By Obekwu Akoto, in Nigeria
part of the CSI Fellowship for Nigerian Voices series
A month before attackers killed more than 200 Christians in a farming community in Nigeria’s Middle Belt in June 2025, the country’s security services received a written warning that the attack was being planned. Soldiers stationed nearby reportedly arrived more than five hours after the attackers had left.
Armed Fulani militias frequently attack Christian farming communities in this religiously diverse region.
The sequence of an unheeded warning, an attack and a late or absent security response has recurred there often enough to raise the question of whether such persistent state negligence could amount to complicity under international law. The pattern continues today.
A warning before the fire
A Department of State Services memo dated 13 May 2025, warned that a Fulani ethnic militia planned an assault on Yelwata, a farming settlement in Benue State that had already absorbed people displaced by earlier attacks.
The militia struck on 13 June, setting fire to homes and burning residents alive. Soldiers stationed in the area failed to respond, according to David Onyilokwu Idah, director of the International Human Rights Commission in Abuja.
Many of the more than 200 people killed belonged to families that had previously fled violence elsewhere.
“The military was aware this was happening and did nothing”, Jacqueline Halbig von Schleppenbach, a Washington-based religious freedom advocate, told the local outlet TruthNigeria. “They did not show up until the massacre ended.”
Survivors in Benue, Plateau, Kaduna and Taraba states give similar accounts of what happens before, during and after an attack.
A recurring sequence
In Bindi, a community in Riyom County, Plateau State, local leaders warned the military of an imminent attack on 15 July 2025, and were assured that soldiers had the situation under control. Fulani militants nevertheless attacked at around 3 a.m., killing 32 people.
Residents said troops stationed nearby did not intervene, while some accused soldiers of preventing local youths from responding to the attack.
Solomon Daylop Mwantiri, National Chairman of the Berom Youth Moulders Association, told TruthNigeria that community leaders had passed intelligence of the imminent raid to the military and were assured that troops were “on top of the situation” before the attackers struck.
Plateau State’s commissioner for information, Joyce Ramnap, subsequently told Channels TV that a military checkpoint stood 200 meters from the scene of the attack and that the soldiers had close contact with the attackers but made no arrests.
On 29 November 2025, villagers in Mwar, Mangu County, Plateau State, ran to a military checkpoint a few hundred meters from their homes and pleaded for help. The 10 soldiers stationed there reportedly did not respond, and three villagers were killed minutes later.
No response to calls
That same night in Igbum, Taraba State, military personnel failed to answer residents’ calls, and phones at the military post were switched off as more than 30 militants attacked the village.
“We knew an attack was likely and alerted the soldiers at the Ogobia military outpost before it happened. We called again while the attack was underway, but no one came. People feel abandoned,” said Joshua Oche, a resident of Ondo community in Benue South, describing a separate July 2026 raid that brought the state’s monthly death toll to 39.
A Plateau-based researcher who documents attacks on villages told TruthNigeria that, in some cases, soldiers arrive at the scene with their sirens sounding, alerting the attackers and giving them time to escape.
Evidence that disappears
Mass killings in functioning legal systems generate a paper trail of death certificates, autopsy reports and forensic files. In the Middle Belt, they generate mass graves instead.
Nine members of a single Christian family were killed on 11 July 2026 in the Kum and Wereng Comp communities of Riyom County, Plateau State and buried the following day, with no morgue, no post-mortem, and no official confirmation of death.
After a 16 June attack on Angwan Magaji in Kaduna State killed nine people, five of them children, the Irigwe Nation, an ethnic community organization, held its own mass burial on 28 June.
When journalists visited the Yelwata village weeks after the massacre there, bones and human remains still lay in the debris, a crime scene holding more than 200 deaths that no forensic team had secured, according to community leaders.
Without hospital records, wound documentation, recovered cartridge cases or witness statements collected close to the time of an attack, prosecutions rarely proceed.
“We are tired of being outside performing burials every day,” Rev. Ezekiel Dachomo, a prominent Christian leader, said while officiating the mass burial of at least 12 victims in Barkin Ladi in October 2025, appealing to the United Nations and Washington to intervene.
Arrests without trials
Nigeria’s police chief announced 26 arrests in the days after the Yelwata massacre, and the suspects reportedly confessed to investigators. However, their arraignment stalled after the case moved to the Ministry of Justice, the charges against them were never made public, and more than a year later no conviction has been announced.
When 18 Christians were killed in Benue in July 2026, police made no arrests at all, a gap that Benue-based security analyst Ayati Christopher Ahangba warned could damage public confidence in law enforcement.
Hundreds of suspects arrested in earlier attacks have been released without charge or trial in the years since.
The International Criminal Court closed its preliminary assessment of Nigeria in 2020 without opening a formal investigation, despite what the International Bar Association (IBA) calls a clear case for prosecution.
“The issue is not jurisdictional ambiguity but prosecutorial inaction,” the IBA concluded in a 2026 analysis, noting that Genocide Watch has designated Nigeria at active risk of genocide and classified the Fulani Ethnic Militia attacks as genocidal massacres.
Known camps, no raids
The men allegedly responsible for these attacks operate in locations that Nigerian authorities and rights investigators say are well known.
In Kajuru County, Kaduna State, Fulani militants run kidnapping networks and hold camps, collecting ransoms from subsistence farmers, according to Dr. Bitrus Pogu, national president of the Middle Belt Forum, a civil society organisation representing farming communities in the region.
“The military has consistently shown reluctance to pursue known terrorist groups, even when their hideouts are well identified,” Pogu told TruthNigeria.
Along the Abuja-Kaduna corridor, an investigation by the newspaper documented detention camps in Rijana village that had operated for years within striking distance of federal forces, camps that were named and mapped but left untouched.
Visits after the violence
Government officials tend to visit only after an attack has ended and leave without committing any resources to the affected community.
In Otukpo-Nobi area, Benue State, the state’s deputy governor and Governor Hyacinth Alia each paid condolence visits after a July 2026 attack and promised protection, but no security deployment followed either visit.
“When the deputy governor came, he came in with a huge convoy of security, when he left, he also left with the same huge security. Since then, no police, no army to guard and patrol this area”, a resident said. A TruthNigeria correspondent traveled from Otukpo town to the attack scene without passing a single military position.
In Naridon community, Kaduna State, where attackers killed 30 people including eight children in July 2026, the state government’s condolence statement and relief directive came only after survivors had already buried their neighbours, well after the gunmen were gone.
Survivors interviewed by TruthNigeria in multiple states report no rebuilding funds, no medical cost coverage and no resettlement support.
International law and state duty
Under international law, a state may be held responsible for failing to prevent violence, even if its own forces did not carry it out.
Nigeria ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1993, and Article 6 requires states to exercise due diligence in preventing, investigating and punishing unlawful killings, including those committed by non-state actors. Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights similarly recognises everyone’s right to life and security, although the declaration is not a binding treaty.
Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute in Washington told the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa on 12 March 2025, that Nigeria’s federal government “allows Fulani violence to continue with impunity”. She added that the government’s failure to collect data on the attacks has led observers, including Emeka Umeagbalasi of the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law, to conclude that it bears responsibility for the violence that has followed.
For farming families in Benue, Plateau, Kaduna and Taraba states, the documentary record now includes memos that predicted violence before it happened, checkpoints that stood a few hundred meters from where people were killed, confessions that never reached a courtroom, and camps that investigators could name and locate but that security forces left standing.
Could the accumulated record point to a policy rather than mere incapacity?
The CSI Fellowship for Nigerian Voices is a six-month programme for a select cohort of Nigerian journalists to shed light on the struggle that local Christian communities have been facing in the Middle Belt, thus increasing public awareness and engagement by the international community.
