The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) says an estimated 30,000 armed Fulani militants are operating across Nigeria in groups ranging from 10 to 1,000 members as perpetrators of “some of the most visible and deadly attacks” driving religious freedom violations in Nigeria.
According to the May 2026 report released by USCIRF, “In recent years, armed actors from a Fulani ethnic background have perpetrated some of the most visible and deadly attacks on religious communities—often but not exclusively against Christians—in Nigeria. These actors operate in a variety of contexts and with a multiplicity of likely aims and motivations. While many Fulani militant groups wage independent attacks, others periodically coordinate with a wide range of other actors, from conventional bandit gangs seeking financial enrichment to recognized terrorist organizations that espouse a violent interpretation of Islam.
This publication examines Fulani militants’ role in deteriorating religious freedom conditions in Nigeria by explaining Muslim and Christian communal dynamics and providing examples of recent and ongoing religious freedom violations by violent Fulani actors. It also describes efforts—and shortcomings—on the part of the Nigerian
government and civil society actors to bolster social cohesion, improve security, and reduce patterns of violence.
Fulani Dynamics and Militant Violence
The Fulani people are a Muslim-majority ethnic group largely concentrated in northern Nigeria and other adjacent areas in West Africa. They represent approximately six percent (or 14.5 million) of Nigeria’s total population of about 242.4 million. Herding remains an important part of many Fulani people’s livelihoods and identities but still faces societal stigma as a traditional way of life. A violent religious ideology, growing resource limitation and competition, population growth, poverty, and other factors have further embroiled the Fulani people in Nigeria’s social instability challenges—and its increasingly volatile security landscape.
An estimated 30,000 Fulani militants likely operate across the country, traditionally concentrating in the country’s northwest, then migrating down through the Middle Belt, and becoming increasingly active in the South. Each group consists of anywhere from 10 to 1,000 members. While these militants do not share a centralized leadership, some collaborate on attacks.
Violence by Fulani militants caused the highest number of deaths among all religious communities in Nigeria over the last year as compared to attacks by organized insurgent groups and criminal gangs. Fulani assailants have not spared Muslims, raiding herders’ cattle and violently attacking non-Fulani Muslim communities. Furthermore, many militants have targeted Christian communities in the Middle Belt and, increasingly, the South, burning homes and churches as well as kidnapping, raping, and murdering. Militants often coordinate via radio and utilize motorcycles
and automatic weapons, rapidly hitting several targets at once in rural, isolated areas.
They often wield machetes and descend on vulnerable communities during the night, eliciting terror as a way to force victims to quickly leave and to achieve greater control of desired land. These Fulani militant attacks, among those of other actors, have forced at least 1.3 million people in the Middle Belt off their land and into overcrowded,
unsanitary, and unsafe conditions in displacement camps. Militants vary in their use of deadly force against
religious communities, and many carry out sexual assault and abductions in hopes of intimidating them or profiting from ransom payments, respectively.
Reportedly, some hostages remain hidden in remote locations such as the Rijana Forest in Kaduna State. Many of these hostages have faced violent sexual assault, causing lifelong trauma. Militant actors have often carried out operations during Christian holidays such as Christmas or Easter to further maximize the psychological impact, terrifying those communities from gathering to celebrate or worship. During attacks, assailants sometimes utter slogans with religious connotations, such as “Allahu Akbar.”
In Plateau and Benue States, Fulani militants have recently perpetrated multiple attacks in which fatalities numbered in the hundreds. One attack in Benue in June 2025 killed at least 200 people, including internally displaced persons (IDPs) living in a Catholic mission, while a massacre that month in Yelwata, Benue forced over 3,000 people to flee their homes and killed over 200 Christians, mostly sleeping women and children. In May, Fulani militants abducted pastors Adura Kayode and Kingsley Ebing of the City of Grace Prophetic Liberation Church in Kogi State, and another assailant reportedly shot and seriously wounded a Catholic priest in Benue State. In October, militants killed seven Fulani Muslim herders in Kano State and stole 70 head of cattle; those assailants also abducted 10 members of the same herding community, demanding ransom payments.
Such violence continued apace in early 2026. In February, Fulani gunmen reportedly killed 12 in Barkin Ladi and Riyom, Plateau State, including one farmer and two herders. That same month, suspected Fulani militants killed at least 32 in the Borgu area of Niger State and reportedly attacked Holy Trinity Parish in Kafanchan Diocese in Kaduna, killing three people and abducting 11 others, including the parish priest, Father Nathaniel Asuwaye. In March, suspected militants killed 12 people in Benue State despite the recent deployment of over 400 security personnel to the region.
Fulani militants have also joined other armed groups in regularly using kidnapping as a tool of extortion, often targeting religious institutions as a potentially lucrative source of funding or profit. For example, in February
2026, armed men kidnapped an imam and seven worshipers from a mosque in Plateau, a state notorious for Fulani militants’ attacks. The kidnappers demanded a ransom of 16 million Nigerian naira ($11,800). Additionally, “bandits”—a common term in local news headlines—have abducted children or teenagers from Christian and public schools as well as worshipers from both churches and mosques. In September 2025 in the northwestern state of Zamfara, for example, armed Fulani actors attacked a mosque during early morning prayers, seizing an unspecified number of Muslim worshipers. In April 2026, assailants abducted more than 150 people, mostly women and children, in Zamfara State.
On Palm Sunday, assailants killed at least 28 in a heavily Christian area in Plateau State. One week later on Easter Sunday, Fulani militants reportedly killed five worshippers at two churches in Kaduna State while abducting 31 others, and suspected militants killed 17 people in Benue State. The fates of all these kidnapping victims, like so many others, remain unknown to the public due to the sensitivity of ransom negotiations and, in some cases, possible collusion between perpetrators and some officials from the police and/or army.
Further complicating matters is the fact that both conflicting media narratives and reported government censorship have hindered accurate analysis of the identities and motivations of the alarming number of armed nonstate actors that violate religious freedom in Nigeria. Some observers have argued environmental and economic factors as the driving force behind Fulani militants’ acts of violence, while others have suggested that these actors are engaged in a concerted campaign of outright genocide against non-Muslims, especially Christians. In fact, multiple and overlapping factors, including religion in many cases, likely spur Fulani militants to attack communities or individuals.
Regardless of these complex motivating factors, the escalation of Fulani-led land invasions and other
violent assaults has yielded the same outcomes: severely disrupting the lives, livelihood, and ability to worship of many Christian and Muslim farmers while triggering their mass displacement and depriving them
of their lands.
Nigerian Government Responses to Fulani Violence
Criticism of responses to Fulani militant violence from federal and state authorities has often described their responses as unsatisfactory at best and complicit at worst. Victims have long reported that security forces
are consistently slow to respond to attacks on their communities. As in prior years, some Christian advocates
have continued to suggest that security forces responding to or investigating attacks routinely show favoritism
toward Muslim communities. Local governments have similarly failed to communicate or coordinate with victims and targeted religious communities, and some reports suggest that leaders may even exploit interethnic or interreligious tensions to advance their own agendas. Compounding these issues, religious leaders have at times sought to address the reported lack of government intervention by recruiting their own security personnel with poor training and little or no accountability for their actions, including use of force. In one incident, local Christians shifted from self-defense to pursuit of innocent actors, attacking Fulani hunters without provocation. Community representatives have pointed to deficiencies in the weapons and staff available to law enforcement and emphasized communities’ corresponding need for self-defense.
In June 2025, in response to a Fulani-led wave of fatal violence in the Middle Belt, governors from 11 states, including Plateau, Benue, Kano, and Zamfara, took the first steps in an initiative to set aside ranch land for
herders. Supporters of the program hope that access to ranching will reduce Fulani herders’ reliance on an increasingly limited number of open grazing routes, preempting a common source of friction between Fulani
Muslim herders and Christian-majority agriculturalists.
Given that government sources and some Nigeria observers often point to the issue of land use rights as the
primary catalyst of Fulani-led violence against farming communities—thereby dismissing any religious role in
such violence—addressing these demands may indeed reveal other motivating factors, including religion, in any
subsequent and ongoing violence.
At the federal level, U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s designation in October 2025 of Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) for its religious freedom violations has since prompted more urgent action on the
part of the Nigerian government. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu officially designated kidnappers and violent
armed groups, such as Fulani militants, as “terrorists” in December, placing them at the same level of priority as
armed insurgent groups. In January 2026, police rescued 309 hostages via coordinated security operations in Kogi
and Kwara States, apprehending 129 suspected Fulani militants and killing 55 others. Also in January, the army
dismantled a suicide bombing network linked to Fulani militants who had carried out a December 2025 attack
that killed five people at a mosque in Gamboru.
There has been some evidence of increased government efforts, both before and after the October CPC designation, to address Fulani-led violence through prosecutions and community-level engagement. In September, prosecutors filed initial terrorism charges against nine Fulani herders. All nine defendants, including the alleged organizer of the massacre, Lawal Mohammed Dono Ardo, have reported ties to the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN).
The police—which in Nigeria are a federal force with local offices—have also contributed to investigations
of kidnappings of religious communities. And in December, the government brought together civil society groups, including religious communities, to reaffirm the government’s commitment to conflict prevention via a new initiative, the Capacity Building Engagement for the Multi-Stakeholder Conflict Early Warning Response Group (EWRG). In early 2026, 19 state governments subsequently launched the Northern Nigeria Peace Campaign, which “calls upon on citizens, traditional institutions, and civil society organizations to embrace community service as a vital tool for peacebuilding, social cohesion, and sustainable development across Nigeria.”
The Controversial Role of MACBAN
MACBAN promotes agricultural interests across Nigeria and maintains close ties with the Fulani community.
The organization has faced longstanding criticism from Christian leaders who claim that it has been ineffective at best in reducing militant violence and Fulani herder incursions onto farmlands—and, at worst, possibly even foments land invasions, according to some. In turn, MACBAN has argued that violent Fulani militants represent only a minority of the greater Fulani population but perpetrate the majority of the violence against all religious communities, including Muslims. In 2025, the organization demanded a presidential directive for security agencies to protect herding communities, citing that they, too, face threats from violent militants and criminal gangs and insisting that they do not “support, condone, harbor, finance, or protect any form of criminality, extremism or violence.” MACBAN and government representatives from Agatu, Benue State, have since engaged in more conciliatory negotiations, agreeing to set aside decades-old tensions and direct their joint efforts toward resisting criminal gangs that target both Christians and Muslims.
In February 2026, the U.S. Congress introduced a bill, the Nigeria Religious Freedom and Accountability Act of 2026,
that included MACBAN as an entity on which the U.S. Departments of State and the Treasury should impose
targeted sanctions for its alleged role in perpetrating severe religious freedom violations. The same month, a
congressional report to the White House outlined actions that the U.S. and Nigerian governments can take to end
the persecution of Christian communities and address persistent security challenges in Nigeria.
Conclusion
Since the United States’ CPC designation in October 2025 and attendant bilateral security discussions with Nigeria,
armed Fulani actors have continued to carry out large-scale incursions onto Christian farmers’ agricultural lands,
violent raids on Christian and Muslim religious sites, and kidnappings of laity and leaders from both religions. As a
result, central Nigeria remains entrenched in an intense, daily, and seemingly perpetual crisis of insecurity—a crisis
that is likely to persist until the federal and several state governments create broader underlying conditions that are
more conducive to the safe practice of religious freedom.