Blood on Palm Sunday: Inside the Attack That Killed Dozens in Nigeria's Middle Belt — and the Years of Violence Behind It

On the evening of March 29, 2026, as Christians in Angwan Rukuba marked Palm Sunday, armed men arrived on motorcycles and opened fire on civilians in the Gari Ya Waye community within Jos North Local Government Area of Plateau State [1]. The attack began around 7:30 p.m. and lasted roughly an hour before Nigerian Army troops arrived at approximately 8:45 p.m. [2]. By that point, bodies littered the ground. A video circulating on Nigerian social media showed a mother kneeling over her son's body, pleading with him to wake up [3].

The confirmed death toll stands at 28, according to Plateau State Governor Caleb Manasseh Mutfwang, who visited the community the following day [4]. The Jos Archdiocesan Justice and Peace Commission put the figure at 27, noting that 14 died at the scene and 13 in hospital [5]. Other sources, including the International Christian Concern and reports from local contacts, have cited figures as high as 40 [6]. Several of the dead were university students living in residential areas near Angwan Rukuba Junction and Eto Baba [7].

The Plateau State Government imposed a 48-hour curfew across Jos North effective midnight on March 29, a measure that also impeded the ability of church leaders and aid organizations to assess the full scope of casualties [8].

What Happened on the Ground

Eyewitnesses provided conflicting accounts of the attackers' identities. Some described them as Fulani-speaking men who arrived on motorcycles, fired sporadically, and retreated toward mountainous terrain [1]. Others said the assailants arrived in a vehicle and a tricycle [6]. Archbishop Matthew Ishaya Audu of the Jos Archdiocese confirmed the attack but declined to give a detailed statement, saying "the details are not there" and that he wanted to speak "with conviction" once facts were established [8].

Governor Mutfwang described the attack as "barbaric and unprovoked" and pledged that security agencies were "actively pursuing those responsible" [4]. His government committed to covering all medical costs for the injured and providing dignified burials for those killed [4]. President Bola Tinubu also vowed justice, and the Nigerian Bar Association condemned the killings [9].

The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), led by Archbishop Daniel Okoh, issued a statement condemning what it called a "horrific" attack. "Nigerians are tired of mourning; Nigerians are tired of statements; Nigerians want to see action," Okoh said [10]. CAN urged churches preparing for Easter vigils to "stay alert" and take deliberate steps to protect congregations [10].

The Pattern: Years of Mass-Casualty Attacks

The Palm Sunday assault was not an isolated event. It fits a well-documented pattern of mass-casualty attacks targeting predominantly Christian communities in Nigeria's Middle Belt — the geographic and cultural boundary between the predominantly Muslim north and the predominantly Christian south.

Source: Open Doors / Intersociety Reports

Data as of Mar 30, 2026CSV

According to Open Doors and Intersociety, an estimated 4,650 Christians were killed in targeted violence across Nigeria in 2021. That figure rose to 5,014 in 2022, remained near 5,000 in 2023, climbed to approximately 5,200 in 2024, and surged to over 7,100 in 2025 [11][12]. The total over the past five years exceeds 27,000.

The most directly comparable recent precedent in Plateau State was the Christmas 2023 massacre, when coordinated attacks on more than 20 villages in Bokkos and parts of Barkin-Ladi killed over 200 people over a span of more than 48 hours [13]. In Benue State, at least 218 people were killed and more than 6,000 displaced in a series of attacks in 2024-2025 [14]. In Kaduna, Zikke village near Jos saw 54 Christians killed following Palm Sunday celebrations in 2025 [6].

A report by ORFA, the Observatory of Religious Freedom in Africa, found that Fulani militias were responsible for 47% of all civilian killings in affected regions — more than five times the combined death toll attributed to Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) [15]. Global Christian Relief reported that between 2019 and 2023, Fulani militants accounted for 55% of recorded Christian deaths [12].

Who Are the Attackers?

The term "gunmen" appears in nearly every media report of these attacks, a designation that obscures as much as it reveals. Nigerian security analysts and conflict researchers point to several distinct armed actors operating in the Middle Belt, with the most frequently cited being armed Fulani militia groups [16].

These groups are not a single centralized organization. According to the European Union Agency for Asylum and the International Crisis Group, they consist of loosely networked communal militias, often composed of Fulani pastoralists, that operate in groups ranging from dozens to hundreds of fighters [16][17]. Their tactical signature is consistent: nighttime raids on farming settlements using motorcycles for rapid movement, AK-47s and machine guns for firepower, and retreat to forested or mountainous terrain before dawn [15][16].

A 2025 Small Wars Journal analysis described the operational environment in central Nigeria as featuring "militias—both herder and farmer—operating in larger numbers than in the past," with attacks growing in sophistication to include military-style operations with supply logistics [18].

However, the absence of definitive attribution in the Palm Sunday attack is itself significant. Nigerian security agencies had not, as of March 31, officially identified the perpetrators [8]. This mirrors a broader accountability gap: despite thousands of documented attacks, arrests and prosecutions remain rare. Amnesty International's 2023 investigation into the Plateau Christmas massacre found that "gunmen were on a rampage of killing and destruction for more than 48 hours" without effective security intervention [13].

Security Spending Up, Rural Protection Stagnant

Nigeria's federal defense and security budget has more than tripled under President Tinubu's administration, from ₦2.95 trillion in 2023 to ₦4.91 trillion in the 2025 budget — the largest single allocation of any sector, representing over 10% of total federal spending [19][20].

Source: BudgIT Nigeria / Federal Budget Office

Data as of Mar 30, 2026CSV

Yet this spending increase has not translated into measurable improvements in rural security. The military's Operation Enduring Peace, deployed in Plateau State, responded to the Palm Sunday attack roughly one hour after it began [2]. Critics argue that the defense budget is overwhelmingly directed toward urban security infrastructure and the military's operations in the northeast against Boko Haram, leaving Middle Belt communities dependent on overstretched police and paramilitary forces [21].

In the two years since Tinubu took office in May 2023, at least 10,217 people have been killed in attacks by gunmen across multiple Nigerian states, with Plateau State alone recording 2,630 deaths, according to Amnesty International [14]. The federal government has not published a disaggregated breakdown of rural versus urban security spending, making independent verification of allocation priorities difficult [20].

Resource Competition or Religious Targeting? The Academic Debate

The question of whether the violence is fundamentally about religion or resources remains one of the most contested in Nigerian security analysis.

Researchers at the International Crisis Group and the Africa Center for Strategic Studies have documented how climate change, desertification, and population growth have intensified competition for land and water between nomadic Fulani herders and settled farming communities [17][22]. A 2025 Frontiers in Pastoralism study argued that resource scarcity, compounded by governance failures and the collapse of traditional conflict-mediation mechanisms, is the primary driver of intercommunal violence [23].

The New Internationalist and Al Jazeera have published analyses arguing that framing the violence as a "Christian genocide" oversimplifies a conflict in which Muslims are also killed, and in which the underlying drivers are economic and ecological rather than theological [24][25]. Al Jazeera quoted Nigerian government officials who described the "Christian persecution" framing as "a gross misrepresentation of reality," noting that Fulani herders themselves face cattle rustling, displacement, and extrajudicial violence [25].

On the other side, researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies have challenged the "farmer-herder conflict" label directly. A SAIS Review essay argued that the term obscures the organized, militarized nature of the attacks and the pattern of targeting Christian communities on religious holidays — including Christmas 2023, Easter 2024, and now Palm Sunday 2026 [26]. The Observatory of Religious Freedom in Africa found that 79% of civilian killings involved land-based community attacks specifically on Christian farming settlements [15]. Global Christian Relief has reported that Christians in affected regions are 6.5 times more likely to be killed than Muslims, and 5.1 times more likely to be abducted [12].

Neither framing fully accounts for the evidence. The attacks are concentrated in a region where religious identity closely tracks ethnic and economic identity — Fulani herders tend to be Muslim, settled farmers tend to be Christian — making it difficult to isolate any single variable [17]. What is clear is that the violence is organized, recurrent, and overwhelmingly directed at identifiable communities, regardless of which label is applied to the motive.

Displacement: Millions Without Return

Nigeria ranks seventh globally for internally displaced persons, with approximately 3.6 million people displaced by violence as of the end of 2024, according to UNHCR data [27].

Source: UNHCR Population Data

Data as of Dec 31, 2025CSV

In Benue State alone, an estimated 500,182 people had fled to IDP camps by December 2024, with more than 10,000 additional displacements in early 2025 following fresh attacks in Gwer West, Agatu, Ukum, Kwande, Logo, and Guma [14]. The 2025 Human Rights Watch World Report documented a mounting humanitarian crisis in the Middle Belt, with women and children disproportionately affected [28].

Return rates remain low. Nigeria's IDP return policy, designed primarily for the northeast, has faced serious setbacks. In September 2025, more than 60 civilians were killed when Boko Haram attacked the village of Darul Jamal on the Nigeria-Cameroon border — a showcase resettlement site for 3,000 IDPs who had spent a decade in a camp [29]. In the Middle Belt, where armed groups use the same tactical profile of motorcycle-borne assaults, communities that attempt to return face repeated attacks with no guarantee of security [14].

Amnesty International documented that attack methods in the Middle Belt are consistent across incidents: "gunmen systematically overrunning villages, using firearms to carry out indiscriminate or targeted killings from a distance, accompanied by brutal close-range violence with machetes and knives" [14].

International Response: Limited and Late

The international response to mass-casualty attacks in Nigeria's Middle Belt has been sporadic and largely rhetorical.

ECOWAS, the West African regional bloc, adopted an ambitious 2020-2024 Priority Action Plan to Eradicate Terrorism, budgeted at $2.3 billion. The plan failed to raise its target funding, and member states disagreed on whether to pool resources or fund national efforts independently [30]. Since 2023, ECOWAS has been consumed by a series of military coups in Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali, with three member states announcing their withdrawal from the bloc — leaving it with diminished capacity and credibility to address internal security crises in member states like Nigeria [30].

The most significant international action has come from the United States. In October 2025, President Donald Trump announced his intent to redesignate Nigeria as a "Country of Particular Concern" for religious freedom violations, and signaled that without action by the Nigerian government, the U.S. would consider terminating aid and preparing a military response to protect persecuted Christians [31]. The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa approved measures urging sanctions on Nigerian officials [31]. Senator Ted Cruz introduced the Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act, targeting officials who "facilitate Islamist jihadist violence" [32].

In February 2026, U.S. lawmakers introduced additional legislation to address persecution in Nigeria [33]. The U.S. State Department also opened the door for travel sanctions against Nigerian leaders who violate religious freedom under Section 212(a)(3)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act [31].

Nigeria's government has pushed back. President Tinubu said the U.S. characterization "did not reflect the country's reality or values" [25]. The Nigerian Minister of Information described the accusations as a "gross misrepresentation" [25]. Nigerian officials have also questioned whether U.S. pressure is motivated by domestic political considerations rather than genuine concern for Nigerian citizens [34].

The European Union and the African Union have issued condemnations of specific attacks but have not imposed sanctions or conditioned aid on security reforms in the Middle Belt [30]. Analysts at the International Crisis Group have attributed the limited pressure to Nigeria's strategic importance as Africa's largest economy and a major oil producer, as well as the diplomatic complexity of criticizing an elected government over what Abuja characterizes as a domestic security challenge rather than systematic persecution [17].

What Comes Next

The Palm Sunday attack in Angwan Rukuba joins a growing ledger of mass-casualty events that have defined life in Nigeria's Middle Belt for the better part of a decade. Governor Mutfwang has vowed justice. President Tinubu has vowed justice. CAN has demanded action. The Nigerian Bar Association has condemned the killings [9][10].

Previous vows have not produced visible results. After the Christmas 2023 massacre in Plateau State — which killed more than 200 people — Amnesty International called for investigation of the security lapses that enabled it [13]. No public findings from such an investigation have been released.

The gap between escalating rhetoric and persistent inaction defines the crisis. Defense spending has tripled since 2021. Attacks have continued. Displacement has grown. Prosecutions remain negligible. For the communities of Angwan Rukuba — and the millions across Nigeria's Middle Belt who share their vulnerability — the question is not whether the next attack will come, but whether any of the institutions responsible for preventing it will act differently than they have before.