Nuhu Dauda was on a missionary trip, about 125 miles away from his home in Plateau state, Nigeria, when he got a panicked call from his younger brother.

“He said jihadists had surrounded my home and were chanting that they would kill everyone inside,” Dauda, a 67-year-old Christian evangelist, told The Epoch Times.

The police helped rescue five family members before heavily armed men burned the house to the ground and killed a young fellow evangelist, he said.

That was in 2005.

“In the 20 years since then, I have seen our people massacred,” Dauda said. “I saw my family members, in-laws, and friends killed. I’ve carried the bodies of my own, and I buried them.”

“It was so strange to us, we never knew that, to see our people killed in a community where Muslims were a minority but well armed,” Dauda said of radicalized groups that began attacking Christians. “They drove us out.”

While the threat has evolved, some observers trace the root of current violence to the rise of Nigeria’s homegrown Sunni jihadist movement more than two decades ago. That movement is synonymous with the terrorist group Boko Haram, sometimes referred to as the “Nigerian Taliban.”

Ebenezer Obadare, a senior fellow for Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, believes that all problems are downstream of Boko Haram.

“It’s a religious campaign in the sense that this is mass killing initiated by Boko Haram, a group that targets Christians, targets Muslims, targets everybody—because it sees all of them as infidels, or apostates,” Obadare told The Epoch Times.

Formed in 2002, Boko Haram began an armed rebellion against the Nigerian government in 2009 and has retained a stronghold in the northeast, as well as in neighboring Chad, Cameroon, and Niger.

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While estimates vary, Obadare said that “what nobody can doubt is that a lot of people are being killed—and more important is the fact that they’re being killed for a religious reason.”

Just hours after that hearing, gunmen on Nov. 21 stormed a Catholic school in the Middle Belt, kidnapping more than 300 students and 12 teachers.

The wave of violence from Nov. 15 to Nov. 21 also included an attack on a Christian church during a service, during which two people were killed and 38 kidnapped, as well as the abduction of 24 female students from a secondary school and the murder of three people and kidnapping of 64 from their homes.

“We hoped the [Country of Particular Concern] designation by President Trump at the end of October might stabilize the situation,“ the Most Rev. Wilfred Anagbe, a Nigerian Catholic bishop, told lawmakers during the Nov. 20 hearing, ”but instead, it is deteriorating into one of the most lethal periods for Nigerian Christians in recent memory.”

While the government has tried to confront the terror threat, Dauda said that “this is not the confrontational war that militaries are used to.”

“They hide, attack, pull away, and cover,” he said. “The government has tried, but they are overwhelmed.”

Such attacks have drawn attention to longstanding conflicts between farmers, who are largely Christian, and Fulani herdsmen, who are semi-nomadic and predominantly Muslim in the Middle Belt.

The Nigerian government characterizes this as a land-use dispute driven by the climate, resource scarcity, and population growth.

And while the 2015 Global Terrorism Index ranked armed Fulani militants the fourth-deadliest terror group in the world, the Observatory notes that they have “mysteriously vanished” from international rankings despite having become “exponentially more lethal.”

Dauda, the Christian evangelist, says it’s a small number instigating and radicalizing an otherwise peaceful population.

“Most Fulanis are innocent,” he said. “Most want to live a peaceful life and take care of their cattle.”

Heni Nsaibia, ACLED’s West Africa senior analyst, told The Epoch Times the violence in the Middle Belt is “multidirectional” and can’t be reduced to a kind of religious war.

“To focus on the persecution of Christians really doesn’t capture the problem,” Nsaibia said. “That is not the main conflict—the real threat are the jihadi groups that are expanding and that larger segments of the population are falling under their influence, and they are now competing with the state.”

Some of those groups, such as Islamic State-Sahel Province, are majority Fulani, he said, but operate primarily in majority-Muslim states, meaning that their civilian victims are mostly Muslims.

As the conflict expanded across the region, Nsaibia said, the most powerful groups concentrated in Mali and Burkina Faso, where many fighters are Fulani.

“So it’s more circumstantial, but also how the state has reacted to the insurgency,” he said.

Belo told The Epoch Times that he typically visits many remote villages only accessible by motorcycle or on foot.

He described going to a village in Plateau state for outreach.

“We preached the gospel to them, we did medical outreach, shared Bibles, and we left. Then fast forward, this past October, we went back for a follow-up,” he said.

The whole village had been wiped out.

“You stumble on human skeletons; you stumble on a body that has not even decayed. ... Horrific things,” Belo said.

Sean Nelson, an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), recalls visiting victims in the aftermath of a Christmas Eve 2023 attack that killed more than 200 people across mostly Christian villages in the same region.

“They went after pastors’ homes,” he said. “They went after churches first. The first village we went to, there was a pastor who, the militants came to his house on Christmas Eve, took him and his family, torched his house, walked him out behind the church, and beheaded him.”

Every witness told him that the attackers came in with machetes, shouting “Allahu Akbar,” and “We will kill Christians,” according to Nelson.

John Stewart, an American attorney and pastor who regularly travels to Africa to teach and train Christian leaders, described Nigerian communities devastated by systemic violence and displacement.

“I went to the relocation centers. These are Christians that have been driven out of their villages by Fulani Muslims, with the military looking the other way,” he told The Epoch Times.

“I had an encounter with one, and I am Fulani by tribe,” Belo said. “When I spoke to him, I understood that this is not Nigerian Fulani. He told me he was from Mali, and his group was headed to Benue state.”

Nigeria’s borders with Niger and Chad are easy to penetrate, he said.

“They are all using sophisticated weapons—machine guns, AK 49s, RPGs—that even our military are not using,” Belo said.

“This thing has been happening for two decades, but the Nigerian government has never brought a single perpetrator to justice.”

Dauda marveled at the sight of Fulani herdsmen carrying machine guns.

“A Fulani man takes care of his cow—that is his bank account, the future of his children. How are such innocent Fulanis operating such guns?” he said.

“It means there are others who are behind this. And I want the world to know, they have been brainwashed. Their target is to go across the nation—that’s why you hear of killings in churches in the south.”

But amid transnational expansion of Islamist extremism, with weapons and fighters flowing across porous borders, some analysts say such distinctions are vanishingly relevant and a distraction from the all-consuming threat of violent fundamentalism.

Collaboration among jihadist groups is growing, ACLED’s Nsaibia said. In some cases, Nigerian groups have been incorporated into broader global structures such as ISIS or al-Qaeda affiliates or coordinate with regional groups across borders to share weapons, propaganda, or fighters.

As the Sahel has become the global epicenter of jihadist militancy, he said, Nigerian groups have been expanding from their historic base in the Lake Chad Basin and into coastal West Africa.

“As these groups are finding one another, they also form a sort of junction between these two very distinct conflict theaters,” Nsaibia said.

Obadare said, “We know for sure that all of these groups are united at least by one aim, which is they want to destroy the modern state as we know it.”

“Death penalty blasphemy law in the 12 Northern States is an outrageous thing,” Nelson said.

The ADF intervenes on behalf of individuals facing blasphemy and apostasy charges in Nigeria’s sharia courts.

“It is one of only seven places in the world with a law like that,” he said.

“The apparent encouragement of killings for blasphemy by religious leaders creates an environment in which mobs feel entitled to take the law into their own hands. Meanwhile, government officials rarely publicly condemn mob violence for blasphemy,” the group reported.

“The idea that Islamist insurgents should not be described or portrayed as what they are because you don’t want to offend mainstream Muslims. ... I find [this] condescending to mainstream Muslims,” he said.

“The more Boko Haram says our aim is religious; we want to replace Nigeria with an Islamic state; we hate democracy; unbelief is the problem ... the more people on the other side double down and say, ‘Nope, you don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s climate change, it’s got nothing to do with religion.'”

Despite the constant threat, Dauda said he wouldn’t think of living anywhere else.

“We are asking God to intervene,” he said. “That’s why we even have an opportunity to tell you about this.”