As part of a social media rampage involving more than 30 Truth Social posts in less than three hours, President Donald Trump doubled down on his threat to launch an attack on Nigeria.

Standing in front of a podium, he accused the government of letting the mass slaughter of Christians go unchecked, and said he may send in American troops ‘guns a-blazing, to completely wipe out the Islamic terrorists who are committing these horrible, horrible atrocities’.

While there was immediate confusion over whether the video was AI-generated, Trump’s message to the ‘disgraced’ country was crystal clear: ‘If we attack, it will be fast, vicious and sweet.’

The rhetoric has sent shockwaves through Nigeria, especially after the Trump administration added it to the U.S. list of ‘countries of particular concern’, alongside China, Afghanistan and others, for alleged violations of religious freedom.

Mohammed Idris, Nigeria’s information minister, has hit back at Trump’s warnings, calling claims about a Christian genocide ‘false, baseless, despicable, and divisive’, while President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has denied that his country is ‘religiously intolerant’.

But where do the allegations about mass murder against Christians come from? And if they are lies, why has Trump instructed the Pentagon to draw up war plans for military intervention?

According to experts in the region, the reality is more complicated than a religious war between Christians and Islamic terrorists.

It is true that death is spiralling in the nation: at least 2,266 people were killed in the first half of 2025, compared to 2,194 for the whole of 2024, according to Nigeria’s human rights agency.

However, that figure includes both Christian and Muslim victims, who each make up roughly half of Nigeria’s population of 232 million, with the former in the south and the latter in the north, where killers don’t discriminate based on religion.

Standing in front of a podium, Donald Trump accused the Nigerian government of letting the mass slaughter of Christians go unchecked

Burnt grains and farming equipment sit inside a storehouse following a deadly gunmen attack in Yelwata, Benue State, Nigeria, June 16, 2025

A photo taken from a video released by Nigeria’s Boko Haram terrorist network in 2014 shows missing girls abducted from the northeastern town of Chibok

The death of Christian Nigerian civilians have been dominating the headlines, sparking fury in Trump’s evangelical base.

At least 100 were murdered in June in a massacre in the village of Yelwata in Benue state, northcentral Nigeria.

Most of the residents were still asleep when the killers descended in the darkness and the pouring rain, unleashing their first gunshots and setting homes ablaze.

Those who didn’t burn to death tried to escape, seeking shelter in the village church, school and market stalls, but such attempts were futile as the murderers hunted their prey.

Armed with rifles, machetes and fuel, most of the suspects were bandits or armed herders — ethnically Fulani pastoralists who are majority Muslim.

April saw more Christian bloodshed in the Bassa area of northcentral region, also known as the country’s Middle Belt or fertile ‘breadbasket’ that provides crops for much of the nation.

Some 40 people from the Zike farming community of the Plateau state were slaughtered, including children and the elderly who were taken by surprise and could not flee from the gunmen.

Muslim herders were again the prime suspects, drawing the attention of campaigners for Nigerian Christians who allege systematic persecution. 

However, analysts insist that such attacks aren’t about faith or ethnicity, but the fight for lucrative farmland, and transforming that battle into one of religion is a dangerous game that will only fan the flames of violence in an already tense region.

People prepare for the funeral of a man that was killed following an attack by gunmen in the Zike farming community in northcentral Nigeria, Tuesday, April 15, 2025

Women mourn the death of a family member following an attack by gunmen in the Zike farming community in northcentral Nigeria, April 15, 2025

In this screengrab made from video, a burned house following an attack by gunmen in Yelewata community northcentral Nigeria, Monday, June 16, 2025

Malik Samuel, a senior researcher at Good Governance Africa, told the Daily Mail that he was surprised by Trump’s comments about Christians facing an ‘existential threat’ in Nigeria, because he thought the U.S. president would ‘have all his facts correct’.

‘Anybody who follows Nigerian politics knows there’s not a Christian genocide, and that any claim of that is an exaggeration,’ he said.

On the contrary, ‘the conflict in north central Nigeria is largely driven by competition for land and water,’ not religious prejudice.

Because most of the farmers are Christian and most of the herders are Muslim, the violence occurs along religious lines — but that’s not its root cause.

In the past, the two groups would work in together in cycles: During rainy season, herders would leave, enabling the farmers to cultivate crops which, once harvested, left behind chaff that provided feed for the cattle, whose manure, in turn, fertilized the land for the next farming season.

But because of rapid population growth and uncontrolled development in Nigeria, ‘the land is shrinking’, Samuel said, meaning farmers are forced to cultivate all-year round to yield the same harvest, making bloody confrontation with herders ‘inevitable’.

‘Now, farmers are no longer farming only during the rainy season, they are farming during the dry season, which means they are farming all year round, restricting the window available for herders to graze their cattle, so this is a major sticking point.’ 

When disagreements arose in the past, the groups could appeal to their community leaders for arbitration, but the toxic politicisation of the conflict has made diplomacy near-impossible — leading to deadly scuffles. 

State officials walk past injured victims on hospital beds being treated for wounds following an attack by gunmen at St. Francis Catholic Church in Owo town, southwest Nigeria on June 5, 2022

Blood stains and littered items are seen on the ground, following an attack by gunmen on worshippers during a Sunday service mass at St. Francis Catholic Church, in Owo, Ondo, Nigeria June 6, 2022

But the conflict in Nigeria isn’t just about farmers and herders. 

Jihadist groups such as the Boko Haram and its splinter groups such as Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) have waged an insurgency since 2009, killing tens of thousands and displacing millions.

And while Trump has blamed ‘radical Islamists’ for the mass slaughter of Christians, most of the terrorists’ victims have been Muslims they deemed insufficiently devout.

According to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), there were 20,409 deaths from 11,862 attacks against civilians in Nigeria between January 2020 and this September.

Of those, 385 attacks were ‘targeted events against Christians… where Christian identity of the victim was a reported factor,’ resulting in 317 deaths.

In the same period, there were 417 deaths recorded among Muslims in 196 attacks.

The birthplace of the Boko Haram conflict is in the northeast of Nigeria, particularly in the Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states, where the majority of the victims have been Muslims.

‘Despite Boko Haram’s language or the ISWAP’s claims — saying things like Christians were killed or the framing of the situation as an attack on Christians — you still have more Muslims getting attacked than you have Christians, because the region has a larger Muslim population than a Christian population,’ Miriam Adah, as assistant research manager at ACLED, told the Daily Mail. 

Muslims are also victims of heavily armed criminal gangs, often labelled as bandits,  in the northwestern states of Kaduna, Zamfara, Kebbi, Katsina and Sokoto, where they are kidnapped and their homes are raided. 

In August, armed gunmen stormed a mosque in Katsina, killing 17 worshippers in the village of Unguwan Mantau as they were doing morning prayers. 

Of course, bandits and the Boko Haram have gone after Christians too. 

In 2014, the militant group abducted 276 mostly Christian girls from their government school in the town of Chibok in the Borno state, where they were taking exams. 

Among them, 82 escaped by themselves, and 103 were released between 2016 and 2017 in exchange for prisoners. 

At least 91 of the Chibok girls are either still in captivity or their fate is unknown, according to the UN, and at least 1,400 students have been kidnapped from schools since the Chibok abduction, taken for ransom, forced marriage, trafficking and prisoner exchange. 

‘The bottom line is that civilians are getting killed and people are dying needless deaths,’ said Adah, regardless of whether they’re Christian or Muslim.

The Boko Haram uses lethal methods — no matter who it’s targetting —  where the tactic is often to ‘pillage through the village and kill as many people,’ said Adah.

‘We’ve also seen cases of public execution by the insurgents, and mostly those are recorded on video and shown for propaganda purposes. You see them shoot at point-blank [range] and cut off people’s throats with knives.’

In this screengrab made from video, a burned house following an attack by gunmen in Yelewata community northcentral Nigeria, Monday, June 16, 2025

Parents of the missing Chibok schoolgirls raise their hands as they pray for the release of their daughters kidnapped by Boko Haram jihadists, during a worship service to mark the fourth anniversary of the kidnapping at Chibok Town, Borno State, on April 14, 2018

ISWAP and Boko Haram have been locked in a deadly struggle for territorial control since their split in 2016 over ideological differences, with much of the fighting taking place around Lake Chad.

The freshwater lake, which straddles Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Chad, serves as a sanctuary for both Boko Haram and ISWAP, from which both launch attacks across the four countries.

Fighting between the rival jihadist factions group broke out in Dogon Chiku on the shores of Lake Chad on Sunday, in the latest bout of infighting for territorial control fuelled by ideological rifts.

‘From the toll we got, around 200 ISWAP terrorists were killed in the fight,’ Babakura Kolo, a member of an anti-jihadist militia assisting the Nigerian military, told AFP.

A former Boko Haram jihadist, who has since renounced violence but follows jihadist activities in the region, also said ‘around 200 ISWAP fighters were killed in the clashes’, with several of their weapons seized.

Boko Haram lost four fighters in the battle, according to the former militant, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Saddiku.

‘This could be the worst clash between the two groups since they began attacking each other,’ said Saddiku, who lives in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, the epicentre of the insurgency.

Short video clips appear to show several dead bodies in canoes, with some of the vessels flooded with bloody water.

Since ISWAP splintered off from Boko Haram, both factions have fought for dominance, leading to the death of Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau during clashes in his Sambisa forest hideout in May 2021.

Some Boko Haram fighters joined ISWAP to avoid execution, others surrendered to Nigerian troops while the rest fled to islands on the Niger side of Lake Chad under the control of Shekau’s successor, Bakura Buduma.

In one of the largest flare-ups, a September 2021 raid by Boko Haram on the ISWAP-controlled Kirta-Wulgo island led to weeks of back-and-forth fighting between the two militias.

Boko Haram has since succeeded in pushing ISWAP out of most of Lake Chad.

Nigeria’s jihadist conflict has killed more than 40,000 people and displaced around two million in the predominantly Muslim northeast since it erupted in 2009.

The violence has spilt into neighbouring Niger, Chad and Cameroon, prompting the creation of a regional military force to fight the jihadists.

People walk past torched houses following an attack by Boko Haram in Darul Jamal, Nigeria, Saturday, September 6, 2025

‘We’re going to do things to Nigeria that Nigeria is not going to be happy about and may very well go into that now disgraced country, guns a-blazing, to completely wipe out the Islamic terrorists who are committing these horrible, horrible atrocities,’ Trump announced in a video on Truth Social on Wednesday, reiterating earlier threats. 

He repeated what he had written in a previous post, about instructing the Pentagon to prepare for ‘possible action’.

While Grok insisted the video was AI-generated, the White House denied the claim. Trump ‘just looks that good’, a spokesperson told Newsweek.

‘If we attack, it will be be fast, vicious and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians!’ WARNING: THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT BETTER MOVE FAST!’ he posted last week, to which Pete Hegseth, U.S. defence secretary, replied: ‘Yes sir.’ 

For Adah, Trump’s framing of the conflict wasn’t just inaccurate, but outright dangerous, because it won’t take much ‘for the entire situation to flip and it could become a full-blown religious crisis’.

‘He got it right when he said people are getting killed, [but] calling it a genocide and an attack on Christians is not the full story,’ she said, accusing the U.S. president of ‘oversimplifying’ a situation which is ‘complex’.

‘It takes away from the actual point of the conversation, which should be that the government isn’t doing enough to promote unity and to ensure that people aren’t getting killed — rather than to apportion blame over who is killed more.’

But by the time Trump made his inflammatory statements, a narrative had already quickly spread online. 

Nicki Minaj, the pop singer, thanked the president for ‘taking this seriously’, writing to her millions of followers: ‘God bless every persecuted Christian. Let’s remember to lift them up in prayer.’

Bill Maher, a talk show host, added his voice into the mix, claiming the killings of Nigeria’s Christians were ‘so much more of a genocide attempt than what is going on in Gaza’.

Meanwhile, reacting to Trump’s measures, Rep. John James of the Republican party said: ‘Thank you, President Trump, for standing up for persecuted Christians in Nigeria and around the world.

‘Thousands of believers are being murdered for their faith.’

But the fact is, the entirety of Nigeria is at risk, with thousands of civilians having been killed across multiple fronts for a variety of reasons.

Whether it’s Christians in the southeast being killed by separatists seeking to revive the defunct state of Biafra, or Muslims being pillaged while worshipping in the northeast, both faith groups are in danger.

As opposed to heightening divisions across religious lines — which could promote a civil war — analysts insist the finger must be pointed at the Nigerian government to do more to protect its citizens.

A vendor sells local newspapers with headlines referring to US President Donald Trump’s comments about Nigeria, on the street of Lagos, Nigeria, Sunday, November 2, 2025

For Dr Uche Igwe, a visiting fellow at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa at LSE, Trump’s comments were welcome — exerting much-needed pressure on President Tinubu to step up.

‘It is a wake-up call to the Nigerian government to do more,’ he told the Daily Mail. ‘I am confident it will have a positive impact rather than negative.’

Attention from the U.S. on conflict in Nigeria can only be a good thing, he argued, because the nation is failing at tackling its deep-rooted security issues.

As opposed to political solutions, he has called for more pro-active intelligence gathering from the Nigerian government, so terrorist attacks in remote, ungoverned locales can be ‘prevented before they happen’.

He said that with their own intelligence networks, the U.S., the UK, and the EU can help with this effort, because the ‘fight against terror is not a fight Nigeria can do alone’. 

Igwe also called for ‘reeducation and enlightenment’ among the population, involving Islamic teachers who must preach peace among their communities. 

Ever since Adah was born in 1996, Nigeria has been steeped in these same divisions and conflicts, but she is confident she will see peace in her lifetime.

But for that to happen, civilians need to regain trust in the government and each other, she said.

‘We need a reorientation in our national consciousness,’ allowing people ‘to say that first we are all Nigerians before we are whatever ethnic group that we are — because people identify more with their ethnicity than they would with their national identity.’

‘That is part of the reason why people cannot actually come together and say that an evil has been done or a wrong has been committed and demand for justice in unison,’ she said.

As well as threatening military action, Trump has warned that he will cut off all ‘aid and assistance’ going in to Nigeria as part of his unprecedented ultimatum.

This moment has the potential to lead to productive collaboration between Nigeria and the U.S. to combat the security issues plaguing the African nation, but there’s also the possibility that the increased heat leads only to more blood shed.