Thousands of Christians have been killed in Nigeria. Why the death tolls differ.

A night attack on Yelwata in June 2025 shows why Nigeria's death tolls for the same killing do not match.

One night in Yelwata, three death tolls

Reuters reported from Yelwata on 17 June 2025 that the gunmen came after dark. Farmer Fidelis Adidi told Reuters he returned in the morning to a room he had rented in the market and found the charred remains of one of his two wives and four of his children. His second wife and another child were badly wounded. Reuters, citing Amnesty International, put the dead at around 100. The dispatch placed Yelwata in Benue, in the Middle Belt, where competition over land between cattle herders and farmers has run for years alongside ethnic and religious division.

The UN Population Fund issued a situation report on 18 July 2025 covering June. It said attacks by suspected herdsmen in Yelwata, in Guma local government area, killed at least 218 people and displaced 4,786, and that the displaced were sheltering at the New International Market camp in Makurdi. That is a later humanitarian count, not a revision of the Reuters figure and not a court finding.

On 2 February 2026 Reuters reported that Nigerian prosecutors had filed 57 terrorism-related charges against nine men over the June 2025 attack, and that the charge put the dead at about 150. The Associated Press reported the same day that the nine pleaded not guilty. Around 100, at least 218, and about 150 are three descriptions of one night: a news count in the first days, a UN relief count weeks later, and the number in a criminal charge. The spread is what limited access to witnesses, graves, and medical records looks like. It is not a reason to treat the attack as doubtful.

Open Doors, in its World Watch List 2026 advocacy report, described that June attack as a four-hour raid by ethnic Fulani militants on a Christian farming community, with more than 200 people shot or burned to death, most of them women and children, and with little military response. That is the organization's own description of motive and of the attackers. Reuters did not use those words in the dispatch cited above.

Four counts, four questions

Thousands of Christians have been killed in Nigeria, but reported death tolls differ because the datasets measure different aspects of the violence.

In that World Watch List, Open Doors reported 3,490 such deaths in Nigeria and 4,849 worldwide for the year from 1 October 2024 to 30 September 2025. The Nigeria figure is about 72 percent of the worldwide figure in the same report. Open Doors says the 3,490 are civilian Christians whose deaths can be linked to Christian identity or to membership in a Christian community. The report says the tally leaves out battle deaths of security forces and of armed groups, ordinary crime where no faith-related targeting can be shown, and reports the group could not confirm. Open Doors says it would rather undercount than overcount. The figure is the product of its researcher network. It is not a national death register and not a forensic identification of every victim.

Amnesty International Nigeria, on 28 May 2025, said at least 10,217 people had been killed by gunmen in Benue, Edo, Katsina, Kebbi, Plateau, Sokoto, and Zamfara in the two years since President Bola Tinubu took office on 29 May 2023. Benue accounted for 6,896 of those deaths and Plateau for 2,630. The statement does not sort the dead by religion. In Benue it also recorded destroyed grain stores and places of worship in Ukum and Logo, and 450,000 people documented as internally displaced after the attacks. Isa Sanusi, director of Amnesty International Nigeria, said the authorities were failing to protect the right to life. The 10,217 and the Open Doors 3,490 cannot be subtracted from each other. One is a two-year toll of gunmen's victims in seven states. The other is a one-year estimate of deaths tied to Christian identity.

The Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa compiled killings from 1 October 2019 to 30 September 2025. Its fact sheet records 79,323 people killed in that violence, of whom 42,033 were civilians. Among the civilians it lists 22,835 Christians, 10,519 Muslims, 184 adherents of African traditional religions, and 8,495 people whose religion was not established. ORFA's own text treats much of the killing of Christian civilians as the work of what it calls a Muslim Fulani ethnic militia. The columns themselves are the religion of the dead. A Christian name in that column is not, by itself, a finding that the person was killed for being Christian. Those 8,495 cases, with no religion recorded, mark the limit of the register.

The Congressional Research Service, in report R47052, Nigeria: Overview and U.S. Policy, updated 10 July 2026, warned that fatality estimates diverge because some count only jihadist violence, some add farmer-herder clashes and banditry, and some include fighters as well as civilians. CRS wrote that public databases often do not record the religion of the dead, and that analysts struggle to separate religious motive from other motives. Citing the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project, CRS reported roughly 53,000 Nigerians, Christians and Muslims, killed in political violence since 2009, including 21,000 in 2020-2025, and 384 targeted events against Christians resulting in 317 deaths from 2020 through September 2025. ACLED, as CRS described the method, captures cases in which religious identity is salient to the targeting. That 317 is not a rival measurement of the Open Doors year, and it is the figure CRS had on 10 July 2026.

Land, faith, and people who are not the militants

The Congressional Research Service describes several wars, not one. In the northeast, Boko Haram began an insurgency in 2009. CRS writes that its leaders framed the campaign as a jihad against Nigeria, Christianity, and the West, and that they classed outsiders to the movement, Christian or Muslim, as people who could be killed or enslaved. Church bombings on Christmas Day 2011 and the 2014 abduction of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok, most of them Christian, sit in that record. After a 2015 pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State, a split produced Islamic State West Africa Province. Those groups declare a religious aim. The religious character of that violence is in their own program, not only in a later label.

The Middle Belt is a different pattern. CRS writes that farmer-herder clashes in the northwest have typically involved ethnic Fulani herders and ethnic Hausa farmers, two largely Muslim groups, while in central Nigeria the violence is more often between Fulani herders and sedentary communities of several ethnic groups, many of them Christian. CRS traces the pressure to population growth, grazing limits, changing rainfall, land ownership, banditry, and the southward push of herders. It also writes that the state rarely arrests the perpetrators of these clashes, and that impunity has fed reprisals. Religion, ethnicity, and land are in the same raids. CRS does not treat either faith or farmland as the sole cause.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom, on 8 May 2026, published a separate account of armed actors from a Fulani background. It said they have carried out some of the deadliest attacks on religious communities in Nigeria, often but not exclusively against Christians, and that they have also raided Muslim communities. USCIRF described the Fulani as a Muslim-majority people of about 14.5 million, roughly 6 percent of a national population it put at about 242.4 million. An armed faction is not that population. USCIRF's estimate of the militants is about 30,000, in groups that do not share one command. It wrote that their attacks, among attacks by other actors, had forced at least 1.3 million people in the Middle Belt off their land. Loss of a farm, in these communities, is the loss of food and of a place to return. Amnesty's 450,000 displaced people in Benue are one state's share of that kind of flight.

The duty to protect is not a finding of collusion

Amnesty International Nigeria said the failure to protect life, after years of warnings and repeated raids, is itself a human-rights breach. A state can carry that duty without having ordered the killing. Amnesty International and the Congressional Research Service document impunity, late or missing protection, and destroyed clinics, schools, wells, and places of worship. They do not document a federal order to exterminate a church.

On 31 October 2025 President Donald Trump designated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern for religious freedom, a step the State Department records on its list of those designations. Reuters reported on 5 November 2025 that Nigeria rejected the designation. Information Minister Mohammed Idris called it misinformation and faulty data. Reuters also reported that Trump had asked the Defense Department to prepare for possible military action if the killings of Christians continued.

That order was carried out. On 25 December 2025 Trump announced strikes against Islamic State targets in Nigeria and said the fighters had been killing Christians. CRS writes that US Africa Command and Nigerian officials described the strikes as coordinated with Nigeria's authorities, and that they were the first known United States strikes in the country. The strikes fell in Sokoto State. CRS notes that press accounts questioned whether the missiles hit the intended groups, and that some observers pointed out that most people killed in Sokoto's wider violence are Muslim. On 16 May 2026 United States and Nigerian forces carried out a further operation, on two islands in Lake Chad, against Abu Bilal al Mainuki. Trump called him a senior Islamic State leader. CRS notes that other analysts dispute his rank. CRS describes these direct operations as a departure from Washington's earlier approach in West Africa, which had emphasized training and support for local forces. CRS also records disagreement in Congress about how the strikes will affect violence against civilians.

The designation and the strikes put the violence on the diplomatic and military record. CRS writes that perpetrators of the wider killing often evade arrest or prosecution. The nine men charged over Yelwata are one case inside that gap.

Nigeria is the largest of these death tolls, not the only attack on Christian civilians in the region. UN News reported on 28 July 2025 that the UN mission in Congo, MONUSCO, condemned a raid by the Allied Democratic Forces, an Islamic State-affiliated group that began in Uganda. On the night of 26 to 27 July, in Komanda, in Irumu territory of Ituri province, at least 49 civilians were killed, including nine children. UN News said most of the victims were reportedly worshippers killed with blades during a night vigil at a church, and that shops and homes were burned.

Zimbabwe's seizures and South Africa's farm murders

Violence against white farmers is a separate record, and Zimbabwe is not South Africa.

Human Rights Watch reported on 8 March 2002 that Zimbabwe's fast-track land reform, under President Robert Mugabe, was accompanied by serious abuses. Militias tied to the ruling party attacked farm owners, farm workers, and people living nearby. Police often did not stop the violence and were sometimes implicated. Applicants for plots were pressed to show support for the ruling party, and many of the black farm workers the program was said to serve lost both work and housing. Human Rights Watch also stated the colonial background: white farmers had received large tracts of fertile land, and black rural people had been confined to crowded reserves. The abuses do not erase that history. The history does not turn the beatings, the evictions, or the partisan allocation into a lawful reform. Many of the people hurt were black workers, not white owners.

Zimbabwe's public-debt bulletin for the end of March 2025 still carried 3.5 billion dollars as the outstanding compensation for former farm owners. On 9 April 2025 a statement for the Ministry of Finance said the government had disbursed 3.1 million dollars in cash for the first 378 of 740 approved farms, equal to 1 percent of a 311 million dollar claim, with the balance in US-dollar Treasury bonds. The same statement says the payment is for improvements, which is also what section 295(3) of Zimbabwe's constitution provides. The BBC reported that most former farmers had not signed the deal and still held their title deeds, and that thousands were forced off the land, often violently, in 2000 and 2001.

In South Africa the killings are real and the extermination claim is a different assertion. AfriForum reported at least 184 farm attacks and 29 farm murders in 2025, against 176 attacks and 37 murders in 2024. Those are attacks and murders on farms and smallholdings in AfriForum's research. The organization's release does not present them as a tally of white owners alone.

The Institute for Security Studies, in an article by Gareth Newham on 26 May 2025, went to the campaign claim directly. Newham wrote that two inquiries between 2000 and 2015, one commissioned by the police minister and one by the South African Human Rights Commission, investigated whether farm attacks were a political campaign to force white farmers off their land. Neither inquiry, he wrote, nor other credible police or private investigations since, found evidence of that campaign. He wrote that the motive is almost always robbery, with some cases tied to labor disputes or domestic violence. For the 2023-24 financial year he cited AfriForum's 49 farm murders as 0.2 percent of 27,621 murders nationwide, and 296 farm attacks as 0.7 percent of 42,206 robberies. A racial motive in a single murder would still have to be proved in that case. The ISS article is evidence against a coordinated campaign. It is not a claim that rural families are safe, or that a brutal robbery is a minor crime because the victim was not singled out as a people.

The land statute is a third question, not a body count. South Africa's Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 allows the state to take property for a public purpose or in the public interest, and it says nil compensation may be just and equitable in specified cases, including unused land held mainly so the owner can gain from a rising price. The government's own page lists the act's commencement as still to be proclaimed. The act is not a law that strips every white owner, and it is not in force on that page.

The 2017 land audit, drawn from deeds registered as of 2015, says white people owned 26,663,144 hectares, or 72 percent, of the 37,031,283 hectares of farms and agricultural holdings held by individual owners. The same page keeps companies, trusts, and the state in separate piles. Trusts held 29,291,857 hectares and companies 23,199,904. The 72 percent is a share of individually owned farms and agricultural holdings, not a share of the country.

One reading of the genocide charge

Genocide, in the 1948 Genocide Convention, is not a synonym for a large number of dead. It requires specified acts carried out with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such. Church raids, the repeated destruction of Christian farming settlements, and the flight of whole communities are evidence of mass killing and, in particular attacks, of religious targeting. Muslim civilians are in the same registers. In the Middle Belt, CRS finds land, indigene status, and ethnicity inside the same fights. Jihadist groups in the northeast kill Muslims who reject them.

One reading is that these reports show persecution and mass murder across overlapping wars. Establishing genocide would require evidence that the perpetrators intended to destroy Christians, in whole or in part, as a religious group. That intent can be shown from the pattern of attacks, from what the attackers said and did, and from whom they selected. The Genocide Convention does not make a single headquarters or a written order an element of the crime. Each alleged campaign has to be judged on its own evidence. Newham's article reports that the inquiries he cites found no evidence of a political campaign to drive white farmers off the land. That is a finding about those inquiries. It is not a court ruling on every farm murder.

A missing list of who holds a farm after a raid leaves the purpose of that raid to other evidence. What the attackers said, whom they killed, and whether the same villages were struck again can show a religious aim, a contest over land, or both. It is not known, from the reports cited here, how often the attackers in a named raid were selecting Christians as such, how often displaced families have been able to return, how often the land was then held by someone else, or how many suspected killers have been tried.