(Worthy News) - More than 200 homes were destroyed and 13 Christians killed in Muslim Herdsmen attacks in Nigeria Monday, where the Nigerian government continues to be silent and inactive in addressing the raids.
Ungwan Rimi Kamuru village, Kikoba village, Kangbro village, Nakai Danwai, and two villages in Plateau state all suffered incursions by the Fulani herders, whose campaign to reappropriate the lands of Christian farmers left 400 Christians dead between February and April of this year alone.
“Houses were burnt and razed down, farms destroyed, the villagers were also displaced,” Lawrence Zongo, publicity secretary for the Miango Development Association, told The Sun newspaper.
3 children were among the dead in the raids, the frequency, and severity of which over the last few years led a delegation of Christians from Nigeria to Washington last month to plead with the Trump administration.
“My people are stranded. They are literally sleeping under the skies, on the floor [with] no houses, no food, nothing. It is not about relief materials and how much we can donate. It's about holding the government accountable,” Alheri Magaji, a member of the Adara Chiefdom, told an audience at an event convened by the Heritage Foundation.
“There is a genocide going on...We are here today to beg the U.S. government and for the world to hear our story,” Magaji told those gathered, citing Nigerian government inaction that has failed to apprehend a single perpetrator from the predominantly Muslim Fulani tribe for the attacks.
In 2018 alone Fulani Herdsmen attacks killed 2,400 Christians, according to the International Society for Civil Liberties & the Rule of Law, which led the Nigerian House of Representatives to begin using the word genocide about the situation there.
Despite the disproportionate number of Christians killed and the substantially higher number of instances in which Fulani aggression is the driving engine, most Western media accounts use the few reprisal attacks by Christian farmers to paint the conflict as something less than religiously motivated genocide.
“It is a deliberate confusion of narrative that has been very successfully used on an international platform,” Richard Ikiebe, president of the International Organization for Peacebuilding and Social Justice, explained to the Heritage Foundation.
Ikiebe said that 70 communities in Plateau state alone have been “eradicated and repopulated” by Fulani herdsmen.