Can we blame the Nigerian gov't now? 160 Christians kidnapped while in churches

By Sam Jones, Op-ed contributor Thursday, January 29, 2026

Armed terrorists stormed three churches in Kaduna State, Nigeria, on Sunday morning, Jan. 18, and abducted at least 160 Christian worshipers in the middle of their services.

They were taken during worship services, marched into nearby forests, and forced toward known terrorist enclaves.  And none of this should have surprised anyone.

One week earlier, TruthNigeria issued a terror alert warning that the Kurmin Wali corridor was facing imminent danger. The area lies within miles of established hostage camps long operated by Fulani Ethnic Militia and allied terrorist groups — camps that have held hundreds of captives for years, documented through survivor testimony, video interviews, and geolocation data.

The threat was known. The terrain was mapped. The pattern was established.

And yet, when armed Fulani Ethnic Militia walked into three churches and carried out one of the largest mass church abductions in Kaduna’s history, the government did not respond with urgency.  It responded with denial.

For two days, local authorities denied that any mass kidnapping had occurred at all. While families searched for loved ones, officials rejected the reports outright. Only after TruthNigeria published detailed documentation of the attack did the government abandon its denial and acknowledge that the abductions had taken place.

That sequence matters because this was not an unforeseeable tragedy.  There was warning of the attacks in a documented terror corridor near permanent hostage camps. And when it happened, the first instinct of the state was not protection — it was suppression.

This is not merely failure; It is a pattern.

Nigeria has become the deadliest country in the world to be a Christian. For more than a decade, violence linked to Fulani Ethnic Militia and allied jihadist groups has followed a grim and familiar arc: intelligence warnings ignored, attacks denied, language softened, perpetrators left untouched, and then quiet normalization.

Churches are burned. Villages are massacred. Worshippers are abducted.

And each time, the response follows the same script: minimize, reframe, delay.

Eyewitnesses from Kurmin Wali describe gunmen bursting into services, ordering worshippers to lie down or be killed. Some wore black robes and turbans. Others wore Nigerian Army-style camouflage. The attackers coordinated strikes on three churches simultaneously, then marched captives toward forests that security officials know well.

This was not a random crime. This was not opportunistic banditry. This was a coordinated operation by armed Fulani Ethnic Militia in territory already identified as high risk.

This raises an unavoidable question: How does an attack of this scale occur – in a warned-of zone, near permanent hostage camps – without either catastrophic incompetence or quiet tolerance?

That question becomes harder to avoid when those camps remain untouched year after year in the age of drones and satellite surveillance, ransom economies flourish openly, kidnappers operate within miles of security corridors, and victims are marched through territory no one seems willing to secure.

At some point, failure ceases to be accidental.

Governments are judged not only by what they prevent, but by what they permit — and by what they refuse to acknowledge.

And this refusal is reinforced by the language the world continues to use.

Western institutions describe Nigeria’s violence as “complex,” “ethnic,” or “tribal,” but complexity does not explain why churches are targeted. Ethnicity does not explain why worship services are raided. Tribal conflict does not explain coordinated multi-church operations carried out by armed militia groups with ideological motives.

What explains it is persecution — tolerated, or aided and abetted, by a state that denies it, delays it, and declines to confront it.

The men and women taken from those churches were not casualties of chaos. They were victims of terror in a territory their government had been warned about and failed to secure.

The world does not get to call that “complex.”  It must call it what it is.

And Nigeria’s government must now answer the question it has avoided for too long:  How many warnings must be ignored, how many churches must be burned, and how many Christians must be taken before this is no longer negligence — but complicity?