Forgotten Front: Why Nigeria’s Military Ignores Middle Belt Massacres
By Steven Kefas | Truth Nigeria | October 15, 2025
As Washington debates Christian genocide, Nigeria Follows a Dual Strategy
(Abuja, Nigeria) The attackers came in the dead of the night, their war cries of “Allahu Akbar” piercing the morning stillness. For over four hours, Muslim Fulani militants descended upon Yelewata, a community of 10,000 souls in Benue State, wielding military-grade weapons with impunity. When the carnage ended on June 14, 2025, 258 Christian farmers—mostly refugees who had already fled previous attacks—lay dead in pools of blood, or mounds of charred bones.
The most damning detail? Yelewata sits less than 30 minutes’ drive from Lafia, the Nasarawa State capital, and roughly 30 minutes from Makurdi, the Benue State capital. Both cities house military barracks. Yet, for four interminable hours, help never came.
But this is the story of Nigeria’s Middle Belt—a predominantly Christian region where mass killings have become routine, military intervention remains conspicuously absent, and the federal government’s response oscillates between silence and suggestions that victims surrender their ancestral lands to their killers.
A Tale of Two Battlefronts
Nigeria’s security landscape is undeniably complex. Boko Haram and ISWAP, (Islamic State of West Africa) a combined threat encompassing 18,000 fighters, terrorize the Northeast. Muslim Fulani militants feast on the Middle Belt. Bandits—a sanitized term for Fulani ethnic militia—plague the Northwest. Lakurawa and Ansaru jihadist fighters operate across the North. Yet, military operations remain heavily concentrated in the Northwest and Northeast according to security experts interviewed by TruthNigeria, leaving the Middle Belt to bleed in the shadows.
The Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa (ORFA), a non-profit organization, documented this disparity in stark terms. In its four-year report covering October 2019 to September 2023, ORFA observed that despite several local government areas in the Middle Belt ranking among the top ten for casualties, security interventions remained focused elsewhere.
Since President Bola Tinubu assumed office in May 2023, little has changed. Despite appointing security chiefs from diverse regions, military operations are lopsided. True, scores of Fulani bandit commanders have been neutralized in the Northwest since Tinubu’s inauguration, and all have been named and profiled in Nigerian Army press releases. Yet in the Middle Belt? The terrorists continue their reign of terror unabated, taking over scores of villages and never facing military pushback from core army units, nor bombing from Nigerian Air Force.
“The Nigerian military has been known to make claims of neutralizing Islamists, or bandits as they prefer to call them, over the years, but the corresponding effect is that there has only been a proliferation of such Islamist groups and a sophistication in their weaponry in the Middle Belt,” Zariyi Yusuf, immediate past National Coordinator of the Middle Belt Patriots, told TruthNigeria.