Where Is the Outrage Over the Jihadist Attacks Against Black Africans?

While much of the West remains focused on conflicts in Ukraine and Israel, a barbaric assault on Africans is taking place, yet this is hardly noticed. There is an active strategy by certain politicians and the mainstream media to cover it up.

A struggle today for Africa launched by Islamic terrorists is something Western elites wish to ignore, even as thousands of innocents are being brutally murdered, raped, burned alive, and taken captive. It is mostly a war waged against black Christians by African Islamists—and therefore an awfully sensitive subject. The recent Christmas attack against Christians in Nigeria claimed the lives of almost 200 people, yet it was mostly ignored in the mainstream press.

Some took notice when this centuries-old religious conflict flared in 1989, as Sudan’s jihad slaughtered 2.5 million Christians and enslaved perhaps 200,000 more. It ended only in 2005, when the U.S. helped broker a peace deal; in 2011, the south succeeded and become South Sudan, the world’s newest nation. More recently, Islamist attacks have spread where Islamic and Christian societies intersect: Mozambique, Niger, and Mali. In Darfur, there is a bit of a twist: Arab jihadists are slaughtering and enslaving Black people who converted to Islam long ago, but refuse to adopt Arab culture and language and who, in addition to being thought of as racially inferior, are not considered real Muslims.

Since the mainstream media is mostly absent, people in the West do not know that these African communities are continuously facing attacks that look very like the widely seen Hamas raids. Yet any decent reporter can easily see the pattern—Islamic jihadists throughout Africa, driven by the near-identical supremacist ideology, storm our villages, slaughter our people with guns and knives, rape our women, and take dozens into captivity.

When African children and women are killed in their sleep, teenage girls sexually trafficked across the Mediterranean, and young boys kidnapped for use as child soldiers, there is no global response. Terrorism is planned, funded, and executed by terrorists and their global networks. Why are there no reports analyzing funders and planners of terrorist murder in Nigeria, of genocidal assaults in Africa?

Can it be because we are Black, and the world just doesn’t care about us? Or is it that jihad is just too taboo a topic for the Western press and the human rights community? As the U.S. and Europe look away, we Black Africans die. How is this not a sin?

The U.S. confused the entire world with a narrative that blames climate change for religious conflicts in Africa. According to the State Department, climate change has been depleting water supplies in the Lake Chad region. A scramble for water resources sets nomadic cattle herders (who just happen to be Muslims) against the Indigenous subsistence farmers (who just happen to be mostly Christians), attacking them and banishing them from their ancestral lands.

The stark but more inconvenient truth is that Muslim terrorists, waging an Islamic “holy war,” are overrunning Christian villages throughout the Lake Chad area and north-central regions of Nigeria. The U.S. Department of State insists on tagging the violence as a farmers versus herders conflict, which, according to a 2023 travel advisory bulletin, “can flare up … in rural areas.” Though Nigeria is the place where 89 percent of the Christians killed for their faith worldwide in 2023 were murdered, the Biden administration removed Nigeria from the U.S. list of Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) for religious oppression, and has never put it back on.

This false narrative is used to obscure the unnerving truth about the nature of the conflict that, if acknowledged, would demand a serious effort by the U.S. to protect our vulnerable Christian African villages from people who want to slaughter and enslave us because of our identity. Our “climate” has changed when armed terrorists surround our villages. But the continued cloaking of Islamic terrorism in a weather narrative has exacerbated the killings and expanded the slaughtering fields of women and children in north-central Nigeria and the Sahel—the horizontal strip across north Africa which culturally divides Arabized Africa from the Indigenous, traditional cultures of the south.

The truth is plain and simple—terrorists take up arms. They kill and take Indigenous people captive. They annex and grab their lands. They call it jihad. Period.

The global community, especially the United States, seems to lack the will to address these genocidal onslaughts. Western inaction spells doom for Africans who are being overrun by jihadists.

What happened to the sleeping citizens in Nigeria’s Plateau State, murdered in their hundreds during Christmas Eve 2023, is no different than what happened to Jewish families in their kibbutzim on Oct. 7. Yet no one takes notice. No one hears the cries of the survivors.

The world’s silence about the plight of Africans must end.

Stephen S. Enada is executive president of the International Committee on Nigeria (ICON).

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.