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More Than 30 Killed as Islamists Target Christian Communities in Benue State, Nigeria More than 30 people were killed in Benue State, Nigeria, as Islamist terrorists unleashed three days of violence against Christian communities. The killings are just the latest massacre in what Nigerian church leaders have called a “genocide” of Nigerian Christians. Barnabas Aid estimates that at least 45,000 Christians have been killed by Islamists in northern and Middle Belt Nigeria since 2009. Most of the deaths took place in Kwande Local Government Area (LGA), beginning on February 3 at Abande market, where sixteen civilians and a police officer, Isaac Madu, were shot and killed by terrorists. A further 13 were killed just three days later in the village of Anwase. On the same day Fulani militia killed two residents of the Akpete community in Apa LGA, Matthew Ochanga and Isaac Adanu. Elsewhere in Benue State on Sunday, February 8, nine worshippers were abducted from an early morning prayer meeting by 25 men with weapons. “They were speaking Fulfulde [the Fulani language] and chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ as they surrounded us,” said a member of the congregation who was able to escape. Erasing Christianity from Nigeria On a recent visit to Plateau, another Middle Belt state, the British author and journalist David Patrikarakos described a landscape of burned-out church buildings and “broken crosses.” “It’s as though someone has tried to erase every visible sign of Christianity from this land,” writes Patrikarakos. “In the face of all this,” he continues, “calling the violence here merely a ‘farmer-herder conflict’ … begins to sound like a diplomatic euphemism.” “We are being displaced,” Patrikarakos was told by Iliya Ayuba Fwangle, a local leader in the Christian Association of Nigeria, adding the need to make known “the genocide we Christians are experiencing here.” According to a survivor of a May 2023 Fulani Islamist attack, “The churches are always their main target.” Patrikarakos’s investigation confirms what Barnabas Aid project partners and contacts in Nigeria have long reported, that militants attack Christians villages “screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’ and calling the Christians living there infidels.” In December 2025, 27 Christians were abducted from a church and the village of Aiyetoro-Kiri in Kogi State. The attack left one worshiper dead. Two others died in captivity and a fourth after being released and hospitalized. “If anybody is telling me that this is not genocide against Christians,” said village head Olusegun Durowaye, “I don’t know where you are getting your story from.”