United States Senator Ted Cruz has accused Nigeria’s government of enabling a “massacre” against Christians, citing a rising number of attacks against the community in the country’s troubled centre.
In an X post on Tuesday, Cruz said 50,000 Christians have been killed since 2009 with 2,000 schools and 18,000 churches destroyed by what he called “Islamist” armed groups, but he did not cite sources for the information.
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Cruz, who counts evangelical Christians among his base, has introduced a bill to sanction Nigerian officials whom he accused of “ignoring and even facilitating the mass murder of Christians”.
The Republican lawmaker is the most prominent figure among voices from within the Christian political right in the US who are increasingly pushing claims of a Christian genocide in Africa’s most populous country, where 48 percent of people are Christians.
Nigeria’s government, while admitting a security problem, has denied the claims. Responding to Cruz’s claims, the Christian Association of Nigeria said the killings in the country were not targeting Christians alone and foreign groups were looking to exploit domestic crises.
Nigeria is plagued by security problems as the armed group, Boko Haram, wages a deadly rebellion in the northeast and criminal gangs operate in the northwest. The country has also been racked by deadly communal violence.
More than 10,000 people have been killed and hundreds kidnapped since Bola Tinubu was elected president in May 2023. As many as 3 million people remain displaced by the violence.
So what’s the truth? And why has Nigeria failed to improve its security?
Who has said what?
Cruz blames Nigerian officials for what he calls “Christian massacres”.
“It is the result of decisions made by specific people, in specific places, at specific times – and it says a great deal about who is lashing out now that a light is being shone on these issues,” Cruz said in his X post.
“The United States knows who those people are, and I intend to hold them accountable,” he added without mentioning names.
In September, Cruz introduced what he called the Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act of 2025, which, he said, aims to hold officials who “facilitate Islamic Jihadist violence and the imposition of blasphemy laws” accountable. The bill seeks to target officials who “facilitate violence against Christians” and those who enforce Islamic and blasphemy laws. It also seeks to designate Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” and Boko Haram as well as its splinter faction, the ISIL (ISIS) affiliate in West Africa Province (ISWAP), as “entities of particular concern”.
The US designated Boko Haram as a “foreign terrorist organisation” in 2013.
Similarly, Republican Congressman Riley Moore wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday, urging him to designate Nigeria as a country of particular concern “due to the alarming and ongoing persecution of Christians across the country”. He said in his letter that 7,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria this year by groups such as Boko Haram. He also did not cite his sources but said: “Nigeria has become the deadliest place in the world to be a Christian.”
Last week, Bill Maher, the host of the HBO current affairs and political satire show Real Time With Bill Maher, also made claims of a Christian genocide by Boko Haram, which he said was being ignored because “Jews aren’t involved” – a reference to the worldwide outrage over Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
“I’m not a Christian, but they are systematically killing the Christians in Nigeria,” he said. “They’ve killed over 100,000 since 2009. They’ve burned 18,000 churches. … They [Boko Haram] are literally attempting to wipe out the Christian population of an entire country.”
It is unclear where Maher got his figures from.
The statements appeared to mirror President Donald Trump’s misleading take on an alleged “genocide” of white people in South Africa.
Have there been attacks on Christian communities in Nigeria?
There are increasing attacks on predominantly Christian farming communities in Nigeria’s Middle Belt and central states. Nighttime raids, burned villages, kidnappings and mass displacements are rife with communities accusing the government of mounting a weak response and failing to arrest perpetrators.
The attackers are often identified by victims as being herders from the rival Fulani pastoral ethnic group, which is predominantly Muslim.
In the region, which is Nigeria’s most fertile, herder and farming communities have a long history of tension and clashes. Analysts link the violence to dwindling access to resources like farm- and rangeland as well as water because of climate change and population growth.
The Nigerian government calls these attacks a “local farmer-herdsmen crisis” and has launched grassroots efforts to create dialogue between the two sides.
However, farming communities, which are non-Fulani and are disproportionately affected, place more weight on the ethnic undertones and are outraged at the government’s unwillingness to highlight those.
As the attacks have grown in scale and the weaponry used has increased, farming communities made up of diverse ethnic groups are calling the attacks “ethnic cleansing”. Analysts said that while the conflict may have started out as resource disputes, it is heavily connected to ethnicity and religion as well. Reports of attacks and reprisals on both sides go back as far as 2013, but recent violence has been focused on farmers.
In an incident in June, herdsmen attacked the Tiv community of Yelwata in Benue State, killing more than 100 people. Tinubu and other officials visited the state and in their statements applied the “farmer-herdsmen” framing. But the Tiv leader, James Ortese Iorzua Ayatse, was quick to counter them.
“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,” he said.
In May, Amnesty International reported that nearly 10,000 people have been killed since 2023, including children, in the worst affected states of Benue and Plateau, where gunmen kill people and then destroy infrastructure like schools, clinics, grain reserves, places of worship and boreholes. More than 500,000 people have been displaced.
Kaduna and Nasarawa states have also been heavily impacted. The authorities, Amnesty International said, have failed to make arrests or prosecute people, prompting anger and mistrust.
Are these attacks linked to Boko Haram?
Cruz and others on the US right may have muddled those attacks with separate conflicts in Nigeria’s northeastern states, including Borno, Adamawa and Yobe.
These are perpetuated by ideological groups – Boko Haram and ISWAP. Both Christians and Muslims, churches and mosques, have been attacked in these states with Muslims most affected because these are Muslim-majority states.
The ideological armed groups are seeking to create a state based on their interpretation of Islamic law.
Borno, where Boko Haram emerged in the early 2000s, is the most affected. At its height in 2015, Boko Haram controlled swaths of territory across Nigeria and neighbouring Chad, Niger and Cameroon. It has weakened significantly in recent years. About 350,000 people had been killed by 2021 in the Boko Haram conflict, according to the United Nations Development Programme.
Separately, bandit groups are operating in the northwestern states of Katsina, Zamfara, Sokoto, Kebbi, Niger and Nasarawa, mostly for profit. They often conduct kidnappings for ransom and raids on communities. Although they frequently recruit from the Fulani community, they are not exclusively made up of members of this group.
However, analysts have noted that bandits are increasingly cooperating with ideological armed groups seeking to expand their territory. That has made the different crises more fluid with overlaps. Analysts said Nigeria’s security apparatus is overwhelmed and struggles to gather adequate intelligence to understand the extent to which these groups collaborate so it can respond efficiently to them.
Fulani nomadic communities – which can be found in Nigeria, Ghana and across Sahelian countries like Mali – have long faced systemic political and social exclusion although governments often argue that their pastoral nature makes it difficult to provide resources like schools, clinics and other services.
Many of them, analysts said, have nursed grievances for a long time. With the rise of powerful armed ideological groups looking to exploit their anger, analysts said more members of the community are being recruited for criminal purposes and ideological attacks.
Fulani herders have similarly been linked to armed groups operating in Mali and Burkina Faso like Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM).
Legitimate Fulani herder associations, however, insisted that not all Fulani herders are engaged in crime or armed conflict and decry stereotypes of the group.
What has the Nigerian government said?
Last week, Nigeria’s information minister responded to Maher’s comments in a statement, saying they were overly simplistic.
“Portraying Nigeria’s security challenges as a targeted campaign against a single religious group is a gross misrepresentation of reality,” Mohammed Idris Malagi said.
“While Nigeria, like many countries, has faced security challenges, including acts of terrorism perpetrated by criminals, couching the situation as a deliberate, systematic attack on Christians is inaccurate and harmful. It oversimplifies a complex, multifaceted security environment and plays into the hands of terrorists and criminals who seek to divide Nigerians along religious or ethnic lines,” he said.
In an opinion piece for Al Jazeera, Gimba Kakanda, a special assistant to the vice president, wrote that the crisis is more about ethnic rivalries than it is about religion.
“In reality, Nigeria’s conflicts are multifaceted, driven by ethnic rivalries, land disputes and criminality, with religion often secondary,” Kakanda wrote. “While Western media often highlight attacks on churches and Christian communities, the reality is that these terrorists are indiscriminate in their violence.”
The focus on Nigeria, Kakanda said, was linked to Vice President Kashim Shettima’s stated support for Palestinians at the recent UN General Assembly.
Abimbola Ayuba, a spokesperson for the Christian Association of Nigeria, told Nigeria’s The Guardian newspaper that the country’s myriad crises were being exploited by foreign groups.
“Sometimes, our situation is being taken advantage of by groups who know that they benefit from foreign interests,” he was quoted as saying.
“Those foreign interests have a right to poke their noses into what’s going on in our system, but we also have a right to report things as they are,” he added.
What about the claims of blasphemy and Islamic law?
Cruz, in his new bill, again lumped together the separate issue of blasphemy and Islamic law with the Middle Belt attacks.
Twelve Muslim-majority Nigerian states in the country’s north apply Islamic law, as is allowed by the 1999 Nigerian Constitution. They are Zamfara, Bauchi, Borno, Gombe, Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Niger, Sokoto and Yobe.
Islamic law in these states is meant to be applied only to Muslims although the US noted in a 2019 report that state governments did not always adhere to that clause.
Blasphemy, which pertains to insults against Islam or notable Islamic figures, carries serious punishments under Islamic law. Some scholars interpret it as requiring the death sentence although this is highly disputed.
In 2022, Kano State sentenced atheist Mubarak Bala to 24 years in prison for what prosecutors claimed was a blasphemous Facebook post. The case generated nationwide outrage and calls for his release. Bala was freed in 2020.
There have been intermittent cases of illegal, deadly mob action against people who are perceived to have blasphemed in the Muslim-majority north.
