CSI met with survivors of the Tatu, Plateau attack. csi
From October 7 to 14, a string of attacks on villages in the Riyom and Barkin Ladi areas of Plateau State claimed at least 25 victims, including six children, according to local Christian activists who spoke of one of the worst weeks in recent memory.
Wave of coordinated attacks
A statement from the Berom Youth Movement (BYM), a local activist group, spoke of a “wave of coordinated attacks” by Fulani militias on Christian villages in the area.
At around 10 pm on October 14, heavily armed Fulani assailants launched two simultaneous deadly attacks on the Tatu community of Rachas in Heipang district, and the Rawuru community in Fan district, according to the statement. Both villages are tin the Barkin Ladi local government area.
Eyewitnesses said 11 villagers, including five children, who were asleep in bed, were killed in gunfire in Tatu. Two others were killed in Rawuru.
The previous evening two men had been killed and two others injured during an attack on the Wereng community in Riyom, the statement said.
And on October 8, four people, including a one-year-old baby, were killed by armed Fulani invaders in Gabwat, Fan district, Barkin Ladi.
“Within one week, 12 persons have been killed in Fan, 11 in Heipang, and two in Wereng, marking one of the darkest weeks in recent memory,” the BYM statement continued. It urged immediate government intervention to prevent further bloodshed.
27 killed in July
Deadly attacks by Fulani militant groups are a regular occurrence in rural areas of Plateau State. On July 15, Fulani militants carried out a massacre in a Christian village in Riyom, killing 27 people. CSI responded to the urgent needs of survivors with emergency aid.
A team from Christian Solidarity International (CSI) visited Tatu village following the October 14 attack to meet with families of the deceased and offer assistance, prayers and condolences.
Keziah loses her husband and two children
Keziah Chollom, 20 years old and a mother of four, lost her husband, Chollom Danjuma, and two children in the attack. Two children belonging to her sister in-law, who were in the house with them, were also killed.
The young mother ran outside when the shooting began and hid her two older children inside a drum. She then returned to the house and concealed herself behind a door.
“I heard them come inside the house and then open fire. They shot at the drum and one of the boys inside the drum coughed. They went to the drum and asked them, ‘where is your father?’
‘He ran out,’ I heard one of the boys say. ‘Where is your mother,’ they then asked.
‘She also ran,’ my son said. I heard them say to the children to remain quiet or they would be killed.”
Keziah held her breath as the gunmen went from room to room in the compound flinging open the doors and looking inside. When they came to the room where she was, they opened the door but didn’t see that she and the younger children were behind it. “Thankfully the children I was carrying were too terrified from the sound of the gunshots to make a noise,” she told CSI.
“After a while when things seemed to have quietened down, I came out and went to where the boys were in the drum. They were both dead and covered in blood. I then saw my husband’s body lying in a pool of blood. They had shot him several times also.”
“How do I survive?”
“I have lost my husband and children; what do I do, where do I go and how do I survive?”
CSI also met with another widow, Yop Solomon. Shortly after the attack on the village, her husband Solomon Dung, 42, was rushing an injured man to a health facility in Heipang when he was ambushed by armed Fulani. The two men were killed just outside the village.
No Christian genocide, government says
Amid the continuing attacks in Plateau State and other parts of Nigeria’s Middle Belt, the government in Abuja has become involved in a war of words with United States Senator Ted Cruz over whether a genocide against Christians is taking place in Nigeria.
“Since 2009, Islamist jihadists have massacred over 50,000 Christians in Nigeria and destroyed more than 20,000 Christian churches, schools and other institutions,” Cruz wrote in a post on X. In an earlier thread, Cruz accused officials in Nigeria of “ignoring and even facilitating the mass murder of Christians.”
The Republican senator for Texas has sponsored a bill that requires the U.S. Secretary of State to designate Nigeria a country of particular concern (CPC) for religious freedom.
In response, Nigerian Senate President Godswill Akpabio “cautioned against framing Nigeria’s security crisis along religious lines,” Punch reported. Akpabio insisted that “terrorists and bandits target Nigerians indiscriminately, regardless of faith.”
For his part, a spokesman for Nigerian President Bola Tinubu flatly rejected the accusations in an angry post of his own on X.
“Senator, stop these malicious, contrived lies against my country,” he wrote. “The degraded Boko Haram terrorists operating on the fringes of Nigeria’s North east target everyone… The bandits in the North west kill worshippers in their mosques. Christians are not targeted.”
While Boko Haram has killed many Muslim civilians, it has made the elimination of Christians in northern Nigeria as a group one of its declared goals. In the Middle Belt region of Nigeria, Fulani militias target Christian villages almost exclusively.
Commenting on an earlier round of massacres of Christians on Palm Sunday this year, CSI’s president, John Eibner, explained that, “This violence is driven by the longstanding determination of Nigeria’s Muslim Fulani-dominated ruling class to gain dominion over the predominantly Christian Middle Belt.”
“The Fulani militias are their instruments,” he continued. “They are waging jihad – in pursuit of the same goals as their spiritual and political forefather, Usman Dan Fodio, the founder of Nigeria’s 19th century Fulani-led caliphate.”
Genocide warnings
The governor of Plateau State, Caleb Mutfwang, has repeatedly warned that a genocide against Christians is playing out in the Middle Belt.
CSI issued a genocide warning for Christians in Nigeria in January 2020.
