Fact check: How have Fulani-herder and Boko Haram/ISWAP attacks contributed to Christian deaths in Nigeria in 2024 versus 2025?

Executive summary — Two quick truths up front. The preponderance of available reports indicates Fulani-herder violence and allied Islamist militants have been a leading cause of Christian civilian deaths in Nigeria across recent years, with some analysts saying Fulani-associated attackers killed more civilians than Boko Haram/ISWAP combined between 2019–2023 ^[1]. In 2025 multiple organizations documented a sharp escalation in Christian fatalities — over 7,000 deaths reported in the first seven to eight months of 2025 — a scale far exceeding most publicized 2024 tallies and prompting international responses later in 2025 ^{[2] [3]}. These claims come from advocacy and monitoring groups; their methodologies and political contexts differ, so reconciling absolute numbers requires scrutiny of source definitions and counting windows ^{[1] [4] [5]}.

1. Why advocates say Fulani and allied militants drove most Christian deaths before 2024. Monitoring organizations and Christian advocacy groups documented a pattern in which Fulani herdsmen and attendant armed groups were credited with higher civilian mortality than Boko Haram/ISWAP during 2019–2023, with those victims described as predominantly Christian in affected Middle Belt and southern farming communities ^[1]. Reports from 2024 emphasize localized attacks on church services, farms, and villages where attackers are characterized as Fulani-affiliated militants seeking land or territorial control, with analysts and clergy framing the violence as targeted against Christian communities rather than being purely resource-conflict driven ^{[6] [7]}. These sources present a narrative of territorial conquest, displacement and forced conversion, asserting that state protection has often been inadequate or complicit, which frames the pre‑2024 casualty pattern as structurally distinct from pure jihadist insurgency ^[7].

2. What changed in 2025 — a statistical spike and new attributions. Multiple 2025 reports from civil liberties and religious freedom organizations record a sharp increase in fatalities, citing roughly 7,000-plus Christian deaths in the first 220–240 days of 2025, often attributing the killings to a mix of Fulani militants, Boko Haram, and ISWAP or to jihadist-aligned Fulani factions ^{[2] [4] [8]}. These 2025 figures represent a substantial surge compared with earlier single-year tallies publicized in 2024 materials, and proponents argue the violence spread further south and intensified in tempo, consistency, and lethality. The apparent escalation in 2025 prompted diplomatic and policy responses including U.S. designations and renewed international attention, signaling that observers saw 2025 as materially different in scale and impact from 2024 ^[3].

3. How sources define perpetrators and why that matters. The classification of attackers varies across reports: some distinguish “Fulani herders” as communal or criminal actors motivated by land disputes and grazing needs, while others describe “Fulani extremists” operating with Islamist ideologies and ties to Boko Haram/ISWAP, blurring lines between pastoral conflict and organized jihadist violence ^{[6] [8]}. Where sources emphasize religious targeting, they frame victims as Christians and label the pattern genocidal or a campaign of religious conquest ^{[7] [5]}. Where sources emphasize resource competition, they portray violence as partly ecological and socio-economic. This divergence affects casualty attribution and policy implications since labeling shapes whether incidents are treated as security failures, counterterrorism priorities, or land-management crises ^{[1] [7]}.

4. Strengths and limits of the available casualty numbers. The high 2025 counts come from advocacy and civil liberties monitors that compile incident lists, but methodologies vary: some use media aggregation, local church networks, or field reporting with different inclusion rules for combatant vs. civilian deaths, temporal windows, and geographic scope ^{[2] [4]}. Earlier claims about Fulani killing more than Boko Haram in 2019–2023 are similarly dependent on definitional choices and data collection practices that can inflate or undercount different actors ^[1]. The consistency across multiple independent monitors of an upward trend in 2025 lends credence to an escalation, but exact comparative tallies between 2024 and 2025 are uncertain without standardized, transparent methodology and government or neutral international verification ^{[4] [5]}.

5. What this means for policy, churches and affected communities. The convergence of multiple reports pointing to rising Christian fatalities in 2025, combined with claims that Fulani-linked groups were already central killers before 2024, suggests a compound crisis where pastoral conflicts and jihadist activity reinforce each other, producing higher civilian mortality and mass displacements ^{[1] [8]}. International designations and advocacy responses in late 2025 reflect recognition of the scale of the problem, but differing narratives about motives and perpetrators create competing policy prescriptions — security operations, protection of farming communities, criminal justice reforms, and reconciliation over land use — and the choice of response will depend on which depiction policymakers accept ^{[3] [7]}.