TOBIAS Yahaya woke in the middle of an April night in 2023 to hear men breaking into his home in Sokoto, a city in the extreme north west of Nigeria.
Three individuals had scaled a high fence surrounding the compound of the house where he lived with his wife and four children aged between eight and three years and cut through coils of barbed wire. He saw them approaching.
Nigeria and the United States say they have killed a senior Islamic State (IS) leader in a joint-operation.
Abu-Bilal al-Minuki was described by US President Donald Trump as the “second in command of ISIS globally” and “the most active terrorist in the world”.
IS has radically shifted in recent years, with around 90% of its attacks now taking place in sub-Saharan Africa. Its Nigeria-based branch is by far the most active.
For Christians around the world, Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week, in commemoration of the entrance of Jesus Christ into Jerusalem.
On Palm Sunday this year, on Saturday 29 March, Christians in the city of Jos in northern Nigeria’s Plateau State saw AK-wielding jihadists enter their city on motorbike. Dozens were then slaughtered. One local leader told me of the pain of praying with a single mother whose 17-year-old son was murdered. Another woman was pregnant when she was shot dead.
At least 40 Christians were killed in a Palm Sunday massacre in Jos, the capital of Plateau State, after gunmen attacked the Agwan Rukuba community, marking one of the deadliest incidents in a week of escalating violence across Nigeria.
According to Arise News, the victims were targeted in Jos North County, a historically Christian area in the country’s volatile Middle Belt. Local reports cited by TruthNigeria suggest the attackers may have been Boko Haram militants rather than the more commonly implicated Fulani militia, although this has not been confirmed by the Nigerian military. The attack echoes a similar massacre last year in Zikke village, where 54 Christians were killed on Palm Sunday.
At least 23 people have been killed and more than 100 others injured in multiple suspected suicide bombings in the north-eastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, shattering its reputation as a relative oasis of calm in recent years as a long-running insurgency was pushed to the rural hinterlands.
Authorities said the explosions went off at the post office and market areas, as well as the entrance to the University of Maiduguri teaching hospital, on Monday evening during iftar, the breaking of fast in the month of Ramadan.
Driving through the vast, scorched landscape, I hear the words that have followed me all day. ‘They roasted the pastor and his wife alive in the church. We heard their screams.’
Plateau State stretches to the horizon. Rich black soil that once grew cassava and sugar cane is now ash. Trees are encrusted with soot. Fields of maize that shone gold in the sun are grey and lifeless, stalk after stalk standing in formation like an army frozen in defeat.
Bricks lie scattered in the scrub. Concrete blocks jut from the earth like jagged teeth. Roofs have collapsed inward.
The traditional chief of a village in western Nigeria where jihadists massacred residents earlier this week has recounted a night of terror during which the attackers killed two of his sons and kidnapped his wife and three daughters.
Umar Bio Salihu, the 53-year-old chief of Woro, a small, Muslim-majority village in Kwara state, said that at about 5pm on Tuesday the gunmen “just came in and started shooting”.
“All those shops that are within the road, they burnt them … Some people have been burned inside their houses,” he told the Agence France-Presse news agency. “They killed two of (my sons) standing at the front of my house. They took away my second wife with some three (daughters). They are with them presently in the bush.”
Donald Trump has said the US carried out airstrikes against Islamic State militants in north-west Nigeria on Thursday, after spending weeks decrying the group for targeting Christians.
The president said in a post on his Truth Social platform: “Tonight, at my direction as Commander in Chief, the United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries!
“I have previously warned these Terrorists that if they did not stop the slaughtering of Christians, there would be hell to pay, and tonight, there was. The Department of War executed numerous perfect strikes, as only the United States is capable of doing.”
BREAKING: President Trump announces "powerful and deadly" strikes on ISIS in Nigeria.
The terrorist group has reportedly attacked and killed thousands of Christians in the country over the past year. pic.twitter.com/jEae858GFj
— Fox News (@FoxNews) December 25, 2025
Douglas Todd: More people in the West are overcoming ignorance or indifference to learn about the atrocities being visited upon many church members in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country.
There are many reasons that massacres of Nigerian Christians haven’t received much media attention in the West, particularly compared with the coverage of conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza.
And one of those reasons is that many Nigerians, including in Canada, are afraid to speak out publicly against the atrocities carried out by Jihadist extremists and others, some of which occur during worship services. NGOs estimate tens of thousands of deaths and abductions.
This week, another Christian school was attacked, 300 children kidnapped. The reaction of the media and the world is indifference, while Pope Leo is in denial.
Manga is a Christian in Nigeria, the most dangerous place in the world for Christians, the country where a Christian is killed every two hours. Manga was supposed to be one of them. He was returning home as usual after university. His mother was preparing dinner. Terrorists burst into his house. They dragged Manga, his father, and his brother outside, while his mother and younger siblings hid in a room.
More than 300 children and staff are now thought to have been kidnapped by gunmen from a Catholic school in central Nigeria, making it one of the worst mass abductions the country has seen.
The Christian Association of Nigeria said 303 students and 12 teachers were taken from on St Mary’s School in Papiri, Niger state – substantially more than previously estimated.
It said the figures have been revised upwards “after a verification exercise”.
There is no Christian persecution in Nigeria!
Western media have become apologists for violent Islamists.
Earlier this month, US president Donald Trump condemned Nigeria over the violent persecution of its Christian minority by Islamist groups like Boko Haram, Fulani militants and other violent actors. Trump called Nigeria a ‘country of particular concern’, and he is not alone. This weekend, Pope Leo XIV picked out Nigeria as a nation in which Christians are being persecuted.
At least since the Obama presidency the US State Dept. held to the position that the conflict was a land dispute between the Fulani tribesman (Muslims) and the Christian Igbo tribe.
Nigeria’s Christians are being pushed to the brink of extinction – and could be wiped off the map within two generations without urgent international intervention.
That’s the chilling warning from Emeka Umeagbalasi, the outspoken founder of Nigeria’s International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety). And he’s not mincing his words.
The veteran activist says a silent, systematic genocide has swept Africa’s most populous nation for nearly two decades – a ‘long-running, coordinated campaign’ of killings, kidnappings and church burnings carried out mostly by Islamist militants and enabled by the Nigerian state itself.
Jihadist violence continues to escalate in Nigeria. Christians in the country face systematic, targeted violence, primarily from Islamic terror groups such as Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), alongside radical Muslim Fulani factions. These groups explicitly target Christians through killings, kidnappings, sexual violence, and destruction of villages. The Nigerian government’s failure to protect Christians and punish perpetrators has only strengthened the Islamic militants’ influence.
The violence against Christians in Nigeria has escalated sharply since at least 2011, with documented killings and attacks increasing steadily. Data from Open Doors show over 41,000 Christian deaths between October 2011 and September 2024, highlighting a prolonged and intensifying crisis.
Christians in Nigeria have welcomed Donald Trump’s threat to send the US military to the West African nation ‘guns-a-blazing’ – but its leaders are wary.
Nigeria has been roiled by internal violence in the wake of a jihadist insurgency spearheaded by extremist group Boko Haram in the northeast since 2009.
Trump, 79, had already designated Nigeria a ‘country of particular concern,’ but he took his condemnation of the situation in the country even further last week after hearing about it on Fox News, threatening to cut aid and even send in US troops.
