At least 3,462 Christians, including ten priests or pastors, were murdered in Nigeria in the first 200 days of 2021. The number, just 68 deaths short to the estimated total for 2020, is aligned with the warnings from human rights organizations that focus on anti-Christian persecution regarding the rise of religious-motivated violence in Nigeria, and a nation where the Christian and Muslim populations are widely considered as more or less evenly split.
According to a recent report coming from Nigeria itself produced by the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, the number of unarmed Christians who were murdered by members of the Islamic terrorist organization Boko Haram or other Jihadist groups between Jan. 1 to July 18, 2021, is barely lower to the one estimated by Open Door’s International for 2020.
Breaking it down, the number means that 17 Christians a day were murdered for reasons related to their faith the first half of 2020, the second highest daily average since 2014, when over 5,000 Christian deaths were recorded in the hands of Boko Haram and jihadist Fulani herdsmen.
In addition to the Christians who’ve been killed in the first 200 days of 2021, some 3,000 Christians, many of them young girls and women, have been kidnapped by Islamic terrorists and their whereabouts remains unknown. The people behind the report estimate, extrapolating from previous cases, that at least three out of every ten kidnapped Christians have been killed.