Surging Terror Raids in Nigeria Following Controversial Elections Renew ‘Caliphate’ Concern

Placards are displayed on a vehicle as a group of people protest the outcome of the 2023 presidential elections and the emergence of the candidate of All Progressives Congress' (APC) Bola Tinubu as the president-elect in Abuja, Nigeria, on March 1, 2023. Kola Sulaiman/ AFP via Getty Images

JOS, Nigeria—A wave of terrorist attacks following Nigeria’s presidential elections has terrified Christians and renewed concern about an Islamic caliphate in Africa’s most populous nation.

At least 1,041 Christians have been killed across the country since January by Islamic extremists, according to Emeka Umeagbalasi, a respected criminologist and genocide researcher who is chairman of the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety), an organization that tracks and reports genocide in Nigeria.

He says the attacks have been influenced by the outcome of the presidential election, which produced a Muslim president- and vice president-elect for the first time in the country’s history.

A soldier from the Nigerian Armed Forces takes position and secures the streets in Lagos Island, Lagos, Nigeria, on Feb. 27, 2023. John Wessels/AFP via Getty Images

“Seventy to 80 percent of the attacks occurred a week before the elections or shortly after,” he told The Epoch Times in a phone interview.

According to Umeagbalasi, Boko Haram and ISIS terrorists seeking to establish an Islamic state are responsible for the attacks, together with militants of Fulani ethnicity.

The Fulani are a large ethnic group in West Africa that claims up to 20 million residents in Nigeria.

Militants who identify as members of the tribe include village-raiding semi-nomadic herdsmen and kidnap-for-ransom bandit terrorists besieging the northwest and north-central regions. Attacks by the Fulani militants have taken six times more lives than Boko Haram in recent years, according to the HART Foundation, a UK-based nonprofit organization.

Fulani terrorists are responsible for more than half of the killings this year, including the deaths of more than 528 Christians as of April 10, Umeagbalasi said.

The attacks in Nigeria are genocidal against Christians, according to Solomon Maren, a member of the Nigerian House of Representatives.

Christians Massacred

However, President Muhammadu Buhari—who boasted of making “successes on security” in a tweet for Easter on April 7—has “turned a blind eye” to the attacks, which have surged in recent weeks, according to Maren, who represents a district in Plateau state in the Nigerian House.

“Consistently, we see Christians being massacred, and the president, who is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, is not doing anything to stop them,” Maren told The Epoch Times.

On April 16, in one of the latest instances, a series of attacks were directed against five villages 30 miles southeast of Jos, the capital of Plateau state. The attacks claimed “several lives and properties” according to Plateau Gov. Simon Lalong.

Titus Alams, a former speaker of the Plateau State House of Assembly who hails from the area, said at least three people were killed.

For several hours, 200 to 300 terrorists armed with assault rifles swarmed the Christian communities on the boundaries of Mangu and Bokkos counties, burning houses and shooting at residents as they tried to flee, Alams told The Epoch Times.

The terrorists started attacking Marish, Murish, Maitumbi, Bet, and Ruboi communities at about 2 p.m., hours after three locals killed the previous day were buried, Alams said.

A group of 20 to 30 civilian volunteers fighting with homemade single-shot guns in each community were only successful in delaying the terrorists to enable women and children to escape, he said.

“They were overwhelmed,” Alams said, noting that a military task force located 10 miles away didn’t arrive at the scene until six hours later.

Candidate of Nigeria's Peoples Democratic Party, Atiku Abubakar (second from L), leads supporters to protest at Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) headquarters, over the results of Nigeria's 2023 presidential and general election in Abuja, Nigeria, on March 6, 2023. Kola Sulaiman/AFP via Getty Images

A spokesman of the Nigerian Army’s 3rd Division in Jos, Maj. Ishaku Takwa, told The Epoch Times that a convoy of military vehicles responding to the attacks crashed, injuring eight soldiers.

The attacks, which came three days after five people were killed at a mining site in western Bokkos, were carried out by Fulani militants, according to Alams, and followed a mass invasion of a Christian town 100 miles away in the south of Kaduna state that killed at least 33 people.

A band of 100 armed terrorists invaded the farm town of Runji in Zangon Kataf County on April 15, killing 33 and wounding at least six others according to county Chairman Zimbo Machaudi.

“The terrorists razed at least 30 houses, incinerating more than 20 residents, including babies trapped inside them before the military intervened,” Machaudi told The Epoch Times.

The commander of the Special Task Force in charge of southern Kaduna, Brig. Gen. Timothy Opurum, told The Epoch Times that his team had received advance notice of the attack but was outsmarted by the terrorists.

“Before we got there, the attackers had already started killing,” he said.

Unprotected Camps

Two days prior to that attack, nine people were killed in the town of Tanje, 10 miles from Runji, according to media reports.

It was the second attack in southern Kaduna since the disputed presidential elections that saw Islamic leaders calling their followers to vote for Muslims as a “jihad.”

Seventeen people were killed on March 12 in Ungwan Wakili, which is 20 miles from Tanje.

The attacks in Plateau and Kaduna are similar to a mass shelling of communities in Benue state that has displaced more than 2 million residents in recent years, according to officials.

On April 7, displaced people were attacked in their unprotected camps by the militants seeking to take over the state, according to Lt. Col. Paul Hemba, who serves as the national security adviser to Benue Gov. Samuel Ortom.

More than 40 of them were sheltering in an abandoned government school when killed in northwestern Makurdi, the state capital, Hemba told The Epoch Times.

The attack was intended to drive the refugees out of an area that’s already experiencing an influx of Fulani militants as part of an effort to Islamize the state, he said.

“Already, they have seized many of our communities and turned them into no-go zones for Christians. When you go to some of those places, you will see them moving freely with their guns,” Hemba said.

The attack followed weeks of mass village invasions in Benue that left more than 100 residents dead, according to media reports.

Ruling party candidate Bola Tinubu addresses supporters in Abuja, Nigeria, on March 1, 2023, during celebrations at his campaign headquarters. Kola Sulaiman/AFP via Getty Images

As of April 10, attacks in Benue have led to the deaths of at least 380 Christians this year, making it the most persecuted state in Nigeria, according to Umeagbalasi.

Emmanuel Ogebe, leader of a Nigerian law group in the United States, has alleged that the recent declaration of the Muslim candidate of the All Progressives Congress as the winner of the Feb. 25 presidential elections in the country is the motivation for the surging attacks.

“Already, Muslims have been celebrating an ‘Islamic republic of Nigeria’ because Tinubu [Bola Ahmed—the Nigerian president-elect] picked a fellow Muslim as vice president instead of a Christian as has been the practice,” Ogebe told The Epoch Times in a text message.

The attacks often described by genocide deniers as clashes between sedentary farmers and semi-nomadic herdsmen are aimed at imposing an Islamic caliphate in Nigeria, Maren said.

“When you look at the patterns of attacks, who the victims are, and the fact that they always drive out people and settle in their lands, you cannot rule out the fact that there is an agenda that is being carefully and systematically implemented,” he said.

Andrew Boyd, spokesman for Release International in the UK, concurs.

“The violence is often simplistically characterized as clashes between herders and farmers, ignoring the religious dimension behind many of the attacks which have the characteristics of an Islamist jihad,” he wrote in a statement mailed to The Epoch Times.

“Predominantly Christian villages have been overrun, church buildings destroyed, and pastors targeted for assassination. Villagers are being burned out of their homes.”

Kyle Abts, president of the International Committee on Nigeria, has called for international sanctions to be imposed on Nigerian officials for encouraging killings.

“The world must hold the Nigeria government accountable for the egregious manner in which it is destroying its citizens and their democracy,” Abts wrote to The Epoch Times in a text message.

“The Nigerian government lied to the world that they would be able to conduct a free and fair election and that the terrorism would stop. Neither happened and we have returned to violence, kidnappings, and killings.”