Trump says violence in Nigeria targets Christians. The reality is more nuanced

(CNN) — After months of warning that the US could take military action to stop violence against Christians in Nigeria, President Donald Trump announced on Christmas Day that he had done just that – delivering a strike on Islamic State terrorists in the country’s northwest.

US Africa Command said it conducted the strikes in Sokoto state, which borders Niger to the north, “in coordination with Nigerian authorities.” AFRICOM’s initial assessment is that “multiple ISIS terrorists were killed in the ISIS camps,” according to a news release.

Nigerian Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar told CNN Friday that he had spoken with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio prior to the strike and that Nigerian President Bola Tinubu gave the “go ahead.”

Details are still emerging about the strike, which came after Trump threatened to suspend aid to Nigeria over violence against Christians, even calling on his secretary of defense to “prepare for possible action” against Africa’s most populous nation in November.

But the reality on the ground is more nuanced than Trump’s characterization suggests, experts and analysts have told CNN this year. Both Christians and Muslims – the two main religious groups in the country of more than 230 million people – have been victims of attacks by radical Islamists.

In the wake of the strike, Yuggar said Nigeria’s focus is “to fight against terrorism, to stop the terrorists from killing innocent Nigerians, be (they) Muslim, Christian, atheist, whatever religion.”

Here’s what you need to know.

Years of violence

Nigeria has grappled for years with deep-rooted security problems driven by various factors, including religiously motivated attacks.

The country has roughly equal numbers of Christians – predominantly in the south – and Muslims, who are mainly concentrated in the north.

Sokoto state, in Nigeria’s northwestern corner, is bordered to the north by Niger, and is home to 4 million people – the majority of whom are Muslim.

The violence in the country’s northwest is mainly driven by criminal bandit groups, analysts say, but growing links with Islamic State-affiliated jihadists have created a hybrid crime-terrorism threat.

“The region where the strike has actually taken place is dominated by criminal bandits, who have been tormenting rural villages and towns with some form of ISWAP (a Boko Haram breakaway group known as the Islamic State in West Africa Province) presence in that region, but not really specifically in Sokoto,” Oluwole Ojewale, a Dakar-based African security analyst told CNN Friday.

In 2012, the Islamist group Boko Haram issued an ultimatum, ordering Christians in the northern region to leave while calling on Muslims in the south to “come back” to the north. Most targeted killings in recent years have been in the north.

Security analysts said Lakurawa, a lesser-known group prominent in northwestern states, could have been the target of Thursday’s strikes. Lakurawa – an offshoot of Boko Haram – has become increasingly deadly this year, often targeting remote communities and security forces, and hiding in the forests between states. In January, Nigeria’s authorities declared the group a terrorist organization and banned its activities nationwide.

Ansaru, an al-Qaeda-aligned jihadist group that also splintered from Boko Haram, operates in the country’s northwest and north-central regions and is known for its kidnappings, attacks on civilians and cooperation with transnational jihadist actors.

Observers say other violent conflicts arise from communal and ethnic tensions, as well as disputes between farmers and herders over limited access to land and water.

Nigeria has not named a specific organization that was targeted on Thursday.

The US strike could “disrupt ISIS operations in the short term, but the long-term issues that surround violence in Nigeria are extremely complex,” said CNN military analyst and retired US Air Force Col. Cedric Leighton, pointing to the economic factors at play.

“The way most of these strikes work is that they need to be part of a larger campaign, and what we’re not seeing here is that larger campaign.”

Has the long-running violence killed Christians?

Yes – though that’s only part of the picture.

John Joseph Hayab, a pastor who leads the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) in the country’s northern region, agrees with Trump’s claim of “systematic killings of Christians” in that area.

The scale of the killings has reduced in the last two years, he said. However, this year has seen a spate of high-profile attacks in predominantly Christian pockets of the north, which has drawn international attention and condemnation.

In April, gunmen believed to be Muslim herders killed at least 40 people in a mostly Christian farming village. Two months later, more than 100 people were massacred in Yelwata, a largely Christian community in the southeastern state of Benue, according to Amnesty International.

The killings have been seized upon among parts of the Christian evangelical right in the US. In August, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas introduced a bill calling for sanctions against Nigeria for purported violations of religious freedom.

What about Muslim victims?

Muslims have also been victims of targeted attacks by Islamist groups seeking to impose their extreme interpretation of Islamic law.

At least 50 worshippers were killed in August when gunmen attacked a mosque in the northwestern state of Katsina, and many similarly brutal attacks have been carried out in Muslim communities by Boko Haram and other armed groups in the north.

“Yes, these (extremist) groups have sadly killed many Christians. However, they have also massacred tens of thousands of Muslims,” said Bulama Bukarti, a Nigerian human rights advocate specializing in security and development.

He added that attacks in public spaces disproportionately harm Muslims, as these radical groups operate in predominantly Muslim states.

What little data exists also does not support Trump’s claims that Christians are being disproportionately targeted.

Out of more than 20,400 civilians killed in attacks between January 2020 and September 2025, 317 deaths were from attacks targeting Christians while 417 were from attacks targeting Muslims, according to crisis monitoring group Armed Conflict Location & Event Data.

The organization did not include the religious affiliation of the vast majority of the civilians killed.

Oyewale said that Trump’s “binary framing of the issue as attacks targeting Christians does not resonate with the reality on the ground.”

Nigeria is already divided along political and religious lines, Oyewale said, who added that the US president’s rhetoric “goes a long way to actually open the fault lines of division that already exist in the country.”

What have authorities said?

In November, Trump designated Nigeria a “Country of Particular Concern” under the US International Religious Freedom Act – which suggests his administration has found that Nigeria has engaged in or tolerated “systematic, ongoing, (and) egregious violations of religious freedom.”

But the Nigerian government rejected claims that it was not doing enough to protect Christians from violence. At the time, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu said that “the characterization of Nigeria as religiously intolerant does not reflect our national reality.”

However, several experts and analysts told CNN they believed the government needed to better protect all citizens – as people are being impacted by mass killings regardless of their religion or background.

Encapsulating the voices of other prominent politicians and leaders across Nigeria on Friday, former Senator Shehu Sani said on X: “The narrative that the evil terrorists only target one faith remains absolutely false and misleading,” before adding: “The ultimate security and peace in our country lies with ourselves and not with the US or any foreign power.”

Tinubu has not yet publicly commented on Thursday’s strike, but earlier in the day, had shared a Christmas message on social media.

“I stand committed to doing everything within my power to enshrine religious freedom in Nigeria and to protect Christians, Muslims, and all Nigerians from violence,” he wrote.

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