U.S. threats over Christian killings don’t help, Nigeria says

Nigeria has drawn a link between U.S. threats of attacks on Islamists over allegations of Christian genocide and recent kidnappings of hundreds of schoolgirls.

“There is a correlation between the recent statements and the kidnapping of girl students in two different locations, because then the terrorists want to use them as human shields,” Nigerian Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar told Newsweek on the sidelines of the Doha Forum in Qatar when asked about the threats.

Asked if the threats had encouraged the kidnappings, he said: “I’ll let you make the conclusion.”

Newsweek contacted the U.S. State Department for comment.

President Donald Trump last month issued an ultimatum to Africa’s most populous nation to stop the “killing of Christians” by Islamist groups and warned that the U.S. military might go in “guns-a-blazing” to attack them. Among those cheering Trump’s comments was musician Nicki Minaj.

More than 250 children are still being held in Nigeria after an abduction from a Catholic boarding school on November 21. A group of 50 escaped. Another 24 girls were rescued after being taken in a separate kidnapping. Tuggar said the kidnapping of more than 270 girls at Chibok in 2014, which grabbed global headlines at the time, had also followed threats of military action by Nigeria’s then president.

“We have to be careful sometimes in the way some of these things are addressed,” he said.

Nigeria has dismissed accusations of Christian genocide, saying Muslims are as much a victim of armed groups as Christians in the country of 230 million people that has been beset by decades of violence rooted in ethnic, religious and political divisions as well as criminality. Nigeria is split roughly evenly between Christians and Muslims.

The violence is also part of the wider spread of chaos by Islamist factions and bandits in the Sahel region south of the Sahara desert.

Tuggar said action was being taken by Nigeria, where the defense minister resigned recently as President Bola Ahmed Tinubu declared a security crisis. Nigeria was also working towards action by a Multinational Joint Task Force because of the regional nature of the threat, Tuggar said.

“It’s not a Nigerian problem. It is a regional problem. It’s the entire West African region. It’s the Lake Chad region, and therefore it’s not a religious conflict or an ethnic conflict. And if you get the framing right, then you get the right narrative, then you apply the right solutions.,” Tuggar said.