As part of a social media rampage involving more than 30 Truth Social posts in less than three hours, President Donald Trump doubled down on his threat to launch an attack on Nigeria. Standing in front of a podium, he accused the government of letting the mass slaughter of Christians go unchecked, and said he may send in American troops 'guns a-blazing, to completely wipe out the Islamic terrorists who are committing these horrible, horrible atrocities'.

While there was immediate confusion over whether the video was AI-generated, Trump's message to the 'disgraced' country was crystal clear: 'If we attack, it will be fast, vicious and sweet.' The rhetoric has sent shockwaves through Nigeria, especially after the Trump administration added it to the U.S. list of 'countries of particular concern', alongside China, Afghanistan and others, for alleged violations of religious freedom. Mohammed Idris, Nigeria's information minister, has hit back at Trump's warnings, calling claims about a Christian genocide 'false, baseless, despicable, and divisive', while President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has denied that his country is 'religiously intolerant'.

But where do the allegations about mass murder against Christians come from? And if they are lies, why has Trump instructed the Pentagon to draw up war plans for military intervention? According to experts in the region, the reality is more complicated than a religious war between Christians and Islamic terrorists. It is true that death is spiralling in the nation: at least 2,266 people were killed in the first half of 2025, compared to 2,194 for the whole of 2024, according to Nigeria's human rights agency.

However, that figure includes both Christian and Muslim victims, who each make up roughly half of Nigeria's population of 232 million, with the former in the south and the latter in the north, where killers don't discriminate based on religion. The death of Christian Nigerian civilians have been dominating the headlines, sparking fury in Trump's evangelical base. At least 100 were murdered in June in a massacre in the village of Yelwata in Benue state, northcentral Nigeria. Most of the residents were still asleep when the killers descended in the darkness and the pouring rain, unleashing their first gunshots and setting homes ablaze.

Those who didn't burn to death tried to escape, seeking shelter in the village church, school and market stalls, but such attempts were futile as the murderers hunted their prey. Armed with rifles, machetes and fuel, most of the suspects were bandits or armed herders — ethnically Fulani pastoralists who are majority Muslim. April saw more Christian bloodshed in the Bassa area of northcentral region, also known as the country's Middle Belt or fertile 'breadbasket' that provides crops for much of the nation. Some 40 people from the Zike farming community of the Plateau state were slaughtered, including children and the elderly who were taken by surprise and could not flee from the gunmen.

Muslim herders were again the prime suspects, drawing the attention of campaigners for Nigerian Christians who allege systematic persecution. However, analysts insist that such attacks aren't about faith or ethnicity, but the fight for lucrative farmland, and transforming that battle into one of religion is a dangerous game that will only fan the flames of violence in an already tense region. Malik Samuel, a senior researcher at Good Governance Africa, told the Daily Mail that he was surprised by Trump's comments about Christians facing an 'existential threat' in Nigeria, because he thought the U.S. president would 'have all his facts correct'.

'Anybody who follows Nigerian politics knows there's not a Christian genocide, and that any claim of that is an exaggeration,' he said. On the contrary, 'the conflict in north central Nigeria is largely driven by competition for land and water,' not religious prejudice. Because most of the farmers are Christian and most of the herders are Muslim, the violence occurs along religious lines — but that's not its root cause. In the past, the two groups would work in together in cycles: During rainy season, herders would leave, enabling the farmers to cultivate crops which, once harvested, left behind chaff that provided feed for the cattle, whose manure, in turn, fertilized the land for the next farming season.

But because of rapid population growth and uncontrolled development in Nigeria, 'the land is shrinking', Samuel said, meaning farmers are forced to cultivate all-year round to yield the same harvest, making bloody confrontation with herders 'inevitable'. 'Now, farmers are no longer farming only during the rainy season, they are farming during the dry season, which means they are farming all year round, restricting the window available for herders to graze their cattle, so this is a major sticking point.' When disagreements arose in the past, the groups could appeal to their community leaders for arbitration, but the toxic politicisation of the conflict has made diplomacy near-impossible — leading to deadly scuffles. But the conflict in Nigeria isn't just about farmers and herders.

Jihadist groups such as the Boko Haram and its splinter groups such as Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) have waged an insurgency since 2009, killing tens of thousands and displacing millions. And while Trump has blamed 'radical Islamists' for the mass slaughter of Christians, most of the terrorists' victims have been Muslims they deemed insufficiently devout. According to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), there were 20,409 deaths from 11,862 attacks against civilians in Nigeria between January 2020 and this September. Of those, 385 attacks were 'targeted events against Christians... where Christian identity of the victim was a reported factor,' resulting in 317 deaths. In the same period, there were 417 deaths recorded among Muslims in 196 attacks. The birthplace of the Boko Haram conflict is in the northeast of Nigeria, particularly in the Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states, where the majority of the victims have been Muslims. 'D espite Boko Haram's language or the ISWAP's claims — saying things like Christians were killed or the framing of the situation as an attack on Christians — you still have more Muslims getting attacked than you have Christians, because the region has a larger Muslim population than a Christian population,' Miriam Adah, as assistant research manager at ACLED, told the Daily Mail.