Two American missionaries are raising alarm over what they describe as a systematic, government-enabled genocide of Christians in Nigeria.
Judd Saul of Iowa and Mike Arnold of Texas — both filmmakers turned human rights advocates — are working to provide housing and support for displaced Christian families while urging the international community to confront what they call a deliberate campaign of religious persecution, according to an Oct. 20 report from Truth Nigeria.
“The primary driving force of the killing of Christians in Nigeria is the Fulani tribe,” Saul, the founder of Equipping the Persecuted, said during an interview on the Tim Pool podcast. “They have declared that Allah has given Nigeria to them and that they can do with Nigeria whatever they want and once they have the political cover in these northern states, they start going after more land and more villages and start doing the killings.”
Saul, who also runs TruthNigeria.com, has documented hundreds of attacks on Christian villages.
He called it “death by a thousand attacks.”
“It’s not like a giant army going in and taking over major cities but systematically over time, they move in, they grow their population in a new area, they gain political power, and once they have the political power, the killing starts,” he said.
Meanwhile,Arnold — a former mayor of Blanco City, Texas — has taken the Nigerian government to task for what he describes as “witness repression” and complicity in the violence.
“There are at least four to 10 million IDPs who are eyewitnesses to genocide, and the government lies to them and labels them criminals,” he told Nigeria’s Punch newspaper Oct. 18. “They are being killed; they are dying of preventable illnesses and malnutrition. They are being abducted; they live in absolute squalor, denied by the government intentionally and in many ways.”
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Arnold, who was originally invited to Nigeria by a former government spokesman to debunk claims of persecution, instead affirmed them with documented research and undercover visits to IDP camps. His public challenge of the official narrative — particularly in a panel debate with former government aide Reno Omokri — triggered a social media surge, flipping online sentiment dramatically toward acknowledging the Christian genocide.
According to Arnold, the ethnic Fulani militias have adopted a chilling “established protocol” in attacks: “They separate Christian and Muslim men and women first. They kill the Christian men and tell the Muslim men that they must either join them or die, and they kill all the ones who don’t join them and sell the women into sex slavery.”
The conflict, often misrepresented as a farmer-herder dispute, is far more calculated, according to a recent statement Arnold presented to journalists in Abuja. He warned that attacks have escalated from the Middle Belt to Nigeria’s southern states.
Instead, he said, “the majority of killings and displacements across the Middle Belt region of Nigeria are, in fact, carried out by radical Islamist Fulani militias.”
He cited field reports, satellite imagery and survivor testimonies as confirmation that the militant groups, “often operating under political protection and mislabeled as herders, are responsible for the most widespread systematic and sustained attacks on Christian farming communities.”
He added, “Their campaigns extend well beyond traditional grazing disputes, encompassing organized massacres, forced displacement, and the strategic occupation of conquered lands.”
With global attention often centered on extremist groups like Boko Haram, Saul and Arnold say the Fulani militia’s quieter, politically shielded campaign goes unnoticed. As Saul’s organization continues to deliver aid to displaced families, he and Arnold are urging the Church and the global community to speak out — before more lives are lost to silence.