US: Nigeria’s CPC Tag Stays After Fresh Plateau Massacre
A fresh massacre in Plateau State has hardened Washington’s position on Nigeria’s status as a Country of Particular Concern, with a United States lawmaker publicly ruling out any removal of the designation just days after both governments met to review the country’s record on religious freedom and security.
Representative Riley Moore, a Republican who represents West Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District, said this week on his official X account that the CPC tag could not be lifted while communities in Nigeria’s Middle Belt continued to come under deadly attack. “We absolutely cannot remove the CPC designation from Nigeria while radical Islamic terrorists continue this horrific violence against Christians,” Moore wrote. He added that the Nigerian government “must meet its commitments to protect innocent Christian communities.”
Moore was responding to a statement by the US Bureau of African Affairs, which condemned the latest killings in Plateau. According to the Bureau, “The United States is horrified by yet another murderous attack in the Middle Belt of Nigeria, killing dozens of people asleep in their homes in Plateau State.” The statement described the timing as “especially troubling coming on the heels of the recent CPC Working Group meeting,” and urged the Nigerian government to “meet their commitments to protect Christian communities and to hold perpetrators of violence accountable.”
The intervention has renewed pressure on both Abuja and Washington ahead of the annual review of the designation, which the US State Department is due to conduct in November. It also underscores how quickly individual security incidents in central Nigeria now feed into a wider diplomatic standoff between the two countries.
The killings that triggered the latest exchange took place in the Bin Mper community of Kombun District in Mangu Local Government Area of Plateau State. According to the Mwaghavul Youth Movement, which confirmed the incident through its Director of Public Affairs, Tubwot Sunday, at least 24 people were killed in the early hours of Tuesday, 18 August 2026, with several others injured. Some accounts put the death toll at 23. The group said homes were set ablaze and farmland destroyed in an assault that devastated families who depend largely on agriculture.
Residents and community leaders described the attackers as heavily armed men who moved through the village while people slept, forcing their way into homes. The assault was characterised by local associations as barbaric and senseless.
Plateau State Governor Caleb Mutfwang visited the community on Thursday to console survivors and the families of victims. According to a statement from his office, Mutfwang described the attack as a direct assault on his person and vowed that his administration would not allow residents to be forced from their ancestral land. “We will do everything within our powers to ensure that you remain on your land. Nobody will take over your land,” he told residents. The governor said the police had arrested some suspects in connection with the killings and pledged to pursue the matter to a conclusion. He noted that the attack occurred shortly after the state reviewed its security arrangements with the new General Officer Commanding the Nigerian Army’s 3 Division.
Support for Washington’s position also came from within Nigeria. The Christian Elders and Professionals Consultative Council of Nigeria, CEPCCN, said it backed the concerns raised by the United States over the safety of Christian communities and the worsening security situation. In a statement by its National Chairman, Bishop Alpha Ikpeama, the group stressed that all Nigerian lives were equally valuable regardless of religious affiliation, and called for urgent protection of citizens and accountability for perpetrators.
The Country of Particular Concern designation is provided for under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. It applies to states judged to have engaged in or tolerated systematic, ongoing and egregious violations of religious freedom, and it opens the door to a range of measures including sanctions.
Nigeria was first placed on the list in December 2020, during President Donald Trump’s first term. The administration of President Joe Biden removed the country in 2021, and Nigeria did not appear on the list in 2021, 2022 or 2023. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent federal body, has recommended Nigeria’s designation every year since 2009.
On 31 October 2025, President Trump returned Nigeria to the list, announcing the decision on his Truth Social platform and citing the killing of Christians. The move followed sustained lobbying from Republican lawmakers and faith based advocacy groups, and it was accompanied by threats of further action from Washington.
Since the re-designation, the two governments have set up a Joint Working Group to review progress. The first session was held in Abuja on 22 January 2026. The second took place in Washington on 12 August 2026, hosted by the US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Allison Hooker, with a Nigerian delegation led by the National Security Adviser, Nuhu Ribadu. According to a State Department statement, the talks focused on three areas: protecting Christian communities in the Middle Belt, strengthening judicial and security institutions to hold attackers accountable, and cooperation between the two militaries. The department said the group reviewed progress on the resettlement of displaced persons, counterterrorism prosecutions and efforts to curb terrorism financing, while acknowledging continuing challenges, including civilian deaths and gaps in humanitarian spending transparency. The session ended without any change to the designation.
The Nigerian government has consistently rejected the characterisation of the violence as religious persecution. Officials describe the crises across the north central and north western states as a mix of terrorism, banditry, criminality and disputes over land and grazing, affecting Christians and Muslims alike.
President Bola Tinubu stated in September 2025 that there was no religious persecution in Nigeria. Responding to the CPC decision on 31 October 2025, he said the characterisation of Nigeria as religiously intolerant did not reflect the national reality, adding that the country remained a democracy with constitutional guarantees of religious liberty. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a statement the following day, described the claim that extremist groups were killing thousands of Christians on a large scale as inaccurate and unreflective of the security situation.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Yusuf Tuggar, has argued that the notion of a Christian genocide rests on faulty data. Government spokesmen have also pointed to what they present as evidence of action against armed groups. According to figures released by the Minister of Information, Mohammed Idris, in November 2025, security agencies had neutralised more than 13,500 suspected terrorists, arrested over 17,000 suspects and rescued more than 9,800 abducted victims since May 2023. These figures have not been independently verified.
Analysts sympathetic to Abuja’s account note that terror groups strike churches, mosques, markets and villages without regard to faith, and that Muslim communities in the north east and north west have also suffered heavy casualties. Those pressing for the designation counter that Christian farming communities in the Middle Belt have been disproportionately and repeatedly targeted, and that impunity remains the norm.
The scale of Nigeria’s rural insecurity is not seriously disputed, even where its interpretation is. Amnesty International, in a report released in May 2025 to mark two years of the Tinubu administration, verified the killing of at least 10,217 people across seven states between 29 May 2023 and May 2025. Benue State recorded the highest toll at 6,896, followed by Plateau at 2,630. The organisation said 672 villages had reportedly been sacked in Benue, Plateau and Kaduna alone. Borno State, the epicentre of the Boko Haram insurgency since 2009, was not part of that particular investigation, meaning the true national figure is higher.
Individual incidents have carried heavy tolls. A massacre in Yelewata, a predominantly Catholic community in Benue State, on the night of 13 to 14 June 2025, left an estimated 100 to 200 people dead, with figures varying between official and civil society sources. An attack on Bokkos Local Government Area of Plateau in April 2025 killed dozens, including entire families. Other assaults in Plateau earlier in 2025 claimed more than 50 lives at a time. The pattern is not new. During the Christmas period of 2023, coordinated attacks on communities in Bokkos and Barkin Ladi killed about 200 people.
The trend has fluctuated. Data compiled by Nigeria Watch recorded 567 fatalities from clashes between farmers and herders in 2024, down from 860 in 2023. However, the second quarter of 2025 saw a resurgence of mass casualty attacks in Benue and Plateau, the pattern that has continued into 2026.
Figures cited by advocacy groups in the United States have been higher and more contested. Moore, in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio in October 2025, claimed that more than 7,000 Christians had been killed in Nigeria in 2025, an average of 35 a day. Such totals are difficult to verify independently and are disputed by the Nigerian authorities, who argue that casualty counts often fail to distinguish between victims of different faiths or to separate terrorism from ordinary crime.
One structural issue repeatedly raised by US bodies is the retention of blasphemy laws. Nigeria is among a small group of countries where such laws carry the death penalty, enforced under Sharia criminal codes in 12 northern states. Rights groups say these provisions have been used against both Christians and Muslims accused of dissent.
What is confirmed is that Nigeria currently sits on the CPC list, that the second Joint Working Group ended earlier this month without any change to the status, and that the annual review falls due in November. What remains uncertain is the outcome of that review and whether the recent violence in Plateau will weigh decisively on it.
The competing positions are clear. Washington, through the Bureau of African Affairs and lawmakers such as Moore, insists that the designation must remain until Nigeria demonstrably protects vulnerable communities and prosecutes attackers. Abuja maintains that the country faces a complex security emergency affecting all faiths, not state tolerated religious persecution, and points to its military operations and its participation in the working group as evidence of commitment.
For the communities of Mangu and the wider Middle Belt, the diplomatic question is secondary to the immediate one of survival. Whatever conclusion the State Department reaches in November, the killings that have drawn international attention to Plateau continue, and the pledges made on both sides of the Atlantic have yet to translate into lasting safety on the ground.