President Donald Trump committed to protecting Christian believers targeted for their faith during a bilateral appearance with Nigerian President Muhammad Buhari Monday.
“We’ve had serious problems with Christians who have been murdered, killed in Nigeria. We’re going to work on that problem and working on that problem very, very hard. Because we can’t allow that to happen,” Trump said during the meeting.
Days before Buhari’s visit, 19 Christians were killed after a gunman opened fire in a church in a remote region of the country. The clashes are largely between Muslim herdsman and Christian farmers in the region.
“Buhari’s Fulani kin are responsible for hundreds of deaths already in 2018, attacking villages and forcing thousands of people to flee their homes and land. The scale of the Fulani aggression threatens to surpass Boko Haram’s reign of terror, based on the sheer number of deaths,” Open Doors CEO David Curry wrote in an op-ed for USA Today ahead of the visit.