PSJ UK responds to the release of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) Issue Update on Fulani militant violence in Nigeria — and asks the hard questions that Abuja must face.
What the USCIRF Report Finds
In May 2026, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) — an independent, bipartisan US legislative agency — published a detailed issue update titled Nonstate Violators of Religious Freedom in Nigeria: Fulani Militants. The report provides a sobering and methodical accounting of a crisis that has been escalating for years.
Among its key findings, USCIRF documents that an estimated 30,000 Fulani militants operate across Nigeria — from the northwest, through the Middle Belt and into the South — operating in groups of between 10 and 1,000, with no central command but with periodic coordination. The report notes that violence by these militants caused the highest number of deaths among all religious communities in Nigeria over the past year, surpassing even organised insurgent groups and criminal gangs.
The documented atrocities are staggering. A June 2025 attack in Benue State killed at least 200 people, including internally displaced persons sheltering at a Catholic mission. A massacre in Yelwata that same month killed over 200 Christians — mostly sleeping women and children — and forced more than 3,000 people to flee. On Easter Sunday 2026, militants killed five worshippers at two churches in Kaduna State while abducting 31 others. Overall, at least 1.3 million people in the Middle Belt have been displaced from their land.
The report is careful to acknowledge complexity: it notes that the violence is driven by overlapping factors including land competition, poverty, population pressure, and religious ideology, and that both Muslims and Christians have been victimised. It also documents Nigerian government responses — including President Tinubu’s December 2025 designation of Fulani militants as “terrorists,” and a January 2026 police operation that rescued 309 hostages and apprehended 129 suspects — while noting these steps remain wholly insufficient given the scale of the crisis.
PSJ UK Commentary: The Questions Nigeria Must Answer
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“If a report states that this force of Fulani ethnic militia has inflicted higher casualties than organised insurgent groups, then this demands the very highest priority from the leaders of the Nigerian state. Wherein lies their responsibility to protect?” |
PSJ UK welcomes this report as a serious and balanced contribution to understanding the crisis engulfing Nigeria’s communities. Yet its very existence compels a direct and uncomfortable question: does the Nigerian government not have the ability, the inclination, the capacity, the will, or the desire to take leadership and own the addressing of this issue?
Why is it a US Commission — however distinguished and well-intentioned — that is taking the lead in articulating what is happening on Nigerian soil? Why are the Nigerian authorities not taking that lead themselves, and why are Nigerians having to depend on a foreign body to document what is happening in their own country? This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a fundamental challenge to Nigeria’s sovereign responsibilities.
Beyond the Semantics: A Country at War
The USCIRF report is admirably balanced in laying out the different facets of what is happening. And within that balance, it clearly articulates why many have referred to what is occurring as a Christian genocide. PSJ UK does not intend to be drawn into arguments about terminology. Whether one calls it a genocide, an ethnic conflict, a resource war, or a campaign of religious persecution, what matters is this: it is the responsibility of the elected government of Nigeria and its constituted authorities to take leadership and address it.
A country in which 30,000 deadly non-state militants are actively operating is, by any meaningful definition, a country at war — declared or undeclared. The seemingly decentralised and uncoordinated nature of Fulani militant activity is not a sign of weakness; it is a deliberate feature of contemporary asymmetric warfare. By operating in a variety of contexts, with overlapping aims, and through periodic collaboration with both extremist organisations and criminal gangs, these actors succeed in stretching and systematically weakening the overall security apparatus of the state. What may look like chaos is, in effect, a tactic.
Nigeria’s leaders must reckon honestly with this reality. Conventional military doctrines, reactive policing, and periodic security deployments are manifestly inadequate responses to this form of neo-warfare. The evidence is in the death tolls: militants killed 12 in Benue State in March 2026 despite the prior deployment of over 400 security personnel to the region.
What Leadership Looks Like: A Call to Action
Rather than being consumed by narratives, semantics, and denials, PSJ UK urges the Nigerian government to proactively recognise and eliminate this anarchic force that is leaving thousands dead, intensifying insecurity across the country, and deepening communal tensions that have already displaced 1.3 million people in the Middle Belt alone.
In an era where warfare has fundamentally morphed, Nigeria actually has a strategic opportunity: to leapfrog over the limitations of conventional responses and demonstrate the kind of adaptive, technology-enabled, intelligence-led leadership that this crisis demands. The Nigerian authorities should move decisively to reclaim the forests, mountain hideouts, and rural hinterlands from which these groups operate, deploying state-of-the-art technology to comprehensively address this scourge. Crucially, the recruitment pipelines that have provided these groups with an unimpeded flow of new fighters must be identified, disrupted, and shut down.
The first and most fundamental responsibility of any government is the protection of its citizens. If Nigeria’s federal and state governments cannot or will not discharge that responsibility, they must be held to account by their citizens, by the international community, and by history itself.
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PSJ UK is a Nigerian diaspora mobilising advocacy organisation monitoring and responding to the social injustice of insecurity and attacks of lives and freedoms. This commentary is produced in response to the USCIRF Issue Update: Nonstate Violators of Religious Freedom in Nigeria: Fulani Militants (May 2026). Full report available at www.USCIRF.gov.
