Donald Trump has a new crusade to fight: hundreds of thousands of Christians are being killed by Muslim fundamentalists in Nigeria. He accuses Islamic State of "targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians", and accuses the Nigerian government of continuing "to allow the killing of Christians", which of course Nigeria denies. But that is more than enough for him to wade into a neutral country and carry out military air strikes there, which is his idea of fun.
The Nigerian Foreign Minister told the BBC that it was a "joint operation" that had "nothing to do with a particular religion", but let's not quibble. Trump may have misunderstood that part.
But - just as with his ongoing campaign against Venezuela and his characterization of the Afrikaners in South Africa - a detailed BBC report shows that it's not even clear that Trump is working from reliable information. Individuals as varied as Ted Cruz and TV host Bill Maher have been pushing the narrative that the Nigerian Jihadist group Boko Haram (not Islamic State, but hey, they're all the same, right?) has been responsible for killing "over 100,000" (or possibly "50,000"?) Christians, and burning "18,000 churches" and "2,000 Christian schools". This stuff gets disseminated widely, and elaborated upon, by the Republican social media machine.
When pressed, these activists almost all refer back to reports by the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (InterSociety for short), which monitors and tracks human rights abuses across Nigeria. InterSociety claims that jihadist groups have killed 100,000 Christians between 2009 and 2025, as well as 60,000 "moderate Muslims", although it's not entirely clear where they get these figures from. The data sources they do mention do not seem to reflect the figures they publish, according to the BBC. In the first two-thirds of 2025 alone, InterSociety claims that 7,000 Christians were killed, based, they say, on media reports, even though most of those media reports do not actually mention the religious identity of victims.
Both Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa tend to operate almost exclusively in north and northeastern Nigeria, which is a predominantly Muslim region, an area where relatively few Christians live. InterSociety also includes in its figures deaths at the hands of the militant (largely Muslim) Fulani cattle and sheep herders, which researchers say are mainly protesting about access to land and water and other ethnic tensions, and are not jihadists as InterSociety characterizes them. InterSociety itself has been accused of links with the Indigenous People of Biafra (Ipob), a proscribed group fighting for a breakaway state in the mainly Christian southeast of Nigeria. The Biafra Republic Government in Exile (BRGE) has also played a key role in promoting the "Christian genocide" in the US Congress over the years.
Nigerian politics - like that of the US, but even more so - is complicated and murky. It is far from clear that any kind of Christian genocide, or even a concerted anti-Christian hostility or persecution, is happening in Nigeria. It's even less clear that the USA should be throwing its weight around there. For an administration that claims it wants nothing to do with any "forever wars", it's sure doing a lot to start them.
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