US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met with Nigerian National Security Advisor Nuhu Ribadu, urging Africa’s most populous nation to take steps to curb violence against Christians, the Pentagon said Friday.
Hegseth called on Nigeria to “take both urgent and enduring action to stop violence against Christians,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement, adding that Washington wants to work with Abuja “to deter and degrade terrorists that threaten the United States.”
The Thursday meeting between Hegseth and Ribadu at the Pentagon came after US President Donald Trump said Christianity was “facing an existential threat” in the West African nation, warning that if Nigeria does not stem the killings, the United States will attack and “it will be fast, vicious, and sweet.”
Nigeria, home to 230 million inhabitants, is divided roughly equally between a predominantly Christian south and a Muslim-majority north.
It is the scene of numerous conflicts, including jihadist insurgencies, which kill both Christians and Muslims, often indiscriminately.
Clashes are also frequent between mostly Muslim herders and mainly Christian farmers over land and resources, particularly water, giving the conflict an air of religious tensions.
However, experts say the conflict in northcentral Nigeria is primarily over land, which is being squeezed by expanding populations and climate change.
Earlier on Friday, armed gang members kidnapped pupils and teachers from a Catholic school in central Nigeria, officials said Friday, in the second such incident in less than a week.
The latest abduction took place in Niger state, and the nearby state of Katsina has ordered all schools shut as a precautionary measure.
The school kidnappings and a church attack earlier this week came after US President Donald Trump threatened military action over what he described as the targeted killings of Nigeria’s Christians by radical Islamists, a narrative rejected by the Nigerian government.
The Catholic Church in the area said in a statement that “armed attackers invaded” the school between 1:00 am (0000 GMT) and 3:00 am, abducting “pupils, students, teachers and a security” guard who was shot.
The Niger state government said it had “received with deep sadness the disturbing news of the kidnapping of pupils from St. Mary’s School in Agwara local government area”.
“The exact number of abducted pupils is yet to be confirmed as security agencies continue to assess the situation,” the state government secretary said in a statement.
After gunmen on Monday stormed a secondary school in Kebbi state in northwestern Nigeria, abducting 25 schoolgirls, Friday’s attack further raises alarm over security in Africa’s most populous country.
For years, heavily armed criminal gangs locally known as “bandits” have been intensifying attacks in rural areas of northwest and central Nigeria with little state presence, killing thousands and conducting kidnappings for ransom.
The gangs have camps in a vast forest straddling several states including Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, Sokoto, Kebbi and Niger from where they launch attacks.
In a statement on Friday, the Katsina state education ministry ordered “the immediate closure of all government schools across the state due to security concerns”.
