- Middle East
- International Affairs
- Determining America's Role in the World
Since 2009, a raging jihadist insurgency has engulfed northeastern Nigeria, especially Borno State, as well as the borderlands of Niger, Chad, and Cameroon adjacent to Lake Chad. Over the past fifteen years or more, an estimated 500,000 people have been killed in the conflict, with untold scores of others displaced, abducted, or maimed and their livelihoods destroyed. The jihadists threaten to carry out a genocide against the Christian minority in northeastern Nigeria, completely eliminating them from the region, in a way that does not threaten Muslims, even though the jihadists target both “non-jihadist” Muslims as well as Christians for being apostates and infidels.
The Nigerian government, including Christian President Goodluck Jonathan (2010-2015), initially wrote off the jihadist insurgency and seemed aloof and unconcerned about its potential to spiral out of control. His successor, a Muslim, Muhammadu Buhari (2015-2023), likewise claimed the insurgents were “defeated” when he took office in 2015, only to see the jihadists increase in power and formally ally with the Islamic State (IS). Notwithstanding declarations of states of emergencies, the development of the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) to combat the jihadists, and the acquisition of advanced counter-insurgency weaponry over the past decade and a half, neither the Jonathan nor the Buhari nor the current Bola Tinubu administration has been able to rein in the jihadists or curb the general violence throughout northern Nigeria, including violence specifically directed against Christians.
If anything, the jihadist violence in the northeast has persisted, while banditry in the northwest, which is interlinked with the jihadist expansion into that region and is often associated with Fulani Muslim networks, has become as rife as ever, affecting both Christian and Muslim civilians. Only since November 1, 2025, however, has violence against Christians in Nigeria begun gaining international attention, and especially in the US. The catalyst was President Donald Trump’s post on Truth Social that day:
If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, “guns-a-blazing,” to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities. I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians! WARNING: THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT BETTER MOVE FAST!
As media and analysts speculate on whether the US may embark on a military intervention in Nigeria or West Africa more broadly, which could put the US on a collision course with Russia, it is imperative to better understand the rationale—or pretext as some may call it—for growing US attention to the region. This article, therefore, examines the “Boko Haram” jihadist perpetrators of violence against Christians, including the origins and evolution of the group’s campaign against Christians as well as the group’s leaders and ideologies. Should the US act on Trump’s allegations, this background will be vital for an informed monitoring and evaluation of the policy.
Origins of Nigerian Jihadism
The earliest roots of Nigerian jihadism lay in diaspora Muslims who returned home with newfound influences, especially from Saudi Wahabism and Algerian jihadism, in the early 1990s. These returnees spearheaded a militant movement of several hundred members at their remote encampment in northeastern Nigeria. However, the Nigerian security forces ruthlessly cracked down on the movement in 2004, when it was led by Saudi diaspora returnee Muhammed Ali, who was tracked down and killed. Five years later, a second crackdown was launched against the movement, at that point led by Muhammed Yusuf when it had grown to hundreds of thousands of followers.
After the 2009 crackdown, which resulted in the deaths of several hundred members and Yusuf’s own extrajudicial killing, Yusuf’s deputy and successor, Abubakar Shekau, assumed the movement’s leadership. Shekau formally aligned the group with the global jihad of al-Qaeda in his first speeches from 2010 onwards. He also rebranded the group from its unofficial name “Yusufiya” (Yusuf’s followers),” and from the derogatory term used by Yusuf’s Salafi rivals, “Boko Haram (Western education is blasphemous),” to Jama'atu Ahlis-Sunna Lidda'Awati Wal-Jihad (Sunni Group for Preaching and Jihad). Not only was Shekau more explicit than Yusuf in aligning the group with global jihadism, including eventually pledging loyalty to the IS in 2015, but he also labeled all Muslims who did not join his jihad as infidels who deserved death.
Yusuf had remained supportive of, but subtle about, connecting with or promoting global jihadists like al-Qaeda and the Taliban during his lifetime. This had helped his followers avoid the intense War on Terror-era international and domestic intelligence pressure that Shekau’s JASDJ subsequently received. In addition, Yusuf never preached for the extermination of Christians or even mass takfir, which refers to the denouncing of other Muslims as infidels. However, under Shekau the group surpassed al-Qaeda’s and later even the IS’s ideological parameters, at least regarding takfir. This led to the IS’s ejecting Shekau from Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP)’s leadership in favor of Yusuf’s comparatively more moderate son, Abu Musab al-Barnawi, by 2016, who thereafter maintained a role in ISWAP’s leadership and elevated the group to the most lethal and capable IS province globally.
Yusuf, Shekau, and the Christian Question
Often overlooked in retrospectives on Shekau’s ideology is his significantly more severe treatment of Christians than Yusuf, both rhetorically and operationally. Yusuf’s stance towards violence against Christians was that legitimate targets included the growing number of influential Christian evangelicals in Nigeria, who proselytized Muslims and built churches throughout the country. Yet little evidence from Yusuf’s dozens of recorded speeches or writings shows that jihad would include targeting “ordinary” Christians. However Yusuf did contribute to Shekau’s eventual policies towards Christians by laying a groundwork for hating and killing Christians by scapegoating them and by associating Nigeria’s localized Muslim-Christian clashes as part of a “global hegemonic context” where “victimized” Muslims were rising up against Western and Christian oppressors. He shared this globalization narrative with his Salafi mentors with whom he however eventually broke over his promotion of jihad against the Nigerian state before the mentors believed the Muslims were sufficiently prepared for it.
Yusuf, for example, compared major Muslim-Christian clashes in Nigeria’s “Middle Belt” region in 1987 and 1992 over the conversion of a Muslim to Christianity to “what is happening in Palestine, Kashmir, and what happened in Chechnya” and declared “jihad” as the solution to Nigerian Muslims’ “anger.” In historical context, Yusuf blamed “colonial schemes” for “mixing” Muslims and Christians together in Nigeria, which divided, weakened, and ultimately dismantled pre-colonial Islamic states in Nigeria and West Africa. Further, Yusuf—who in 1994 had switched membership from a Shia movement to an upstart takfiri movement that beheaded a Christian for allegedly using the Quran as tissue paper that same year—took an isolated example of a female Christian journalist who blasphemed Prophet Muhammed to assert that “Christians…insult the Prophet” and can nevertheless still “live in peace.” According to Yusuf, Nigerian Muslims, and especially the mainstream Salafi preachers from whom Yusuf split, always call for “patience” instead of waging jihad. Finally, Yusuf went so far as to accuse Nigeria’s main evangelical Christian organization of “organizing” attacks on Muslims in Nigeria.
Immediately after Yusuf’s death, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which received several dozen of Yusuf’s disciples in the Sahel for training in “special operations,” such as car bombings and kidnappings, also began scapegoating Christians. Although Nigeria’s president was Muslim and local leaders where Yusuf was killed were almost all Muslims and the Nigerian army is religiously mixed, AQIM leader Abdelmalek Droukdel announced that the “evil Christian Nigerian army” was waging an “unjust Crusade” and “genocide” against the alleged Muslim “majority” in Nigeria. More than a year later, Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) released a video dedicated to “black men” in Nigeria who were fighting “Christian proselytization and Westernization campaigns”. While Yusuf laid the groundwork for anti-Christian ideology, Shekau would operationalize it based on the validation it received from AQIM and ISI.
Shekau’s Operationalization of Anti-Christian Ideology
Once Shekau became JASDJ leader, his main targets were, in fact, Muslims whom he perceived as having betrayed his group during the crackdown on Yusuf and his followers one year earlier. Such targets included government officials and anti-JASDJ imams as well as Muslims whom Shekau accused of “apostasy,” such as using charms for prayer. A sea change occurred in 2011-2012, however, when Yusuf’s followers returned to Nigeria after training in AQIM camps and, at the advice of AQIM leader Droukdel, targeted Christians who were allegedly responsible for Yusuf’s death by bombing mega-churches, especially in the volatile Middle Belt region, as well as “Christian” international institutions, such as the UN building in the capital Abuja. In addition, another faction that eventually broke from Shekau because of his killing too many Muslims began abducting Westerners, whom they termed as “Crusaders”, and especially engineers, all of whom were killed or escaped before ransom could be paid.
Shekau was unable to target Christian civilians en masse in the first years after becoming leader because the fighter contingents who primarily targeted Christians, international institutions, or Westerners were based in central Nigeria and eventually broke or distanced themselves from him due to his ruthlessness and megalomania. Shekau’s base and main hub of support in northeastern Nigeria’s Borno State, has comparatively few Christians compared to central Nigeria. Moreover, many Christians in Borno’s capital and main population center, Maiduguri, descend from southern Nigeria where they could readily flee amid the uptick in JASDJ attacks. It was not until 2013 that Shekau—who was emboldened by fighters returning from Mali, which AQIM allies had occupied the previous year—began expanding from Maiduguri into Borno and its borderlands’ rural areas. This brought Shekau’s fighters into contact with the indigenous Christian communities whose ancestors had escaped slave-raids during the jihads of the precolonial era by relocating towards the mountainous regions of Nigeria’s borderlands, only to face Shekau’s new jihad.
In April 2014, JASDJ fighters under Shekau abducted more than 200 mostly Christian schoolgirls in the infamous “Chibok kidnapping.” Nearly half of them were released two years later for an undisclosed sum of money. Several dozen girls who did not perish in JASDJ custody or escape voluntarily chose to remain with JASDJ because they had either been (forcibly) married to fighters or became indoctrinated into the group’s ideology and converted to Islam under their “father,” Shekau. By 2021, ISWAP now under Abu Musab al-Barnawi’s leadership launched an operation that cornered Shekau, resulting in his detonating explosives to kill himself. Under al-Barnawi and subsequent leaders, ISWAP attacks on Christians persisted, often involving raids to steal from them and expel them from their communities as well as brutal executions of villagers, who were beheaded or shot in the head, while they were forced to wear Guantanamo prison-style orange jumpsuits for propaganda video effect. Both types of attacks on Christians were commonly featured in ISWAP propaganda photos and videos released through IS’ central media apparatus, in order to boost the overall IS brand among its online followers.
Conclusion
The ISWAP and JASDJ attacks on Christians continue, but they also demonstrate the embeddedness of Christians in their historic communities in northeastern Nigeria. Despite the genocidal attacks against them by ISWAP and JASDJ, they remain. This case also shows how anti-Christian rhetoric that was initially not accompanied by violence under Yusuf—and that was not earnestly combatted by the broader Salafi community— turned murderous under Shekau by drawing on a narrative of revenge. It is of course not the Nigerian state that is responsible for anti-Christians attacks; it is however responsible to do its utmost to prevent them. Thus far, unfortunately, it has fallen short in this mission, which will inevitably cause sympathetic Christians from around the world to pay attention to the plight of their religious brethren in Nigeria.
Jacob Zenn is an adjunct associate professor on African Armed Movements and Violent Non-State Actors in World Politics at the Georgetown University Security Studies Program (SSP).
