A new report suggests Nigerian Christians are suffering disproportionately compared to Muslim victims in targeted killings and massacres spearheaded by Nigeria’s Islamic terror groups.
The study, published by Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa (ORFA), discovered that between October 2019 and September 2025, the death rate of Christians was approximately 4.4 times higher than Muslims, adjusting for the size of religious populations in states affected by the attacks.
Within the six-year period, some 28,000 Christians were murdered throughout Nigeria while some 13,000 Muslims were killed. The 105-page study recorded nearly 35,000 in civilian kidnappings across all civilian groups, with each group being abducted with nearly equal numbers.
The report referred to another ORFA article examining the treatment of hostages and the “religious hierarchy of human worth embedded in the operational logic of Fulani Ethnic Militias.”
The article examined field interviews, interviews with a retired security official and a named survivor as well as other ORFA research and asserts that Christian and Muslim hostages often faced different treatment when in captivity.
“Muslim abductees receive comparatively lenient treatment, lower ransom demands, and shorter negotiations, while Christian captives endure systematic physical and sexual violence, higher ransoms, prolonged captivity, and significantly greater risk of execution,” OFCA found.
“It follows that Christian civilians were killed or abducted for being Christians, while Muslim civilians were killed or abducted for being non-Fulani,” the report said.
ORFA’s press release says that findings on groups responsible for the violence “overturns longstanding assumptions.” Terror groups Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Providence were responsible for 12% of civilian killings during the period but Fulani terror groups were responsible for 44% of civilian killings.
Frans Vierhout, ORFA senior research analyst, called the violence from Fulani militias the “the dominant force behind Nigeria’s death toll.”
“The Western preoccupation with Boko Haram is, at best, misleading. Nigeria is incubating a terror network which the outside world has yet to acknowledge.”
For governments, policymakers, civil society organizations and international partners, the report recommends seven polices to prevent violence from terror groups. The report calls for stronger international attention on religious freedom, greater pressure on Nigerian leaders to address and end the violence, better cooperation between state and federal governments, fortifying accountable community policing, and providing reintegration programs and trauma counseling to support victims.
Steven Kefas, the OFRA senior research analyst who authored the article centered on captivity in Nigeria, says “[t]he field research reveals a lesser value is assigned to a Christian life.”
“From the moment of capture, Muslim and Christian hostages enter different realities,” Kefas said. “It is not about individual captors. It is a system—consistent across multiple states, armed groups, and multiple years of survivor testimony.”
