How many deaths from Boko Haram and Fulani militancy affected Christians versus Muslims in 2015 2024?
Executive summary
There is no authoritative, publicly available tally that breaks down all killings by Boko Haram and Fulani-affiliated militants between 2015 and 2024 into precise counts of Christian versus Muslim victims; available reporting supplies snapshots and contested datasets rather than a single, verifiable total [1] [2] [3]. Independent reports and advocacy groups paint sharply different pictures — some document hundreds of Christian-specific deaths in particular attacks or intervals, while other analysts and databases show that Boko Haram’s dead have been predominantly Muslim in many periods — underscoring that any single headline number would be misleading without careful qualification [1] [4] [3].
1. What the best available snapshots say about Boko Haram casualties by religion
An examination of recent reporting finds focused counts rather than comprehensive totals: a Catholic News Agency summary of a religious-freedom dataset attributes at least 851 Christian civilian deaths and 491 Muslim deaths to Boko Haram in the incidents it catalogued, with 609 victims unclassified by religion, and attributes additional killings to ISWAP with 265 Christian and 127 Muslim victims recorded in that same reporting window [1] [5]. These figures are presented as part of a larger dataset compiled by religious-freedom observatories and are useful as partial evidence, but they do not claim to account for every Boko Haram-linked death across 2015–2024 and leave hundreds of victims’ religions unrecorded [1].
2. What broader violence datasets and regional studies reveal — and their limits
Larger conflict databases and academic analyses provide much higher body counts for Nigeria overall but do not reliably disaggregate victims by religion across the full 2015–2024 period: ORFA data cited in commentary report tens of thousands of killings in a narrower window (66,656 from October 2019 to September 2024) with Fulani militants blamed for a large share, but these tallies are not presented with a country-wide Christian-versus-Muslim breakdown for the entire period 2015–2024 [2]. Earlier academic work on the Boko Haram theatre found that, in some phases, Muslim non-combatants outnumbered Christian victims by large margins (as much as six-to-one in a 2009–2012 sample), reflecting that Islamist insurgents have often killed predominantly Muslim civilians as well as Christians [3].
3. Fulani-associated violence: patterns, claims, and uncertain totals by religion
Reporting on Fulani-associated “herder” militias and bandits consistently highlights localized massacres of mostly Christian farming communities in the Middle Belt and specific episodes in 2023–2024 where Christian victims were emphasized by church groups and human-rights monitors, but independent sources caution that the motives are mixed — land, ethnicity, and criminality intersect with religion — and that comprehensive, religion-coded fatality counts are not systematically published for 2015–2024 [6] [7] [8]. Government and U.S. State Department accounts flag mass-killings in Plateau and Benue states in 2023–2024 where “most” victims were reported as Christian, yet those episodic reports cannot be aggregated into a definitive religious breakdown for the whole decade without methodological assumptions [9].
4. Why precise Christian-versus-Muslim totals for 2015–2024 can’t be produced from available sources
The public record combines partial datasets with differing methodologies, advocacy-driven counts, and academic databases that vary in scope; some reports leave many victims’ religions unclassified, others focus on regional or temporal slices, and still others emphasize narrative aims — for example, advocacy groups framing attacks as targeted religious persecution — producing divergent totals and contested interpretations [1] [2] [10]. Independent analysts warn against simple sectarian narratives because Boko Haram and ISWAP have frequently killed Muslims and attacked mosques as well as churches, while Fulani-related violence is entangled with competition over land and criminality, making religion an imperfect proxy for motive or victim identity [4] [8].
5. Bottom line — what can be stated with confidence
It is provable that numerous individual attacks and datasets document hundreds of Christian victims in Boko Haram and Fulani-related incidents and that some sources (e.g., the CNA-reported dataset) enumerate more Christian than Muslim victims in certain collections of incidents, but no single, verifiable nationwide count of Boko Haram and Fulani militant deaths by religion for 2015–2024 is available in the supplied reporting; therefore any firm total would be speculative rather than evidentiary [1] [2] [3] [9]. Policymakers and journalists should therefore cite specific datasets and windows of time, acknowledge unclassified victims, and avoid extrapolating a single decade-wide sectarian death toll without transparent methodology [1] [8].