Donald Trump threatened Nigeria on Saturday with military intervention if Africa’s most populous country did not stop what the US president calls “murders of Christians” by “Islamist terrorists”, accusations denied by Abuja.
These threats come after months of pressure from conservative American elected officials who believe Christians there face “genocide.” These accusations were also spread by Christian and evangelical associations and were echoed among far-right European politicians, although experts cast doubt on them.
“A possible action”
“If the Nigerian government continues to tolerate the murders of Christians, the United States will immediately suspend all aid to Nigeria and may well go in full force to this now disgraced country, to completely annihilate the Islamist terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities,” the American president thundered on his Truth Social platform.
“I order the Ministry of War to prepare for possible action,” he added, urging Nigeria to “act quickly.” Defense Minister Pete Hegseth then assured X that the Pentagon “is preparing to act”: “Either the Nigerian government protects Christians or we will kill the Islamic terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”
Nigeria is plagued with security problems. The northeast region is a hotbed of the Boko Haram jihadist insurgency, which has killed more than 40,000 people and displaced more than two million since 2009, according to United Nations estimates.
On Friday, Donald Trump placed the country on the list of countries of “particular concern” (“Country of Particular Concern”, CPC) in terms of religious freedom, considering that “Christianity (there) faces an existential threat.” “When Christians, or any other group, are massacred as is happening in Nigeria (3,100 compared to 4,476 in the world), we must act!” he insisted, without specifying where these figures come from.
Clashes and kidnappings
“The characterization of Nigeria as a religiously intolerant country does not reflect our national reality,” its president Bola Tinubu reacted on Saturday, in the face of threats of military interventions.
Nigeria is divided almost equally between a predominantly Muslim north and a predominantly Christian south. In the northeast, Boko Haram and its splinter group, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), remain active, although weakened compared to a few years ago.
In the center of the country, deadly clashes between Fulani herdsmen, mainly Muslims, and farmers, often Christian, are recurrent and often presented as interreligious conflicts, although they are generally rooted in competition for access to land.
In the northwest, criminal gangs – locally called “bandits” – terrorize communities by attacking villages, killing and kidnapping for ransom, and burning houses after looting them.
In mid-October, Donald Trump’s African advisor, Massad Boulos, who has lived in Nigeria for several decades, claimed that jihadists were killing “more Muslims than Christians.”
This fervent defense of Nigerian Christians echoes Donald Trump’s positions regarding Afrikaners, descendants of the first European settlers in South Africa. The Republican president has repeatedly spoken of an alleged “genocide” against them and granted refugee status to this white minority, from which the leaders of the segregationist apartheid regime came, which deprived the black population – the vast majority – of most of their rights from 1948 to the early 1990s.
Source: BFM TV
