch.
Terrorism
Nigerians have frequently been attacked by jihadist groups like Boko Haram, based in the northeast, whose ideology tells them to attack Christians, as well as Muslims with whom they don’t agree. The most famous case was the kidnapping of the Chibok girls, which happened about a decade ago. Most of those girls were Christian, and there have been many more like it. But the attack took place in a majority Muslim area.
Kidnapping for money
In the northwest, where one of this week’s abductions took place, there have been many attacks on villages. Some Nigerians use the word “bandits” to describe such perpetrators, and it’s not really clear what they’re motivated by — other than money.
Land conflicts
Many of Nigeria’s Christian victims of violence in recent years have been from the central Nigerian region known as the Middle Belt, where there have been frequent herder-farmer clashes. These are inter-communal conflicts over land, as a battle for scarce resources stirs long-held tensions over religion and ethnicity. The region has a mix of Muslims, Christians and animists, and many ethnic groups. But the herder-farmer label lately masks land grabbing attempts by elites, local residents say.
Secessionists
Nigeria also has secessionist groups in the southeast who have been carrying out attacks on security forces and sometimes the civilian population, which is largely Christian, as are the secessionists themselves. This conflict dates back more than 50 years, when the self-declared Republic of Biafra tried to break off from the rest of the nation. The resulting civil war left more than one million people dead.
Trump’s response
Since Mr. Trump publicly criticized Nigeria for the attacks against Christians, he has designated the nation a Country of Particular Concern, a label reserved for foreign governments with severe religious freedom violations. He has also ordered the Pentagon to prepare to intervene militarily in Nigeria if necessary. He has directed two Republicans in Congress, Representative Riley Moore of West Virginia, and Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, to look into the killings.
“President Trump’s put everything on the table,” Mr. Moore said in an interview this month. “What I’m hoping is we can help them disrupt and defeat these terror networks that are killing these Christians. But we need the Nigerians to step up.”
Nigeria is not the first African nation Mr. Trump has accused of genocide. He has also claimed, falsely, that South Africa is carrying out a genocide against white Afrikaners.
Ruth Maclean is the West Africa bureau chief for The Times, covering 25 countries including Nigeria, Congo, the countries in the Sahel region as well as Central Africa.
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