Nigerian Christians continue to be killed and abducted in large numbers. The latest attacks came as the church commemorated the first anniversary of the Yelwata massacre, in which Fulani militants killed more than 250 people during a three-hour assault in Benue State. Photo courtesy of Paul, a local journalist.

At midnight on June 21, Kawell Village, a Christian farming community in the Mushere District of Bokkos Local Government Area, roughly 90 minutes from the Plateau State capital of Jos, came under attack. The assault lasted three hours, killing 22 people, including the village reverend and a government community healthcare worker who was killed while on duty at the clinic. A Nigerian Army formation stationed less than one kilometer away failed to respond to distress calls. Soldiers arrived two to three hours after the attackers had already left.

Yafubu Samuel Domshak, 41, youth leader of Kawell Village, had just returned from a surveillance patrol when the attack began. He heard a gunshot, woke his wife, alerted neighbors, and began making calls to confirm what was happening. Word soon came back that attackers had entered the village and were killing people.

The assault was methodical. Gunmen entered homes one by one, moving quietly between houses. At one point, they shone a torch at a house. The residents, thinking it was a Christian security patrol, flashed a light back. “Immediately they replied the light, the next thing they heard was gunshot,” Domshak said, “and that was how they killed about five people in that very house.”

The attackers then moved to the Primary Health Care clinic, where a woman had been brought in for labor. They killed the clinic attendant, the Okada motorcycle driver who had transported her, and her father-in-law, mother-in-law, and husband. The woman escaped. The village reverend was shot and killed at the church. The confirmed death toll stands at 22. One survivor, a boy who was shot, was taken to Bokkos and was responding to treatment.

Domshak said the attack bore the hallmarks of inside knowledge. The gunmen bypassed the positions where his surveillance teams were stationed and instead used an unmonitored route toward where mobile police were posted. As they withdrew, he heard them calling each other by name: Awolu, Bashiru, and a third name, none of them Christian names. “It was a kind of selected attack,” he said. “They entered people’s houses. They knew us by name. They knew our houses.”

He traced the suspected source of that knowledge to former Fulani neighbors. Kawell had coexisted with a Fulani community for decades, with intermarriage, shared ceremonies, and mixed-heritage families on both sides. During a prolonged crisis that began in May of the previous year and lasted through November, those Fulani residents voluntarily left Kawell, fearing retaliatory violence after Fulani attacks on other villages in the Mushere District.

They resettled in Barikinladi, Boko, Bodel, Mangar, and Mushere West, the last of which had been emptied of its Christian population through displacement. “We suspected they left, regrouped, and maybe brought mercenaries for this attack,” Domshak said. “They know us. They know our houses and what we do.”

Two additional security failures compounded the assault. At 5 p.m. on the evening before the attack, a convoy of five motorcycles and two vehicles carrying uniformed soldiers passed through Kawell heading toward Mushere Central and Mushere West. They did not return until after the attack. Only three motorcycles came back, without the vehicles or the personnel who had departed with them. Separately, five soldiers stationed at a checkpoint less than one kilometer from the village were contacted while the attack was still in progress. They said they were preparing to respond. By the time they arrived, the victims were dead, and the terrorists had escaped.

When soldiers finally appeared, they told villagers that because residents had previously requested mobile police rather than army personnel, they should continue with that arrangement. Domshak refused to assist them in tracing the attackers’ route. “We are still looking for our people,” he said. “People are missing. People have died. We are not going anywhere.”

He also alleged that security personnel in the region had, in previous incidents, accepted payments to guide attackers or had actively participated in violence. He cited one case in which a soldier was shot and killed alongside attackers and was identified by his uniform and military ID card. Similar incidents have been documented elsewhere in the Middle Belt: following an attack near Yelwata, eight terrorists were killed and their bodies were found to carry military ID cards from Niger Republic, Mali, and other Sahelian countries, according to Genocide Watch.

The Kawell attack came during a week of sustained violence across Nigeria’s Middle Belt. Five days earlier, on June 16, armed men attacked Ungwan Magaji village in Kamaru Chawai, Kauru Local Government Area of Kaduna State, killing nine residents and injuring at least 11 others. The dead included four children: Moses Daddy, 4; Sunday Elkan, 5; Esther Kefas, 5; and Happy Friday, 6. That same night, in Dantanko, an Irigwe community in Miango District of Bassa Local Government Area, Plateau State, Emmanuel Gara, 48, a father of four, was shot and killed behind his home.

Earlier that week, the District Head of Gwande in Bokkos Local Government Area, Saf Samuel Alaket, was ambushed and killed along the Sha-Daffo road while returning from a traditional council meeting. Combined, the Kawell and Ungwan Magaji attacks alone killed at least 31 people in one week, according to ICC.

The attacks coincided with the first anniversary of the June 13-14, 2025, massacre in Yelwata, Benue State, in which Fulani militants went house to house, killing more than 250 people over three hours. On June 12-13, 2026, the Catholic Diocese of Makurdi held a memorial Mass and unveiled a cenotaph engraved with the names of all the victims.

The monument was funded by Judd Saul of the U.S.-based nonprofit Equipping the Persecuted. At the ceremony, Saul said his organization had warned Nigerian authorities about the impending attack one week before the massacre and again 24 hours before it occurred, but no proactive measures were taken. Survivors told attendees that the attackers still occupy nearby farmlands and continue to threaten their return.

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