The African Union chief said there was no genocide in Nigeria’s volatile north after US President Donald Trump claimed that Christians were being slaughtered by jihadists and faced an “existential threat”.
Trump this month threatened to carry out an armed intervention in Nigeria, saying radical Islamists were killing “Christians in very large numbers”.
The US leader said Christianity was “facing an existential threat” in the West African nation, adding that if Nigeria does not stem the killings, the United States will attack and “it will be fast, vicious, and sweet”.
Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, chair of the African Union Commission, told a press conference on Wednesday in New York that “there is no genocide in northern Nigeria”.
Youssouf said, “The first victims of Boko Haram (the most prominent jihadist group in the region) are Muslims, not Christians”.