Equipping the Persecuted, a U.S.-based ministry focused on Nigerian Christians, is urging the United Nations to recognize what it calls a genocide in Nigeria’s Middle Belt after a weekend terror alert through its Truth Nigeria network was credited with reducing casualties in fresh attacks that left at least 60 people dead.
According to Equipping the Persecuted, the early warning was issued via its Truth Nigeria system ahead of coordinated assaults on majority-Christian communities in the Middle Belt, giving residents critical hours to flee or fortify their villages before gunmen arrived. Truth Nigeria’s website regularly posts urgent notices, including recent alerts for Plateau State, Kogi State and Adamawa State, warning of armed groups sighted near rural communities and “credible threat of attacks” against Christian areas. The ministry says it has now issued more than 200 operational terror alerts through its network, claiming a documented accuracy rate of 93 percent.
The weekend violence came just days after Equipping the Persecuted released a detailed report, “Religious Persecution and Security Failure in Nigeria,” outlining what it describes as systematic, religiously motivated attacks on Christian communities and chronic failures by security agencies to prevent them. Drawing on field reports and its incident database, the group says at least 4,216 Christians were killed between January and September 2026, an average of 16.8 deaths per day, and more than 5 million Christians have been displaced from their homes. The report further estimates that over 600 Christian communities have been destroyed or emptied and documents more than 70 abductions and 35 killings in a single week in September. Equipping the Persecuted argues that these figures demonstrate a pattern of targeted religious persecution that meets the legal threshold for genocide.
Independent monitoring groups have reported similarly grim numbers. A September analysis by the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law, cited by Catholic World Report and Zenit, found that at least 3,083 Christians were killed and 3,193 abducted in Nigeria between January and August 2026, with many of the attacks carried out by jihadist groups and concentrated in the Middle Belt where largely Muslim northern populations meet largely Christian southern communities. The same report said roughly 400 churches were attacked and 25 priests and pastors killed or kidnapped in that eight-month period, including a particularly hard-hit Catholic diocese in Taraba State that recorded 239 church buildings attacked or destroyed and nearly 100,000 parishioners forced to flee between September 2025 and August 2026.
Truth Nigeria, an independent news outlet founded and led by Equipping the Persecuted’s executive director Judd Saul, has used its investigations to highlight what it calls a disconnect between growing security budgets and continuing bloodshed. In a July article, the outlet reported that Nigeria’s federal and state governments spent more than $377.4 million on security between 2023 and 2025, yet killings of Christians in the Middle Belt continued to rise. “Between 5,000 and 10,000 Christians are killed in Nigeria each year in direct attacks while 800 Christian villages have disappeared over the past three decades after repeated assaults left communities destroyed or abandoned,” Saul said in that report, arguing that authorities have failed to confront armed Fulani ethnic militias he describes as the primary threat facing Christian communities in Benue, Plateau and Kaduna states.
Other Christian advocacy organizations have echoed concerns about the role of Fulani militias in the violence. A July analysis by International Christian Concern, highlighted by Baptist Press, concluded that Islamic Fulani militias were responsible for a greater share of civilian deaths than Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province combined, and found that Christians were killed at a rate 4.4 times higher than Muslims, though Muslims have also been targeted. In that context, Saul told Baptist Press that while former U.S. president Donald Trump had condemned terrorism in Nigeria and supported operations against ISIS-linked groups, his administration did not take direct action against what Saul called the “Islamist Fulani Ethnic Militia,” which he said was responsible for most attacks on Christian communities in parts of the Middle Belt.
Equipping the Persecuted is pairing its new report with technology it hopes will both save lives on the ground and strengthen its case before international bodies. In mid-September, the ministry began rolling out the Truth Nigeria app for iOS and Android, which sends real-time terror alerts to users’ smartphones, aggregates reporting from Truth Nigeria and integrates an interactive Nigeria Terror Tracker map. A description of the app on the Google Play Store says it provides “news, reports, and incident updates related to violence, persecution, and humanitarian concerns in Nigeria,” giving users direct access to security alerts posted by Truth Nigeria’s local networks. Earlier this year, Truth Nigeria formally unveiled the Nigeria Terror Tracker at an event in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, where Saul described the interactive map as a tool that “exposes five years of terror—who carried it out, where it happened, and who was ignored,” using verified incident data to plot patterns of attacks against Christian communities.
As world leaders gather in New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly, Equipping the Persecuted is urging diplomats to confront the situation in Nigeria more directly. In recent press materials, the organization has called on the UN Human Rights Council and member states to formally recognize the mass killings and forced displacement of Christians in Nigeria as genocide, arguing that continued silence amounts to complicity in ongoing atrocities. The group has tied its appeal to high-profile speeches at the UN and to an expected address by Nigeria’s vice president, pressing the question of how global institutions will respond while Christian communities report being “slaughtered, driven from their homes, and terrorized for their faith.” For now, Truth Nigeria’s steady stream of terror alerts—from Plateau and Kogi to Adamawa—underscores that, despite increased security spending and expanding advocacy efforts, Christian villagers across Nigeria’s Middle Belt remain on constant watch for the next attack.