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Showing posts with label Fulani Herdsmen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fulani Herdsmen. Show all posts
Five alleged members of the Islamist group Ansaru have gone on trial in Nigeria in connection with the kidnapping of 46 students and teachers in the state of Oyo.
All five denied seven terrorism-related charges against them, local news agency Punch reported on Thursday, citing the country’s state security service.
Mahmud Muhammad, Abubakar Abbas, Abdulrazak Umar, Yunusa Musa, and Shamsu Sani appeared before Federal High Court Judge Salim Ibrahim in Abuja, according to Reuters. The defendants face prison terms ranging from 20 years to life if convicted, while they could face the death penalty if prosecutors prove that deaths resulted from the kidnappings under Nigeria’s 2022 anti-terrorism law.
An anonymous prosecution witness said the attack took place on May 15, when armed men targeted three schools in Oyo State’s Oriire district. The witness, identified in court only as “AAA” for security reasons, said: “School activities had just started when we heard gunshots,” according to Premium Times. She told the court that 39 pupils and seven teachers were abducted and remained in captivity for 56 days.
The witness said the captives were moved between six locations and forced to sleep on grass in rain and hot weather, Punch reported. She also said they suffered from severe shortages of food and water during their captivity. “We had to drink the dirty water just to survive,” the witness stated.
Nigerian security forces rescued 39 pupils and six teachers in July and arrested eight suspected kidnappers, the presidency said at the time. One teacher had been killed in captivity, while security personnel were wounded by explosives during an earlier rescue attempt.
Ansaru emerged as an armed splinter group of Boko Haram and publicly announced its existence in January 2012. The group maintains close ties with Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).
The region has been at the center of a longstanding Islamist insurgency, with mass abductions, including the 2014 kidnapping of more than 270 Chibok schoolgirls. In June, the Nigerian Army said it had rescued 360 hostages, including women and children, from a Boko Haram enclave in the state of Borno.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center spent a lot of time bringing attention to the Muslim genocide of Christians in Nigeria. Before his death, Charlie Kirk spread our work around, and the Trump administration fortunately listened. And yet it also unfortunately adapted a false narrative in which the tremendous genocide of Christians was just the work of the local Al Qaeda. And that’s simply not true. These are the broader work of the local Muslim ‘Fulani’ population.
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.’
Bricks lie scattered in the scrub. Concrete blocks jut from the earth like jagged teeth. Roofs have collapsed inward.
And then come the churches.
Burned-out shell after burned-out shell. Crosses broken. Windows blown through. One has been gutted by fire, another reduced to rubble.
It’s as though someone has tried to erase every visible sign of Christianity from this land.
For more than two decades, this stretch of Nigeria’s Middle Belt – the faultline where the largely Muslim north meets the predominantly Christian south – has convulsed in recurring waves of bloodshed…
In the face of all this, calling the violence here merely a ‘farmer–herder conflict’, as government officials try to do, begins to sound like a diplomatic euphemism. It’s true that land is in high demand and grazing routes are contested. But that explanation alone feels inadequate when you witness for yourself the ruins of so many churches – and hear the stories of so many slaughtered Christians.
We arrive in the village of Gwet, parking by a collection of abandoned houses, destroyed fields and another ruined church. In truth, we’re not exactly welcome. The people who committed these atrocities – Muslim Fulani herdsmen – can be seen in the distance: the new, unchallenged masters of this once devoutly Christian area.
Yes, Boko Haram attacks and kills Christians, but much like ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Hamas in Israel, or the Al Qaeda regime in Syria, t’s just the tip of the spear for the larger genocidal campaign by a Sunni Muslim group against another population.
The pattern has been identical across the years and locations. Night raids. Armed, baying men descending on sleeping Christian communities. Houses torched; men, women and children cut down or slaughtered in their beds; churches set ablaze. By dawn, whole settlements are smoking ruins.
‘Jonas’ is 29 years old. He cradles his metal machete like a comfort blanket. ‘For firewood,’ he says, ‘but also’, he adds, looking at the Fulani in the distance, ‘for protection.’ We stand in the blackened remains of his family home. This is the first time he’s dared to come back since May 16, 2023: the day his world was destroyed.
He starts to remember. Early that morning, Fulani families had been seen nearby gathering cattle and belongings, moving in unusually large numbers. Within hours they stormed his village screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’ and calling the Christians living there infidels. They fired into homes, chased families out and burned everything they could. They were methodical in their savagery. ‘We were terrified,’ he tells me. ‘We ran and hid in the bush and then fled.’
Ten people once lived in his home: his parents, wife and younger brothers. They were farmers. Now the Fulani cattle graze the family’s field beyond their ruined church.
‘The churches are always their main target,’ he says. It is an attack at the heart of their faith…
In 48 blood-spattered hours between December 23 and Christmas Day, mobs attacked at least 17 rural communities in the Plateau areas of Bokkos and Barkin Ladi, murdering at least 200 and injuring 500 more. Although no group claimed responsibility, residents insist it was the Fulani.
They also insist the date was deliberate. In the days before the attacks, warnings had circulated: ‘Be careful how you celebrate Christmas – or you may not celebrate at all.’
There’s plenty more there and I encourage you to read all of it, but the bottom line is to remember this is not just ‘Al Qaeda’.
This is a genocidal campaign by a Muslim population against a Christian population. This is how Islam expands. Its borders are always red because they bleed with the blood of Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and all non-Muslims.
It’s not just a matter of tracking down a few terrorists, it’s about facing the reality that this is what Islam is.
And it’s not just at work in Nigeria or in Africa, it’s at work in Europe and America.
“Make ready for them all that you can of force and of warhorses, so that by them you may strike terror in the enemy of Allah and your enemy…” (Qur’an 8:60)
Pastor, Daughter and Son-in-Law Slain in Plateau State, Nigeria
ABUJA, Nigeria (Christian Daily International–Morning Star News) – Fulani herdsmen last month killed a pastor, his daughter and her husband, leaving the couple’s 3-month-old baby with a machete wound, in Plateau state, Nigeria.
The Christian family was ambushed as they traveled on the Jos-Barkin Ladi highway to a village in Barkin Ladi County on Jan. 16, the Evangelical Missionary Society (EMS) of the Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) said in a statement.
The Rev. Bulus Madaki, an EMS worker, his daughter and son-in-law were slain in the attack, while the granddaughter suffered a machete cut on the head and was left to die but survived.
“In Nigeria, the gospel is often preached at the cost of blood and tears, the blood and tears of missionaries who choose to follow Christ no matter the price,” the EMS leaders stated.
Pastor Madaki had served at Janta 2 Mission Station in Zagun District Church Council (DCC) and was recently transferred to Gwol DCC; he was killed along the Kassa-Nding Bridge in Barkin Ladi County, they said.
“He was killed alongside his married daughter and son-in-law by killer Fulani herdsmen. They were on their way to his new mission station. They never arrived,” the leaders stated. “His granddaughter, a 3-month-old baby girl, survived the attack with a severe head injury. She now lives as an orphan, having lost her father, her mother, and her grandfather in a single, violent moment.”
The attack marks the harsh reality of missions in Nigeria, they stated.
“Missions in Nigeria is growing, but the danger that comes with it is both real, brutal and enduring,” they stated. “In spite of this attack, it is a sure evidence that we are winning and souls are being won to Christ through a tumultuous period.”…
'Systematically slaughtered': Okla. student lost 34 family members in massacre; pregnant woman's stomach cut open
WASHINGTON — Barr Franc Utoo, a native of Nigeria's Benue state and a graduate student at the University of Central Oklahoma, awoke to several missed calls one morning last month.
Fulani terrorists murdered 34 members of his immediate family during the June 13-14 Yelewata Massacre, including his pregnant aunt, by slicing open her belly and removing her twin unborn children.
The extremists attacked the Christian community of Yelewata in the Guma Local Government Area of Benue, slaughtering more than 200 believers in what has been described as one of the deadliest assaults in the region's ongoing violence that has claimed the lives of countless Christians.
"The first names that I asked after spontaneously, they were all killed," Utoo, who was in Oklahoma at the time, told attendees during a Thursday press conference hosted by Equipping The Persecuted, an organization dedicated to reporting on Nigerian Christian persecution and enhancing villages' security.
Barr Franc Utoo, a native of Yelewata, Nigeria, speaks at a conference at The National Press Building in Washington, D.C., on July 24, 2025. Fulani terrorists murdered dozens of Utoo's friends and family during the Yelewata Massacre of June 13 and 14, 2025. | Samantha Kamman/The Christian Post
The extremists who carried out the massacre "butchered" his aunt, he said, who had been pregnant with twins at the time of her death. The radicals pierced her belly and removed the twins, killing Utoo's aunt and her unborn children.
The Nigerian, who comes from a family of Catholics, also said his sister was killed during the massacre. Utoo said his sister, a devout Catholic and an altar server, had her brain "peeled out."
One of Utoo's friends, who had just graduated after studying pharmacy for seven years, arrived at the village on the same day that the killing began. The Fulani terrorists killed Utoo's friend by burning him to death in his room during their rampage, where they torched buildings and burned people alive.
As Utoo noted, the village is "sandwiched" by two state capitals and is located near several military bases. However, the attack lasted around four hours without interruption. The Yelewata native believes this is a sign of what he calls the Nigerian government's complicity in Christian persecution.
A May intelligence memo from Nigeria's Department of State Security reportedly even foreshadowed a planned assault by Fulani militias in Benue communities such as Yelewata. However, the Nigerian military provided no defense to Yelewata.
"The Nigerian government, despite its pronouncement, has demonstrably failed to defend us," Utoo said. "Time and again, when our villages are attacked, help is either non-existent or deliberately arrives too late."
"Worse, when our young men, driven by desperation to protect their families, organize themselves in self-defense, they are often met not with support, but with arrest and detention by the very authorities who should be protecting them, leaving our communities even more vulnerable."
"This is not just neglect," Utoo asserted. "It is an active disarming of the victims."
Advocates have spoken out for years on the rising trend of what they say are genocide-like attacks on predominantly Christian farming communities in Nigeria's Middle Belt states carried out by armed and radicalized Fulani militias. Thousands have been killed in recent years, and many more have been displaced from their communities and farms.
Christian persecution watchdog organizations like Open Doors and ADF International note that more Christians are being killed in Nigeria each year than in all other countries combined.
Local leaders have pushed back on the Nigerian government's narrative that increasing attacks are part of decades-old farmer-herder clashes and not sectarian violence.
Last month, James Ortese Iorzua Ayatse, paramount ruler of the Tiv tribe, said during an event attended by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu that attacks like the one in Yelwata are not communal conflicts.
"It's not herders-farmers clashes, not communal clashes or reprisal attacks," Ayatse said, according to outlet TruthNigeria. "It is a calculated, well-planned, full-scale genocidal invasion and land-grabbing campaign by herder terrorists and bandits."
Pope Leo XIV acknowledged the Yelwata attack, saying in an Angelus message he is praying for those killed in "a terrible massacre," most of whom were "sheltered by the local Catholic mission." Leo prayed for "rural Christian communities of the Benue State who have been relentless victims of violence."
In 2020, the U.S. government added Nigeria to the Countries of Particular Concern list during the final year of President Donald Trump's first term. During the first year of the Biden administration, the State Department removed Nigeria's CPC label to the dismay of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. There is some hope that Nigeria could be re-added to the CPC list with Trump back in the White House.
Utoo shared several recommendations that he believes will protect Nigerian Christians from persecution and genocide. He called on the U.S State Department to redesignate Nigeria as a CPC and called for the prosecution of terrorist sponsors through the International Criminal Court "for crimes against humanity." The sponsors of Fulani extremists, according to Utoo, are well-known to the United States and Nigeria.
"This is not merely about justice for the past; it is also about dismantling the machinery of terror that continues to threaten our existence," Utoo said.
"My people are resilient, we are resourceful, but we are also systematically slaughtered," he added. "We are not asking for an army to fight our battles, but for the right to protect our lives, our families and our faith in the face of an existential threat."
"The price of continued inaction, of polite diplomacy that ignores the brutal reality on the ground, will be paid in Christian blood," the Yelewata native warned.
Some people actually believe that all religions are equally capable of inciting their adherents to commit acts of violence. Some people actually believe that Islamic jihadis, though they are found all over the world and base their appeal to peaceful Muslims on their strict obedience to the commands of the Qur’an and Sunnah, are twisting and hijacking the beautiful religion of peace.
Islamic State-backed rebels attack a Catholic church in eastern Congo, killing at least 34
by Justin Kabumba and Ope Adetayo, Associated Press, July 27, 2025:
GOMA, Congo (AP) — Islamic State-backed rebels attacked a Catholic church in eastern Congo on Sunday, killing at least 34 people, according to a local civil society leader.
Dieudonne Duranthabo, a civil society coordinator in Komanda, in the Ituri province, told The Associated Press that the attackers stormed the church in Komanda town at around 1 a.m. Several houses and shops were also burnt.
“The bodies of the victims are still at the scene of the tragedy, and volunteers are preparing how to bury them in a mass grave that we are preparing in a compound of the Catholic church,” Duranthabo said.
Video footage from the scene shared online appeared to show burning structures and bodies on the floor of the church. Those who were able to identify some of the victims wailed while others stood in shock.
At least five other people were killed in an earlier attack on the nearby village of Machongani….
Eastern Congo has suffered deadly attacks in recent years by armed groups, including the ADF and Rwanda-backed rebels. The ADF, which has ties to the Islamic State, operates in the borderland between Uganda and Congo and often targets civilians….
