Nigerian Village Bombed by Trump Has ‘No Known History’ of Anti-Christian Terrorism, Locals Say

“Portraying Nigeria’s security challenges as a targeted campaign against a single religious group is a gross misrepresentation of reality,” said Nigeria’s information minister.

By Stephen Prager, Common Dreams

When President Donald Trump launched a series of airstrikes in Nigeria on Christmas, he described it as an attack against “ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians.”

But locals in a town that was hit during the strike say terrorism has never been a problem for them. On Friday, CNN published a report based on interviews with several residents of Jabo, which was hit by a US missile during Thursday’s attack, which landed just feet away from the town’s only hospital.

The rural town of Jabo is part of the Sokoto state in northwestern Nigeria, which the Trump administration and the Nigerian government said was hit during the strike.

Both sides have said militants were killed during the attack, but have not specified their identities or the number of casualties.

Kabir Adamu, a security analyst from Beacon Security and Intelligence in Abuja, told Al Jazeera that the likely targets are members of “Lakurawa,” a recently formed offshoot of ISIS.

But the Trump administration’s explanation that their home is at the center of a “Christian genocide” left many residents of Jabo confused. As CNN reported:

While parts of Sokoto face challenges with banditry, kidnappings and attacks by armed groups including Lakurawa–which Nigeria classifies as a terrorist organization due to suspected affiliations with [the] Islamic State–villagers say Jabo is not known for terrorist activity and that local Christians coexist peacefully with the Muslim majority.

Bashar Isah Jabo, a lawmaker who represents the town and surrounding areas in Nigeria’s parliament, described the village to CNN as “a peaceful community” that has “no known history of ISIS, Lakurawa, or any other terrorist groups operating in the area.”

While the town is predominantly Muslim, resident Suleiman Kagara, told reporters: “We see Christians as our brothers. We don’t have religious conflicts, so we weren’t expecting this.”

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation with more than 237 million people, has a long history of violence between Christians and Muslims, with each making up about half the population.

However, Nigerian officials have disputed claims by Republican leaders—including US Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas)—who have claimed that the government is “ignoring and even facilitating the mass murder of Christians.”

The senator recently claimed, without citing a source for the figures, that “since 2009, over 50,000 Christians in Nigeria have been massacred, and over 18,000 churches and 2,000 Christian schools have been destroyed” by the Islamist group Boko Haram.

Cruz is correct that many Christians have been killed by Boko Haram. But according to reports by the US-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project and the Council on Foreign Relations, the majority of the approximately 53,000 civilians killed by the group since 2009 have been Muslim.

Moreover, the areas where Boko Haram is most active are in northeastern Nigeria, far away from where Trump’s strikes were conducted. Attacks on Christians cited in October by Cruz, meanwhile, have been in Nigeria’s Middle Belt region, which is separate from violence in the north.

The Nigerian government has pushed back on what they have called an “oversimplified” narrative coming out of the White House and from figures in US media, like HBO host Bill Maher, who has echoed Cruz’s overwrought claims of “Christian genocide.”

“Portraying Nigeria’s security challenges as a targeted campaign against a single religious group is a gross misrepresentation of reality,” said Nigerian information minister Mohammed Idris Malagi. “While Nigeria, like many countries, has faced security challenges, including acts of terrorism perpetrated by criminals, couching the situation as a deliberate, systematic attack on Christians is inaccurate and harmful. It oversimplifies a complex, multifaceted security environment and plays into the hands of terrorists and criminals who seek to divide Nigerians along religious or ethnic lines.”

Anthea Butler, a religious scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, has criticized the Trump administration’s attempts to turn the complex situation in Nigeria into a “holy war.”

“This theme of persecution of Christians is a very politically charged, and actually religiously charged, theme for evangelicals across the world. And when you say that Christians are being persecuted, that’s a thing,” she told Democracy Now! in November. “It fits this sort of savior narrative of this American sort of ethos right now that is seeing itself going into countries for a moral war, a moral suasion, as it were, to do something to help other people.”

Nigeria also notably produces more crude oil than any other country in Africa. Trump has explicitly argued that the US should carry out regime change in Venezuela for the purposes of “taking back” that nation’s oil.

Butler has doubted the sincerity of Trump’s concern for the nation’s Christians due to his administration’s denial of entry for Nigerian refugees, as well as virtually every other refugee group, with the exception of white South Africans.

She said: “I think this is sort of disingenuous to say you’re going to go in and save Christianity in Nigeria, when you have, you know, banned Nigerians from coming to this country.”