Constructing the Enemy: How United States Narratives Turn Nigerian Muslims into Suspects

Officers of the Nigerian Explosive Ordinance Disposal Unit securing the site of a US Airstrike in Jabo, Nigeria, on December 26, 2025. Source: Tunde Omolehin/AP

On December 25th, 2025—Christmas Day—the United States military launched strikes against the Islamic State (IS) militants, specifically the Lakurawa group in Northwest Nigeria, in response to alleged organized attacks of Nigerian Christians. Afterward, President Trump referred to the strikes as a “Christmas Present” for terrorists. 

Officials in Nigeria and the United States have stated that the airstrikes were carried out in a mutual coordination with international law. However, the Nigerian government has not claimed that Christians are being persecuted within the state, unlike the United States President, Congress, and others in Washington, who have repeatedly framed the violence in religious persecution terms. 

United States officials, such as Senator Ted Cruz have asserted that there is “mass murder of Christians” occurring in Nigeria, which the Nigerian government is allowing to happen. Earlier this year, Cruz introduced the Nigerian Religious Freedom Accountability Act to “protect Christians and other religious minorities from being persecuted in Nigeria by holding Nigerian officials accountable who facilitate Islamic jihadist violence and imposition of blasphemy laws,” according to a press release from Senator Cruz’s office. Furthermore, in Washington, President Trump likewise claimed that IS is “targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians at levels not seen in many years, or centuries.” 

Christians have faced persecution from groups such as Lakurawa, Boko Haram, and other IS affiliates, who draw on radical interpretations of Islamic law and aim to create a more “Islamic” state, one they deem insufficiently Islamic. Nigerian officials, however, have emphasized that both Christians and Muslims have been targeted equally. Additionally, the majority of attacks occur in the North, where Muslims predominantly reside, making this persecution by radical organizations all-encompassing, not isolated to Christians, as Western narratives are attempting to paint. Furthermore, Christian associations in Nigeria from the targeted regions have denied the assertions of a “Christian genocide.”

Many conflicts between everyday Nigerian Muslims and Christians, distinct from radical Islamist organizations, are also not exclusively religious in nature. Some conflicts have emerged in response to resource disputes. These clashes are primarily between nomadic Fuldani herders, most of whom are Muslim, and largely Christian farming communities. As predominantly Nigerian Muslims reside in the North, and Nigerian Christians in the South, they collide in Nigeria’s Middle Belt region, driven by disputes over land and water resources, obstruction of traditional migration routes, and livestock theft.

Despite Nigeria having faced security challenges for decades, religion is one of the many factors that destabilize the country’s security. Furthermore, the West's reduction of the conflict solely to religious persecution oversimplifies the complex socio-economic issues and can inflame existing ethnic and religious divisions. Additionally, when United States officials and media describe violence in Nigeria almost exclusively as a “Christian genocide,” they recast a multi-faceted security crisis as a simple confrontation between Nigerian Muslims and Christians. This framing encourages the assumption that “Muslims” are the perpetrators, a Western narrative augmented since the 9/11 attacks, even though extremist groups such as Boko Haram and ISIS affiliates have also killed large numbers of Muslims. Because many military operations occur in predominantly Muslim northern states, such as Sokoto, this geographic overlap reinforces the perception that Muslim communities as a whole are suspect rather than recognizing the specific militant actors involved. 

IS-allied militants have attempted to establish a presence in the north-western regions of Sokoto and Kebbi. Another IS-affiliated group resides in the north-eastern Borno. Map Source: BBC

Such narratives are doubly damaging. They provide propaganda fuel for extremist groups, who use them to claim that the West is at war with Islam, and they risk normalizing blanket suspicion toward everyday Nigerian Muslims at home and abroad. When the United States' rhetoric appears to endorse sectarian language, even where Nigerian officials resist it, it further deepens social divides and misrepresents the reality that Christians and Muslims alike suffer from violence.

It is not simply bombs or headlines alone, but the story told about them, that constructs the enemy. By collapsing complex political, economic, and regional conflicts into a single religion-based script, United States headlines risk turning Nigerian Muslims into suspects, not because of who they actually are, but because of how they are portrayed.

By Lekha Kolli '29

Published 01/12/2026