Abuja, Nigeria — October 31, 2025 | Dalena Reporters
Nigeria continues to record a disturbing escalation in violence and targeted attacks against Christian communities across its northern and central regions. In 2025, the country has once again become a focal point for global concern regarding religious freedom, with mounting evidence of mass killings, kidnappings and displacement disproportionately affecting Christians.
According to the international rights-monitoring organisation Open Doors, Nigeria is ranked among the world’s most dangerous countries for Christians, who continue to face extreme risks from Islamist militant groups such as Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), as well as from armed herders and “bandit” networks operating in the Middle Belt and northern states.
In the first seven months of 2025 alone, Nigerian-based analysts estimate that thousands of Christians have been killed and many more wounded or abducted. A monitoring group reported that more than 7,000 Christians were killed during that period.
Several documented attacks in 2025 illustrate the scale and severity of the crisis:
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In June, gunmen killed around 100 villagers in the Yelwata community of Benue State, a region predominantly inhabited by Christian farmers. Houses were reportedly burned and many residents displaced.
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In April, similar attacks across Nigeria’s north-central region left more than 150 people dead and thousands displaced; many of the victims were Christian farming communities caught in land-and-resource conflicts with immigrant herding groups.
These incidents are part of a broader pattern in which Christian civilians are killed, farmsteads destroyed, homes burnt, and abductees taken — including clergy and women of faith.
While the violence is often attributed to a mix of factors — land-use competition, climate change, herder-farmer conflict, and weak state security — multiple human-rights organisations highlight a clear and consistent pattern of Christian targeting. In many Middle Belt and northern states, attackers exploit the interplay of ethnicity, religion and rural vulnerability.
Moreover, state responses have been widely criticised as inadequate. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) describes Nigeria’s religious-freedom conditions as “poor,” noting that government protection of Christian civilians remains inconsistent and perpetrators often act with impunity.
In October 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that Nigeria would be designated a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) under the International Religious Freedom Act, citing the “existential threat” facing Christians in Nigeria.
At the same time, the European Parliament posed formal questions to the European Commission regarding the persecution of Christians in Nigeria, signalling rising global diplomatic pressure.
The human and social toll is grave: entire congregations have been displaced, church buildings destroyed, livelihoods devastated and trauma widespread. In zones such as Benue state, Enugu state, Kogi state, Kaduna and Plateau states, Christian farmers report living in perpetual fear, unable to tend their fields, harvest crops or attend worship services without threat.
The violence targeting Christians in Nigeria in 2025 marks one of the most severe phases of persecution in recent years. For the country to reverse this trend will require substantial reform: enhanced protection of vulnerable communities, effective prosecution of the perpetrators, and recognition of the religious-dimension of the violence, alongside the land-conflict dimension. Without such action, the cycle of violence is likely to deepen and expand.