On Christmas Day, the President ordered U.S. missiles fired from a Navy destroyer into Nigeria. The explanation came pre-loaded for television: protecting Christians from terrorists.
It sounds moral.
It sounds simple.
It feeds his base.
And it gets the war wrong.
Nigeria is not burning because of religion. It’s burning because the land is collapsing, the state has lost control of the countryside, and armed men are filling the vacuum. Religion gets blamed afterward because it’s loud and convenient.
This Starts With Dirt, Water, and Grazing Routes
Nigeria’s violence begins the way most wars actually begin — with who gets to live off the land.
As desertification spreads south, herders are pushed off traditional grazing routes. Pasture disappears. Water dries up. Cattle have to go somewhere, so herders move — increasingly into forest reserves.
Those forests aren’t empty. They’ve become hideouts for criminal gangs and extremist groups.
Now you have herders and jihadists operating in the same terrain. Cattle theft explodes. Banditry becomes routine. Pastoralists start arming themselves just to survive.
From the outside, the distinction collapses.
To local farmers and villagers, an armed man in the forest is an armed man in the forest. Whether he’s protecting cattle or running an extremist cell becomes irrelevant once crops are destroyed and people are killed.
In places like the northern part of the country, which includes parts of the Sambisa Forest, Boko Haram cells have driven pastoralists out of forest areas entirely. The result? Herders push back onto farmland. Crop damage increases. Relations with farmers crater.
That’s the cycle.
Not scripture.
Not ideology.
Land pressure and insecurity feeding on each other.
Where Religion Gets Misused
Yes, Nigeria has Islamist terror groups. Boko Haram and ISIS–West Africa exist. They kill civilians and deserve to be hunted.
But here’s the part that never makes the speeches: they kill Muslims at least as often as Christians. They attack mosques, markets, schools, and anyone unlucky enough to live where the state has vanished.
Much of what gets branded as “Christian persecution” is actually land conflict, criminal violence, fear-driven arming, and American myopia. Religion becomes the label because identity overlaps with geography — not because it started the fight.
When herders arm themselves to survive cattle theft, they look like militants. When militants use forests as sanctuaries, they look like herders. The fog thickens. Communities panic. Retaliation follows.
That’s how communal wars are born.
The Oil State Rotting From the Inside
Nigeria’s oil wealth doesn’t cause these fights directly, but it poisons the system that should contain them.
Oil money centralized power in Abuja and hollowed out rural governance. If you don’t live near a pipeline, you don’t matter. Policing disappears. Justice evaporates. Armed groups take over local authority.
This is what state failure looks like — slow, uneven, and invisible from the capital.
Washington pays attention because Nigeria is big, unstable, and oil-rich. So it reaches for moral language to justify action. That makes the strike sound noble. It does not make it effective.
Why the Religious Frame Is a Strategic Mistake
Call this a holy war, and you guarantee failure.
You guarantee:
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Bad diagnosis — missiles aimed at symptoms
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Endless escalation — every land dispute recast as ideology
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Permanent instability — because airstrikes don’t restore grazing routes, policing, or trust
You can kill terrorists forever. If the land keeps failing and the state stays absent, the gun just changes hands.
The Part Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud
Nigeria isn’t medieval. It’s modern.
This is what conflict looks like when climate stress, population growth, weak governance, and criminal networks collide. Religion enters late, loud, and misleading.
And here’s the truth the White House won’t put in a press release:
You don’t bomb a drought.
You don’t missile disappearing grazing land.
And you don’t fix a failed state by pretending a land war is a holy war.
Nigeria isn’t bleeding because God picked sides. It’s bleeding because the ground is giving out, the government abandoned the countryside, and young men with rifles see no future worth defending. Terrorists exploit that chaos — they don’t invent it.
Fire Tomahawks if you must.
Just don’t lie to yourself about what you’re fighting.
Wars don’t start in scripture.
They start when the earth runs out and the state walks away.