The battle for Nigeria’s soul

As rain pelted down around 9 p.m. on June 13, the villagers of Yelewata heard death: the roar of motorbikes, shots from AK-47s, and the Arabic cry “Allahu akbar,” meaning “God is great.” Within minutes, a group of extremist Fulani attacked the village from the front while another group flanked ­fleeing villagers from behind. The Fulani shot fathers, mothers, and children. They burned down buildings for five hours. No help ever came.

Three days later, Truth Nigeria journalist Mike Odeh James woke up at 3 a.m. to pray. Then, he traveled six hours to Benue state, Nigeria, to report on the Father’s Day Massacre in Yelewata. Fulani Islamist terrorists killed over 270 Christians that day with fire, bullets, and the cold steel of their machetes.

For decades, nomadic herders from the Fulani ethnic group have roamed the region with their cattle, seeking pasture. International news reports often say the Fulani are forced into land-­grabbing because climate change is causing pastureland to shrink. But witnesses say the radicalized Fulani now trying to steal their land and conquer their villages are doing it for the glory of Allah. The Yelewata massacre “is a ­representation of what goes on every day [in Nigeria],” James said.

Extremist Fulanis are not Nigeria’s only problem. Islamist insurgents like Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province also plague communities in the northeast. Armed criminals known as bandits operate in parts of the northwest and elsewhere. Meanwhile, kidnappers have also targeted Roman Catholic priests across the country, with at least 145 ­kidnapped between 2015 and 2025.

When James arrived in Yelewata, he saw charred, smoking huts and smelled “burned dead body [and] burnt rice and yams.” As he walked through the remains of the village, he noticed silent survivors huddled in groups or carrying machetes and cutlasses out of fear of another attack.

The chief agreed to show James through the village, house by house. Charred bodies, bones, and ashes cluttered the inside of more than 40 homes. Blood spattered the walls. On the streets, stray dogs nipped at unburied carcasses. The chief pointed out orphaned children, injured ­villagers, and husbands and wives who had lost their spouses. “Some of them were breaking down, some of them were looking so hungry, and you could see the scars on their body, you see the white marks,” he said. At one house, James met Lazarus Dendy, a villager who lost 30 family members in the attack—most of them burned alive in their huts or suffocated by smoke.

On the edge of the village, only about 300 steps away from the marketplace, James noticed a military outpost—full of soldiers and police who never responded to the attack. Villagers told him on the night of the attack soldiers fired their guns over the heads of the Fulani to keep them from nearing the base. They did not kill the Fulani or protect the village.

Nigeria’s federal government operates a centralized policing system, with forces sent from the capital city of Abuja to other states. Some communities lack any official security presence and rely on vigilantes. Officers have failed to respond to attacks, saying they lacked clearance from superiors in the capital city, and blamed a lack of fuel or weapons for their failure to defend communities.

But Judd Saul, CEO of Truth Nigeria, sees the failure to act as a more structured ploy. “The local military commanders are Muslim; the local police commanders are Muslim. And if the Nigerian government doesn’t, from the top, say ‘engage,’ no one’s going to engage.”

To make things worse, government officials reportedly knew about the attack 30 days in advance but never acted to prevent it. “We have a Muslim president, a Muslim vice president, the chief of justice is a Muslim, and everything is just skewed in favor of the Muslim,” James said. “The national security adviser to Nigeria’s president is a Fulani. The minister for defense is a Fulani, and his assistant is a Fulani.”

Right now, Nigeria is about evenly split between Christians and Muslims, but in part due to Fulani terrorism, the numbers are shifting. The Father’s Day Massacre is only one example of the horrors Christian citizens of northern Nigeria go through. Two weeks after the attack on Yelewata, another 50 Christians were murdered by Fulani just feet outside the village.

Nigeria’s persecution crisis reignited international concern this year, with lawmakers in the United States and Canada urging stronger government action. Nigerian authorities have so far denied that any persecution is actually happening. But according to the Nigeria-­based nonprofit InterSociety, Islamists murdered more than 7,000 Christians—an average of 30 each day—and kidnapped 7,800 others between January and August.

“By persistently killing and grabbing the lands of Christians in Nigeria, the Christians will be forced to flee, to run away to other neighboring countries as refugees,” James said, insisting it’s part of a concerted effort to make Nigeria an Islamic caliphate.

If extremist Islamic ideology con­tinues to spread, he warned, it will fundamentally change the country: “If America doesn’t put pressure [on the Nigerian government], these [terrorist] sentiments will grow, and then over time we will become like Yemen. We will become like Afghanistan.”

—with reporting from Onize Oduah