Category: Nigeria
‘Terrorist scum’: Trump announces Christmas Day strikes in Nigeria in response to persecution of Christians
Christians in Nigeria have faced increased persecution recently. President Trump has landed a major surprise blow against those responsible.
On Christmas Day, President Donald Trump announced 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!”
‘The symbolism of doing this on Christmas should not be ignored.’
“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,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The Department of War executed numerous perfect strikes, as only the United States is capable of doing. Under my leadership, our Country will not allow Radical Islamic Terrorism to prosper.”
Trump’s post concluded, “May God Bless our Military, and MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists, of which there will be many more if their slaughter of Christians continues.”
On X, War Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed the attack and the Nigerian government’s cooperation with the United States in facilitating the strike.
“The President was clear last month: the killing of innocent Christians in Nigeria (and elsewhere) must end. The [Department of War] is always ready, so ISIS found out tonight — on Christmas. More to come… Grateful for Nigerian government support & cooperation. Merry Christmas!” Hegseth wrote.
Trump previously threatened to “do things in Nigeria that Nigeria is not going to be happy about” and “go into that now disgraced country guns-a-blazing.”
Responding to the announcement, Fox News’ Peter Doocy said, “The symbolism of doing this on Christmas should not be ignored.”
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Trump Strikes Anti-Christian Nigerian Terrorists On Christmas
‘There would be hell to pay, and tonight, there was’
Persecution
“Persecution,” editorial cartoon by Yogi Love for The American Spectator on Dec. 1, 2025.
‘Mass slaughter’: Trump moves to help Nigerian Christians under attack
“Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria. Thousands of Christians are being killed. Radical Islamists are responsible for this mass slaughter. I am hereby making Nigeria a ‘COUNTRY OF PARTICULAR CONCERN.'”
President Trump’s recent post to Trump Media-owned Truth Social focused attention on a crisis not known for being a priority of American foreign policy. But as much as the news out of Mexico and Ukraine may overshadow what’s happening in Nigeria, the situation there is no less severe. And it is indeed an “existential threat” that should especially concern Christians.
Just this past weekend, nine Christians — including a pastor — were killed by Fulani assailants in a terrorist attack.
Despite their well-observed decline in North America and Europe, the number of Christians worldwide is increasing, largely thanks to Asia and Africa. And in Africa, nowhere does the faith have a stronger presence than in Nigeria.
Christian stronghold
Africa’s most populous nation (238 million) is also its most Christian, with some 100 million believers — enough to rank Nigeria as the sixth-largest Christian population in the world. Concentrated in the country’s south, this population includes 21 million Catholics, 22 million Anglicans, 14 million Baptists, 6 million evangelicals, and 4.5 million Pentecostals, in the form of the Apostolic Church Nigeria.
Despite these numbers, Nigeria remains predominantly Muslim (53.5%), especially in the north, where Islamic terrorism is on the rise. According to a 2022 State Department report, groups like Boko Haram and ISIS-West Africa — along with religiously unaffiliated criminal gangs — have killed thousands of Muslims and Christians, with both sides accusing the government of failing to intervene.
There continued to be frequent violent incidents, particularly in the northern part of the country, affecting both Muslims and Christians, resulting in numerous deaths. Kidnappings and armed robbery by criminal gangs increased in the South as well as the North West, the South South, and the South East. The international Christian organization Open Doors stated that terrorist groups, militant herdsmen, and criminal gangs were responsible for large numbers of fatalities, and Christians were particularly vulnerable.
In response to such persecution, the State Department listed Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” under the first Trump administration, in 2020; the Biden administration removed that designation in late 2021. This was despite protests from the independent U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, which noted widespread “violence by militant Islamists and other non-state armed actors, as well as discrimination, arbitrary detentions, and capital blasphemy sentences by state authorities.”
Since then, USCIRF has continued to call for Nigeria’s Country of Particular Concern designation to be restored, warning as recently as July that “religious communities are facing ongoing, systematic, and egregious violations of their ability to practice their faith freely.”
High-profile attacks
This year alone, Nigeria has seen multiple high-profile attacks against Christians, including massacres in April and June that killed 40 and more than 100, respectively. In August, 50 Muslims were killed in an attack on a mosque. Just this past weekend, nine Christians — including a pastor — were killed by Fulani assailants in a terrorist attack.
On Saturday Trump followed up his initial statement with another post threatening to halt humanitarian aid and assistance to Nigeria until the killings stop. He also hinted at the possibility of military intervention, stating that he was prepared to enter the country “guns-a-blazing” in order to “wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”
While aboard Air Force One on Sunday, Trump made no effort to walk back his comments, telling reporters that deploying troops to Nigeria was still very much on the table. “I envisage a lot of things. They’re killing record numbers of Christians in Nigeria … and killing them in very large numbers. We’re not going to allow that to happen.”
Nigeria responds
Nigerian spokesman Daniel Bwala subsequently responded to Reuters with a statement following Trump’s comments, stating that U.S. assistance would be welcomed so long as the U.S. respected Nigeria’s “territorial integrity.” “I am sure by the time these two leaders meet and sit, there would be better outcomes in our joint resolve to fight terrorism.” He similarly affirmed to the BBC that any anti-Jihadi efforts ought to be made jointly.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu also challenged Trump’s statements and defended Nigeria’s record on religious freedom in a post on X.
“Religious freedom and tolerance have been a core tenet of our collective identity and shall always remain so. Nigeria opposes religious persecution and does not encourage it.”
Photo (left): Rodin Eckenroth/WireImage; Photo (right): SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Image
Genocide or not?
While acknowledging the realities of Nigeria’s ongoing security crisis, the mainstream media has disputed characterizations of the violence as a genocide against Christians.
Time magazine dismissed such claims as an idea “circulating in right-wing circles” and amplified by politicians like Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. Riley Moore (R-W.V.). It also cited statistics from independent watchdog Armed Conflict Location and Event Data suggesting that of the 20,409 estimated civilian deaths in the past five years, just 417 deaths were Muslim and 317 deaths were Christian.
CNN called the genocide narrative an “oversimplication” that blames religion for the violence while ignoring factors such as ethnicity and resource scarcity.
The Guardian cast Trump’s remarks as an attempt to pander to “his right-wing, evangelical base,” reflecting “renewed domestic political pressure to appear tough on the marginalization or persecution of Christians abroad.”
Methodological weakness
While ACLED rejects the claim of a Christian genocide in Nigeria, arguing that most violence stems from ethnic rivalries and competition over land and resources rather than religion, it has previously acknowledged the difficulty of ruling out religious persecution. In a note on its general methodology, the group has acknowledged that “disentangling the ethnic, communal, political, and religious dimensions of specific events … [proves] to be problematic — at times even impossible — and extremely time-consuming. As a result, religious repression and disorder … may be underrepresented in the dataset.”
Proponents of the genocide narrative say this could lead to systematic undercounting of Christian victims. In a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio last month, Rep. Moore countered with significantly larger figures: “More than 7,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria in 2025 alone — an average of 35 per day — with hundreds more kidnapped, tortured, or displaced by extremist groups.”
‘This needs to stop’
Evangelical author, public speaker, and Christian apologist Dr. Alex McFarland agrees with Moore, noting that resistance to covering Christian persecution is the norm. Reached just prior to Trump’s statements over the weekend, he told Align that he believes that claims of a Christian genocide are accurate.
In an age when so many champion human rights and social justice, Nigeria is something that should be talked about. What’s going on there is tragic on an unimaginable scale. This needs to stop, and I pray the United States of America will do what it can to stop the killing of Christians and advocate for their human rights.
American Christians who want to to help should be relentless in speaking up to elected officials, advises McFarland, making it clear that they “ask and expect them to take a stand on this issue, just as we expect our elected officials to take a positive stand for Israel and against anti-Semitism.”
Supporting organizations like Samaritan’s Purse, Open Doors, and Voice of the Martyrs is also an option.
McFarland emphasizes that anti-Christian persecution extends well beyond Nigeria, pointing to similar ongoing persecutions in China, India, and Saudi Arabia. “We need to understand that Christians outside of the United States have a hard go of it.”
Finally, he cautions his fellow Christians not to overlook one of the most powerful ways they can effect change. “What Christians can do is pray,” he tells Align. “That might sound glib and easy to say, but prayer works and is quite significant.”
Media Denies Christian Genocide in Response to Trump’s Threat of Military Action in Nigeria
On the night of June 13, 2025, armed Fulani herdsmen descended on a Catholic farming community in Nigeria. By the…
Rapper thanks Trump for defending Nigerian Christians; president threatens to ‘completely wipe out’ their jihadi attackers
Nigeria is a fast-growing country with an estimated population of over 239 million. According to the CIA Worldbook’s 2018 estimate, roughly 53.5% of the Nigerian population is Muslim and roughly 45.9% of the population is Christian.
Despite being over 100 million strong, Nigeria’s Christian population faces brutal persecution at the hands of radical Muslim groups.
President Donald Trump, who vowed ahead of the 2024 election to “protect persecuted Christians,” made abundantly clear over the weekend that those now savaging the followers of Christ in Nigeria may soon reap the whirlwind, courtesy of the U.S. military.
While the Nigerian regime has decried Trump’s efforts to prevent further bloodshed, others have celebrated the American president’s interest in resolving yet another conflict — including Trinidadian rapper Nicki Minaj, who thanked Trump and his team on Saturday.
Background
The Christian persecution watchdog Open Doors now ranks Nigeria as the seventh-worst place for Christians in the world, noting that “Christians are particularly at risk from targeted attacks by Islamist militants, including Fulani fighters, Boko Haram and ISWAP (Islamic State West Africa Province).”
According to the watchdog, over 4,100 Christians were killed for their faith between October 2022 and September 2023 alone — an average of 11 Christians slaughtered every day. During that same period studied by Open Doors, over 3,300 Nigerian Christians were abducted. The situation appears to have grown more dire in the years since.
RELATED: Nigerian Christians are being murdered by Islamic radicals. This congressman has had enough.
Photo by OLYMPIA DE MAISMONT/AFP via Getty Images
A report issued in August by the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law indicated that Fulani fighters and other jihadists massacred over 7,000 Christians in the first seven months of this year.
While some academics have warned against grouping the mass-killing Fulani herder-militant groups with other Islamist outfits targeting Christians — claiming their attacks are instead driven by economics or climate — the Fulani attacks appear to have a religious motive as well.
Jeff King, president of International Christian Concern and a leading expert on religious persecution, told Blaze News earlier this year that like Boko Haram, the Fulani militants, a group of traditionally nomadic cattle herders seeking greater grazing lands for their livestock, “are also driven by Islam’s practice of using violence to subjugate territories to Islam. In fact, the Fulanis are the driving force behind radical Islam’s massive land-grab of a huge swath of Africa known as the Sahel. They are motivated by a desire to rebuild a caliphate they had built in the 1700s and 1800s.”
The persecution of Christians by the Fulani militants and other radical Muslim groups has reportedly worsened since Bola Ahmed Tinubu became Nigeria’s president in 2023.
Taking action
Rep. Riley Moore (R-W.Va.) and other lawmakers, confronted with indications that the situation is worsening for Nigeria’s Christians, have called on the Trump administration to take action.
“Since Boko Haram’s insurgency in 2009, more than 50,000 Christians have been murdered and more than 5 million have been displaced. Just this year, a priest was kidnapped and murdered on Ash Wednesday. 54 Christians were martyred on Palm Sunday,” Moore noted early last month. “At least 250 priests have been attacked or killed in the last decade. More than 19,000 churches have been attacked or destroyed since 2009 — averaging three per day.”
Moore, who indicated that elements of the Nigerian regime have reportedly been involved in recent anti-Christian attacks, asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio to designate Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern. Evidently the administration similarly feels strongly about the matter.
‘If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet.’
President Donald Trump announced on Friday that he was applying the designation and asked Reps. Moore and Tom Cole (R-Okla.) along with the House Appropriations Committee to immediately look into the matter.
“Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria. Thousands of Christians are being killed. Radical Islamists are responsible for this mass slaughter,” wrote Trump. “I am hereby making Nigeria a ‘COUNTRY OF PARTICULAR CONCERN’ — But that is the least of it. When Christians, or any such group, is slaughtered like is happening in Nigeria (3,100 versus 4,476 Worldwide), something must be done!”
The CPC designation is applied under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 to nations engaged in severe violations of religious freedom. The designation can carry with it significant economic and diplomatic consequences.
Nigeria was previously slapped with the designation by the first Trump administration in 2020, but this was subsequently lifted by the Biden administration.
RELATED: Bill Maher’s shocking defense of Christians — and what it reveals
Aftermath of a terrorist attack on a Catholic Church in southwest Nigeria. AFP/Getty Images
Nicki Minaj was among those who celebrated Trump’s decision, stating, “Reading this made me feel a deep sense of gratitude. We live in a country where we can freely worship God.”
“No group should ever be persecuted for practicing their religion,” said the rapper.
“Numerous countries all around the world are being affected by this horror & it’s dangerous to pretend we don’t notice. Thank you to The President & his team for taking this seriously. God bless every persecuted Christian. Let’s remember to lift them up in prayer.”
Republican Reps. Moore, Cole, and Mario Díaz-Balart (Fla.) noted in a joint statement, “With President Trump announcing he will be redesignating Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern, the United States is making clear in one resolute voice: religious persecution will not be tolerated. The scourge of anti-Christian violence and oppression of other religious minorities by radical Islamic terrorists is an affront to religious freedom. This is a critical step in mobilizing leadership and attention to confront evil extremism.”
Just in case the designation wasn’t enough, Trump threatened a military intervention in the event that the Nigerian regime fails to protect Christians.
“If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Saturday evening.
“I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians! WARNING: THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT BETTER MOVE FAST!” added the president.
Fresh off blowing an apparent narco-trafficking vessel to smithereens, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth confirmed the Department of War was “preparing for action.”
The promise of a reckoning clearly made officials over in the Nigerian capital of Abuja nervous.
President Tinubu rushed out a statement on Saturday claiming that his nation “stands firmly as a democracy governed by constitutional guarantees of religious liberty.
“The characterization of Nigeria as religiously intolerant does not reflect our national reality, nor does it take into consideration the consistent and sincere efforts of the government to safeguard freedom of religion and beliefs for all Nigerians,” wrote Tinubu. “Religious freedom and tolerance have been a core tenet of our collective identity and shall always remain so. Nigeria opposes religious persecution and does not encourage it.”
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