When the Boko Haram militants stormed his hometown on Nigeria’s border with Chad in December 2018, Usman Abubakar did not hesitate. As bullets popped in the distance, he fled into the bush.
He knew the stakes. Three years earlier, Boko Haram fighters in camo fatigues poured into the city, Baga, on motorbikes, screaming “Allahu akbar” – God is great – as they shot hundreds of people dead in the streets. Among them was Mr. Abubakar’s uncle.
Leaving everything was “heartbreaking,” he says. “But I had no choice.”
Why We Wrote This
Donald Trump says Nigeria’s Christians are under “existential threat” from Muslim insurgents. But experts say that rhetoric obscures a far more complicated reality.
For more than a decade, Boko Haram has terrorized communities like this one across northern Nigeria. This month the conflict captured global headlines after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to enter the country “guns-a-blazing” to root out the insurgency, which he describes as an “existential threat” to Nigeria’s Christians.
But that warning ignores a pivotal fact: Most of Boko Haram’s victims are Muslims, and its violence targets people of all faiths.
“They didn’t ask who was Christian or Muslim,” recalls Mr. Abubakar, who is Muslim. “They just killed.”
