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While violence against Christians in Nigeria has attracted global attention in recent years, a new report suggests that this has been incorrectly interpreted.

This phenomenon had become synonymous with organised and highly ideological groups, such as Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP). These groups have sought to create a new societal order based on an austere and supremacist view of Islam.

The Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa (ORFA), a think tank project based in the Netherlands, has examined available data on violence against Christians in Nigeria. Its report Killings and Abductions in Nigeria (2020–2025) challenges this understanding.

According to the report, 79 323 people were killed in Nigeria in the period from October 2019 to September 2025. Of these, 42 033 were civilians, and 37 290 were combatants, either from the security forces or from terrorist groups. Over that period, 15 434 attacks occurred that involved killing – this averaged to seven per day.

Over the same period, 34 917 people were abducted (of whom 34 773 were civilians), across 4 590 attacks that involved abductions. Two abductions occurred on average each day.

A large majority of the victims were Christians: of the civilians killed, 22 835 were Christians, as opposed to 10 519 Muslims. The religious identity of 8 495 was unknown, and 184 followers of traditional religions were murdered.

Abductions tended to show a more even distribution of victims, with Christians being a slight majority – although Muslim abductees exceeded Christians in the last two years.

The report found that Boko Haram and ISWAP were responsible for only around an eighth of the civilian killings (4 941). The vast majority were killed by ethnic Fulani terror groups (18 577, or 44%), or unidentified terror groups (13 346, or 32%). In respect of Christians killed, Fulani terror groups were responsible for 53%, and unidentified terror groups for 28%. The same broad trend was evident with regard to Muslim civilians.

Fulani terror groups are generally associated with militias organised among the Fulani ethic group – Muslim herders, who are frequently nomadic – while there appears to be substantial overlap between the Fulani terror groups and those that are unidentified.

This in turn suggests that the conflict – and the consequent persecution of Christians – cannot be understood merely as a religious conflict, nor as a matter between farmers and herders (as is sometimes averred) and a conflict over resources, nor indeed as pure jihad driven by Islamists.

Rather, all these elements are present, but it appears that a key factor are ethnic Fulani militias operating out of a combination of motives: some religious, some ethnic, and some related to resource conflicts.

The report commented: “Christian civilians were killed or abducted for being Christians, while Muslim civilians were killed or abducted for being non-Fulani.”

According to Frans Vierhout, senior research analyst at ORFA: “Violence linked to Fulani militias is the dominant force behind Nigeria’s death toll. The Western preoccupation with Boko Haram is, at best, misleading.”

He indicated, however, that this does not mean that the danger within Nigeria or the region – or indeed to the world at large – is less acute: “Nigeria is incubating a terror network which the outside world has yet to acknowledge.”

As this newspaper has previously reported, Northern Nigeria has become a centre for global Islamist terrorism, accounting for a majority of Christians killed for reasons connected with their faith. Last year, United States (US) President Donald Trump announced that his administration would consider intervening to protect the country’s Christians; in December, the US military conducted a missile strike on a Nigerian jihadist group.