Joel Veldkamp, head of international communications at Christian Solidarity International, is sounding the alarm on horrific attacks unfolding against believers in Nigeria.
“What just unfolded there is the worst attacks we’ve seen in Nigeria in almost a year and a half,” Veldkamp told CBN News. “My coworker … got to the city of Jos in central Nigeria on Saturday, on April 12. Every night since then there have been attacks on Christian villages in that area.”
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He said they believe at least 126 people have been killed and 7,000 have been driven from their homes.
“It’s an extremely serious attack, one of the biggest that we’ve seen in this region for a long time, and it’s coming in Holy Week,” Veldkamp said. “The worst massacre was on Palm Sunday, actually. Fifty-six people were killed in their village by Fulani Islamic jihadists.”
Veldkamp described some of the horrors his coworker is seeing on the ground after meeting with “survivors of the massacre.”
“He said most of the people who are in there have wounds from machetes,” he said. “The attackers are actually using machetes to kill and to hurt people. He met a seven-year-old boy named Steven, whose entire family was killed. His father was shot and killed. His mother had both of her arms cut off with machetes, and then she died, we believe. His two other siblings were both hit with machetes and they were killed.”
Steven, who was struck in the neck with a machete, was left for dead by the terrorists and was later discovered by a relative who brought him to the hospital.
“Even in the hospital several days later, he was still screaming and vomiting from the pain of his wounds,” Veldkamp said.
Nigeria has become a hotbed of terror in recent years, despite nearly half of the country being Christian. Veldkamp explained that the ruling military class has always been Muslim and from the Fulani ethnic group.
“What’s happening now is we have this huge region of Nigeria called the Middle Belt that’s very fertile, that’s populated by hundreds of different ethnic groups, almost all of whom are a Christian and who are farmers,” he said. “And we’re seeing for the past six years, at least, systematic attacks on their villages by Fulani militias who then, after they’ve killed the people and driven the people out, take their land and settle on their land.”
Veldkamp continued, “So, we’re seeing a slow process of taking a region that used to be Christian and turning it into a Muslim region. For the militias themselves, they get land, they get property, they get money perhaps.”
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As CBN News has reported, Nigeria is consistently found by watchdogs to be the most deadly nation for believers.
“We documented almost 10,000 killings of Christians, mostly in the north and middle part of that country,” Isaac Six, the former senior director of advocacy for Global Christian Relief (GCR), told CBN News earlier this year. “And, again, that is systematic violence being perpetrated and led by groups like Boko Haram, and Islamic State West Africa Province, and then other armed groups.”
Ultimately, Isaac said Christians in America need to understand the extent of the terror.
“The church in America really has to hear how horrific some of these stories are,” he said. “It’s not just violence. It’s not just killings. It is brutal atrocities. And, frankly, the church has to wake up to some of this. Only a fraction of believers in America are even aware of what’s happening.”
Other persecution trackers have also extensively documented the severity of the issue. Open Doors’ World Watch List 2025 placed Nigeria in the seventh spot in its rankings of nations where anti-Christian persecution and discrimination are the worst.
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