How many Christians were killed by Boko Haram and ISWAP in Nigeria in 2025?
Executive summary
Available reporting does not produce a single, independently verifiable tally of how many Christians in Nigeria were killed specifically by Boko Haram and ISWAP during calendar year 2025; a widely cited civil-society count says more than 7,000 Christians were killed in the first 220 days of 2025, but that figure aggregates multiple perpetrators including Boko Haram, ISWAP and Fulani militants and comes from a Catholic-inspired NGO rather than an independent incident-level dataset [1] [2] [3]. Independent monitoring projects and analysts caution that victim counts, perpetrator attribution and motives are contested, and some large datasets report different patterns of victims across jihadist and communal violence [4] [5].
1. What the headline numbers say — the 7,000 figure and its provenance
Multiple news outlets and faith-based organizations reported an August 2025 Intersociety/InterSociety study that estimated “more than 7,000” Christians had been killed in Nigeria in the first 220 days of 2025, presented as an average of roughly 30–35 Christian deaths per day and widely cited by outlets from Newsweek to religious press [1] [6] [7] [8].
2. What those reports actually attribute the killings to
The Intersociety report and its media echo attribute the violence to a mix of actors: Boko Haram, ISWAP (the Islamic State West Africa Province), and Fulani militants; many articles explicitly caution that the 7,000 figure covers killings by jihadist groups and by armed herder militias without providing an incident-by-incident breakdown that isolates Boko Haram/ISWAP responsibility alone [6] [9] [7] [2].
3. Independent datasets and alternative interpretations
Crisis-monitoring projects cited in background reporting paint a more complex picture: ACLED reported that, since 2009, just under 53,000 civilians of Muslim and Christian identity had been killed in targeted political violence, and ACLED researchers have argued that most victims of jihadist groups like Boko Haram and ISWAP have been Muslims, which complicates claims that a specific religious group bore the majority of jihadist violence in 2025 [4].
4. Evidence gaps — why a precise Boko Haram/ISWAP-only number is not present in reporting
The available sources do not publish an independently validated, perpetrator-specific count for all of 2025 separating Boko Haram and ISWAP deaths from those caused by Fulani militias or criminal gangs; the prominent 7,000 figure aggregates perpetrators and relies on Intersociety’s compilation of media reports and other sources, some of which themselves did not always identify victims’ religious identity or perpetrator conclusively [1] [6] [10].
5. Competing agendas and how they shape the numbers
Faith-based groups and advocacy organizations reporting the 7,000 tally have explicit aims to highlight Christian suffering and press for political action, which affects selection and emphasis of incidents, while monitoring groups like ACLED aim for incident-level coding and sometimes reach different conclusions about victim demographics — readers should note these differing institutional perspectives when weighing the figures [6] [4] [5].
6. Bottom line answer to the narrow question
There is no authoritative, publicly available statistic in the provided reporting that isolates how many Christians were killed by Boko Haram and ISWAP alone in Nigeria in 2025; the best-cited aggregate is “over 7,000 Christians killed in the first 220 days of 2025” attributed collectively to Boko Haram, ISWAP and Fulani militants by Intersociety and repeated in multiple outlets, but that figure should not be read as an exclusive Boko Haram/ISWAP-only death toll because the underlying reporting aggregates perpetrators and has methodological limits [1] [2] [7] [6] [4].