How many attacks on Muslims occurred in Nigeria in 2020 through 2024?

1. What the claim asks for — and why the sources can’t deliver it

The user asks for a concrete tally of attacks on Muslims in Nigeria from 2020–2024. The assembled materials uniformly indicate that such a precise count is not provided in the corpus. Several reports catalogue incidents—mass killings, bombings, and abductions—but do so without a strict, population-targeted breakdown of victims by religion or without reconciling different conflict typologies (terrorism, banditry, communal disputes). The USCIRF summary and related pieces emphasize systemic reporting shortfalls and that violence often affects both Muslims and Christians or is driven by nonreligious motives such as land conflict or criminality ^{[2] [5]}. That absence of a single validated dataset is the principal reason a trustworthy numeric answer cannot be calculated from these documents ^{[1] [4]}.

2. Patterns reported across the documents — a mosaic of violent actors and incidents

Across the sources, recurring patterns emerge: Boko Haram and ISWAP attacks in the northeast; banditry and kidnappings in the northwest; and communal/land-related clashes involving Fulani herders in central regions. The p1 materials recount specific deadly events in 2023—massacres in Yobe and Borno, drone strikes, and attacks on Fulani herders—without consolidating them into a 2020–2024 total ^{[1] [6]}. ACLED-style aggregated incident tallies are referenced for 2024, showing high incident and fatality counts in states like Borno and Kaduna, but these statistics do not disaggregate victims by religion, leaving the religious-targeting question unresolved ^[3].

3. Divergent emphases and partial counts — where sources disagree or omit

Some sources emphasize that most jihadist victims have been Muslim, citing ACLED and investigative work that portray civilians in jihadist-affected areas as predominantly Muslim, while other texts highlight large numbers of Christian victims or frame violence as largely nonreligious. The p3 collection notes a study asserting that jihadist violence’s victims are mostly Muslim and that only a minority of violence is explicitly religiously motivated, whereas other sources spotlight Christian casualties and burned churches, creating apparent tension about who is targeted and why ^{[4] [7]}. These differences reflect varying definitions—whether an attack is counted as “against Muslims” depends on motive, perpetrator, and victim identity, and the reviewed analyses do not harmonize those definitions ^[8].

4. Geographic concentration and attribution problems that block a clean count

Violence is geographically uneven—northwest banditry, northeast insurgency, and central farmer-herder clashes—so any accurate count would require combining regional incident datasets, victim religion coding, and motive analysis. The materials show that some attacks occur in Muslim-majority states (e.g., Borno, Yobe, Zamfara) and that jihadist groups have killed thousands regionally over longer periods, but none of the supplied reports produce a validated 2020–2024 subcount for Muslim victims specifically ^{[6] [9]}. Analysts in these documents repeatedly caution that fatality and targeting claims must be interpreted carefully because of underreporting, partisan narratives, and inconsistent coding ^{[3] [8]}.

5. Practical next steps to obtain a defensible number

To answer the user’s question credibly, researchers must combine incident datasets (e.g., ACLED-style event logs), victim-level reports that record religion, and qualitative verification from local investigations. The provided materials identify the right building blocks—state-level incident totals, documented major attacks, and notes on motivation—but stop short of a unified dataset. The responsible path is triangulation: compile incident lists from each year 2020–2024, code victims’ religion where verified, exclude events motivated primarily by criminality unless victims are identified as Muslims, and document uncertainties. The current corpus supplies case examples and methodological cautions but not the reconciled dataset required for a single authoritative count ^{[1] [3] [4]}.