RUTHFULLY YOURS

As the genocide against Christians in Nigeria crashes on, a news outlet, TruthNigeria.com, continues to courageously shed light on the atrocities committed by jihadists against Nigerians of all religions.

“Truth Nigeria,” according to its website, “had to be launched to slice through the fog of war and the cloud of false narrative that bedevils mainstream media reporting of what many call a ‘Christian genocide’ in Nigeria that has been spreading like a cancer.”

Award-winning journalist Douglas Burton, a former U.S. State Department official who says, “I serve as managing editor for about 12 freelancers who risk their lives to lift the veil on the world’s most shameful and still barely reported Christian genocide,” was interviewed by Gatestone:

“TruthNigeria.com is a project of Equipping the Persecuted, a humanitarian-aid nonprofit, chartered in Sioux City, Iowa since 2019. In Nigeria, our reporters live in or near the war zones of Kaduna, Plateau, Benue and Adamawa states, and they all have had dramatic introductions to the conflict. All have lost friends or relatives to Boko Haram or to attacks by Fulani ethnic militia. Others were citizen journalists reporting about violence on social media who had a passion to expose the genocide.

“Some of our reporters have been jailed for months at a time for trumped up charges simply for telling embarrassing truths about oligarchs.

“The team usually see photos and videos on messaging services such as WhatsApp, or by cell phone text from friends. Sometimes the terrorists themselves make bragworthy videos of themselves in the bush celebrating by shooting off scores of bullets; sometimes they send heartbreaking videos of torturing kidnap victims to the victims’ families. But places and locations, and dates are sometimes figured out. Local hunters and volunteer guards are useful witnesses, and, with just a small ‘courtesy gift,’ they often open up.”

Since 2011, Islamic violence against Nigerian Christians has escalated.

“In 2010, Nigeria was widely viewed as a rising regional power. It was often said to be the only nation where radical Islam was actively being pushed back. While occasional attacks occurred, they were infrequent and met with national outrage. Importantly, there were effectively zero recognized internally displaced persons (IDPs). That changed dramatically after 2011. There were bloody riots in several cities and small towns then due to the election victory of Goodluck Jonathan, an Igbo and a Christian. At the time, the Boko Haram (‘Western learning is forbidden’) insurgency was in its second year and growing. A deadly new phase opened on August 26, 2011, when a terrorist car bombing at the United Nations House in Abuja claimed the lives of 23 UN employees and civilians and left over 60 people injured.

“It is rarely mentioned, and even some Nigerians do not seem to comprehend, that the 28 million Christians living the Middle Belt states are squeezed between two ethnicities rooted in Islamic identity and vying with each other for supremacy: the Fulani tribe that came into Nigeria with the Usman Dan Fodio invasion in 1804 vs. the historic Caliphate linked to the Kanuri tribe in Lake Chad.

“The Kanuri’s number approximately 8.28 million today, whereas there are possibly 20 million Fulani, and 30 to 40 million Hausa people. The Fulani Muslim armies that swept over Northern Nigeria in the first decade of the 19^th Century tried and failed to subjugate the Caliphate of Bornu in Lake Chad. The British defeated the Fulani emirs in 1895 and ended the slave trade. But the Fulani Sultan of Sokoto allowed the British colonials to rule indirectly until independence in 1960. No similar trade-off was made with the Muslim Caliph of Bornu. Today there are, by some estimates, 50 million residents of the Middle Belt states, of which 65% are Christian, 10% Muslim. Yet most of these states are ruled by Muslims, who gain office by election, though these are notoriously rigged and tainted by violence.

“Since independence from Britain in 1960, there was already a divided nation, with the northern states overwhelmingly Muslim and the southern states majority Christian. The departing British colonials had used the northern Muslim elites as top officers in the Nigerian army, navy and police forces, and key positions of power in the executive branch were held by Muslims. There is rivalry and bad blood between the Hausa-Fulani tribes in the north and the Christian Igbo tribes in the southeastern states. The bloody coup of July 6, 1967, precipitated the civil war of 1967 and the ensuing genocidal suppression of the breakaway nation of Biafra.”

There are, notes Burton, wildly varying estimates of death counts, including of Muslims, in Nigeria since the emergence of Boko Haram’s violent phase in 2009.

“TruthNigeria considers the most accurate report that of the Belgium-based Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa (ORFA). The quadrennial ORFA study issued in 2024 reported that, between 2019 and 2023, 55,000 citizens were killed by the range of civil conflict the government calls ‘Insecurity’. Of these, ORFA reports that 19,000 were civilians. This means that 26,000 of the fatalities were counted either as security personnel or criminals or insurgents. On average 5,000 plus citizens every year are killed either by bandits, jihadists or Fulani ethnic militia. That is a big undercount: many killings and kidnappings go unreported. TruthNigeria investigators this year did a 9-part series on mass hostage camps maintained by Fulani bandits in forests south of Kaduna where many thousands of kidnapped people have been held for months at a time. We believe virtually none of these people were noted as kidnapping statistics by government officials, nor were many of the persons murdered in these camps registered as fatalities by ORFA.

“ORFA reports show that for every Muslim fatality there are five Christian or non-Muslims killed. However, much larger numbers have been cited by the UN, which reported in 2021 that more than 300,000 children had been killed by conflict, disease and starvation caused by the Boko Haram insurgency.”

Other than the massacres, there are also thousands of church burnings, abductions and forced conversions of Christian children and women to Islam.

“The NGO called Intersociety claims that 12,000 churches have been destroyed by terrorists, but we cannot confirm that. TruthNigeria has documented forced conversion and forced marriages of Christian teen girls to Muslim men in northern states. Our reporters have documented that mass kidnappings of women in Kaduna state in 2023 were in fact aimed at capturing scores of women in Southern Kaduna and selling them as sex slaves in the Fulani bandit community.

“Mass rape of Muslim women belonging to “noncooperative” clans is a terrorist weapon deployed in bandit gangs in several Western states, including Sokoto, Zamfara and Niger states. Sexual violence against women taken by kidnappers is very common but rarely reported. There is clear evidence of sectarian selection. The Fulani bandit gangs in the Northwestern states usually attack mosques that are aligned with Imams who are not aligned with the Wahabbist forms of theology advocated by the Izala Islamic center in Jos.”

“The chief reason there is so little media attention is that the Nigerian media themselves have deliberately failed to give a clear picture of who is doing the violence and why. When I started reporting in 2019, no Nigerian newspaper identified the ethnicity of the gangs’ burning villages in Kaduna State and murdering scores of people in the middle of the night. The criminals would be called ‘unknown gunmen,’ or ‘herdsmen,’ or ‘hooligans.’ It appears that obvious obfuscation was in obeisance to Nigerian officials looking over the shoulders of their bosses. The official ruse has somewhat worn off in the last year since we have made a point of showcasing Nigerian mainstream media’s dishonesty. Tens of thousands of Nigerian Christians have been murdered and tortured to death for years by Fulani tribe ethnic Militia. We broke the taboo from its first appearance in 2023. Now some are following our lead.

“Besides TruthNigeria and Sahara Reporters, and a couple of investigative nonprofits, most media appear to be controlled by cash payments from government spokesmen or others offering ‘courtesy gifts.’ When the army holds a presser, every reporter who shows up gets a cash envelope, the more influential his paper, the bigger the reward — still the practice in many countries, I believe. TV reporters get better incentives, and TV executives are said to receive parcels of real estate in Kaduna State. TruthNigeria reporters tell me that in previous years they used to take those “courtesy gifts,” too. Our reporters find it very hard to get Nigerian public affairs officers to answer their calls, so they must use other ways to get official statements from office holders. TruthNigeria called our hardworking Nigerian scribes out for it on October 22: ‘Nigerian Media in Lockstep with Government No-Genocide Narrative.'”

Meanwhile, Burton said, U.S. Senator. Ted Cruz has introduced the Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act of 2025.

“Government control of the narrative is on flagrant display since Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and four of his colleagues announced their bill in November to demand that the U.S. State Department shame Nigeria as a ‘Country of Particular Concern’ and sanction Nigerian officials for enforcing legal punishments for Blasphemy.”

“Nigerian Christians,” Cruz said, “are being targeted and executed for their faith by Islamist terrorist groups, and are being forced to submit to sharia law and blasphemy laws across Nigeria. It is long past time to impose real costs on the Nigerian officials who facilitate these activities, and my Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act uses new and existing tools to do exactly that. I urge my colleagues to advance this critical legislation expeditiously.”

Many in the U.S. are urgently expecting the Senate to follow Cruz’s lead.

Uzay Bulut, a Turkish journalist, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.