Islamic militants in Nigeria have killed almost 55,000 Christians in the last 14 years, a new report has said.
Since the Boko Haram insurgency began in 2009, a total of 52,250 Christians have been murdered in the West African country, according to a report called Martyred Christians in Nigeria.
More than 1,000 Christians have already been murdered in Nigeria this year alone.
A total of 30,000 killings have taken place under the rule of President Muhammadu Buhari, who has been often criticised for not doing enough to combat the growing insecurity in the country.
Islamists have also murdered 34,000 moderate Muslims and burned 18,000 churches and 2,200 Christian schools.
The report was published by the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety), a Nigerian-based research and investigative rights group, which has been monitoring and investigating domestic religious persecution since 2010.
Researchers also recorded the kidnappings of at least 707 Christians, with more than 200 carried out in the Northern Nigerian Niger State where last month more than 100 Christians were taken captive in Adunu.
More than 100 kidnappings of Christians took place in Kaduna state and others also in Katsina, Taraba, Edo, Ogun, Nassarawa, Kwara, Kogi, Borno, Yobe and Adawama Bauchi, Enugu, Imo, Kebbi, Gombe, Bayelsa and Cross River.
Christians in Nigeria face regular violence not only from Boko Haram and other Islamist groups, some of which are affiliated to the Islamic State or Al Qaeda, but also from Fulani Muslim herders.
The violence has forced the internal displacement of five million Christians, many of whom now live in refugee camps at regional and sub-regional borders, the Intersociety report says.
Nigeria is ranked the sixth most dangerous country in the world to be a Christian even though Christians account for 100 million of the nation’s 217 million population.
Aid to the Church in Need, in its latest two-yearly report, revealed that more than 7,600 Nigerian Christians were murdered between January 2021 and June 2022.
One of the most horrific attacks this year involveda priest was burned to deathand another was shot and wounded in an attack on a presbytery.
Fr Isaac Achi of Ss Peter and Paul Church in Kafin Koro, in Niger State, was murdered by assailants who set fire to his house. Fr Collins Omeh, the assistant priest, was shot while trying to escape the building but survived his injuries.
Sources told Aid to the Church in Need, the Catholic charity for persecuted Christians, that they believed the attackers’ initial motive was to kidnap Fr Achi.
One said: “Because of the dimension and the duration of the assault, we can say that it was planned and organised.”
The attack took place the same day that Fr Michael Olofinlade of Ibadan Archdiocese in south Nigeria was kidnapped.
Last year a total of 28 priests were kidnapped in Nigeria and four were murdered.
Bishop Jude Arogundade of Ondo said in the British Houses of Parliament in November that the persecution of Christians in his country by Islamic militants was tantamount to a genocide.
He said: “I strongly appeal to this important body and all people of goodwill to compel the Nigerian government to stop the genocide.”
He urged UK politicians at the very least to “ask for help from other countries before Nigeria is overrun as is the case of Afghanistan”.
“The entire nation is on the edge, apprehensive of a major offensive that may sweep round the entire country,” he said.
The bishop had earlier emerged into the international limelight last summerwhen he publicly criticised Irish President Michael D. Higgins for blaming “climate change” for the massacre of 41 Catholics, including many children, by Islamists during a Mass at St Francis’ Church, Owo, a parish in his diocese.
President Higgins had suggested moral parity between the massacre “and any attempt to scapegoat pastoral peoples who are among the foremost victims of the consequences of climate change”.
Bishop Arogundade said, however, that “terror attacks, banditry, and unabated onslaught in Nigeria and in the Sahel Region and climate change have nothing in common”.
Any informed person could see “that alluding to some form of politics of climate change in our present situation is completely inappropriate”, the bishop continued.
“Terrorists are on free loose slaughtering, massacring, injuring, and installing terror in different parts of Nigeria since over eight years not because of any reasonable thing but because they are evil — period.”
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