Fulani Muslim raiders killed ten people last week, including an infant, in the Christian-majority southern Kaduna State in Nigeria, the Barnabas Fund reported Monday.
Armed with guns, the militants stormed Magamiya village around 11:00pm on July 12, stealing valuables and food, and killing two men, aged 70 and 62. During the two-hour assault, the raiders also set houses on fire and attempted to burn down the village’s Christian church.
Following the first assault, the assailants went on to raid the village of Matyei in the middle of the night, killing eight people, including a baby. The attackers torched all 156 homes in the village as well as its church, Barnabas noted.
The inhabitants of the two villages belong to the Atyap ethnic group, 84 percent of whom are Christians.
According to the Southern Kaduna Peoples Union (SOKAPU), survivors of the assaults were able to identify the attackers as Fulani.
In a press statement, SOKAPU said that since 2019, Fulani raiders have engaged in ongoing killing and land grabbing, in which 108 Southern Kaduna communities have been displaced and taken over.
“Not a single Fulani leader has been called for questioning,” the group said.
A 2019 Wall Street Journal report asserted that the Islamist Fulani raiders have grown more dangerous for Nigerian Christians than the Boko Haram terror group and are waging a barbaric war on Nigeria’s Christians to rid the country’s Middle Belt of non-Muslims.
In a first-hand account, Bernard-Henri Lévy said the Fulani raiders are responsible for systematic attacks on Christians involving burning, raping, maiming, pillaging, and killing.
This campaign constitutes a “slow-motion war” against Nigeria’s Christians, Lévy wrote, “massive in scale and horrific in brutality.”
In his report, Lévy chronicled some of the atrocities committed:
“The mutilated cadavers of women. A mute man commanded to deny his faith, then cut up with a machete until he screams. A girl strangled with the chain of her crucifix.”
Nearly all the members of Nigeria’s political bureaucracy are Fulani, including President Muhammadu Buhari, which many credit for the government’s failure to intervene to stop the slaughter.