While the world’s attention fixates on the Middle East, a silent genocide continues in Nigeria — and a new congressional report demands the Trump administration finally treat it with the urgency it deserves.
The House Appropriations and Foreign Affairs committees released a bombshell report last week titled “Ending the Persecution of Christians in Nigeria.” Its opening lines pull no punches:
“After decades of persecution, Nigeria is the deadliest place in the world to be a Christian.”
The numbers are staggering. Tens of thousands of Christians murdered. Thousands of churches and schools destroyed. Pastors and priests targeted for assassination. Mass kidnappings. The systematic use of blasphemy laws in Nigeria’s northern states to silence, imprison, and execute believers without due process.
The perpetrators are well-documented: Boko Haram, the ISIS-affiliated Lakurawa terrorist group, and Fulani militias who have transformed Nigeria’s Middle Belt into a killing field. Just last month, Lakurawa gunmen attacked villages in Kwara State after residents refused demands to embrace Sharia law, slaughtering at least 162 people. Days later, suspected Fulani terrorists killed 16 more in coordinated attacks on Benue State communities.
For years, the U.S. State Department looked away. Under the Obama and Biden administrations, officials insisted the violence had “nothing to do with religion” — a deliberate obfuscation that ignored the cries of “Allahu Akbar” rising from massacre sites and the systematic targeting of Christian farming communities.
The State Department’s cover relied on skewed data from ACLED, an NGO whose founding director built her career on the thesis that climate change — not religious hatred — drives African conflicts. The data conveniently omitted the religion of perpetrators and victims, allowing bureaucrats to reframe Islamic terrorism as mere “resource conflict.”
President Trump broke that silence in December, forcefully condemning the slaughter and taking military action. Now, Representative Riley Moore of West Virginia — tapped by Trump alongside Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole to assess the crisis — has delivered a comprehensive plan to the White House.
The report calls for an end to the willful blindness. It demands recognition of what Nigerian Christians have long known: they are targets of a coordinated campaign of religious cleansing that meets the definition of genocide.
For American Christians, the moral imperative is clear. Our brothers and sisters in Nigeria are being martyred for their faith while the world averts its eyes. The Trump administration has an opportunity — and an obligation — to act before the last Christian communities of northern Nigeria are erased from the map.
Providence watches over the bold.
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