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The head of the African Union Commission, Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, has said that there is no genocide taking place in northern Nigeria, contradicting US President Donald Trump’s claim that insurgents are killing Christians and posing an “existential threat.”
This month, Trump warned of a possible armed intervention in Nigeria, claiming that radical Islamists are killing “Christians in very large numbers.”
The US president claimed that Christianity is experiencing an “existential threat” in the West African country, adding that if the killings continue, the United States will respond with an attack that will be “fast, vicious, and sweet.”
During a press conference on Wednesday in New York, Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, the chair of the African Union Commission, said that “there is no genocide in northern Nigeria.”
Nigeria, which is the most populous country in Africa with 230 million people, is roughly equally split between a predominantly Christian southern region and a Muslim-majority northern region.
The nation is a battleground for insurgencies, which result in the deaths of both Christians and Muslims, often without discrimination.
Since its inception in 2009, the Boko Haram insurgency has taken more than 40,000 lives and displaced over two million individuals, according to United Nations statistics.
