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In the aftermath of the March 2019 Christchurch, New Zealand, massacre in which a white supremacist gunman fatally shot 50 people at two mosques, some right-leaning observers quickly turned their attention to atrocities allegedly perpetrated by Muslims against Christians in recent weeks. On 16 March, Breitbart reported that Nigerian Muslim militants had killed 120 Christians within a space of three weeks since late February 2019. In another article published the next day, the same author wrote that Political leaders and public figures were falling over themselves this weekend to condemn the mosque attacks in New Zealand, while dozens of Christians were slaughtered by Muslims in Nigeria to the sound of crickets. That article cited a report from the website Christian Post, which in turn cited a 14 March press release posted by the U.K.-based charity Christian Solidarity Worldwide, which read: At least 120 people have died since 9 February in a series of attacks by Fulani militia on communities in the Adara chiefdom of southern Kaduna. The violence comes in the wake of a statement by the Kaduna state governor on the eve of Nigeria’s presidential elections in February regarding an alleged massacre of Fulani villagers in the area. Christian Solidarity Worldwide outlined the purported details of five recent attacks: Although not entirely reliable, local news reports largely corroborate the incidents and deaths described by Breitbart and Christian Solidarity Worldwide. It is difficult to arrive at a definitive total number of persons killed, but the numbers claimed by Breitbart and Christian Solidarity Worldwide are certainly plausible and, unfortunately, in keeping with the ongoing farmer-herder conflict that has affected parts of Nigeria in recent years. However, that conflict has a complex set of causes and motivations, and the Breitbart and Christian Post articles in March 2019 served readers poorly by focusing exclusively on the religious affiliations of the groups involved -- something that impartial experts have presented as not being a central cause of the conflict -- while failing to mention other, much more relevant factors. Breitbart also markedly failed to mention in their article the single largest atrocity recorded during February and March 2019, one in which members of the mainly Christian Adara ethnic group were alleged to have killed 130 members of the mainly Muslim Fula ethnic group. Since around 2017, longstanding and violent clashes have escalated between various groups of farmers in different parts of Nigeria and semi-nomadic cattle herders from the mostly Muslim Fula ethnic group (known collectively as Fulani). In the summer of 2018, the International Crisis Group, a non-governmental organization that researches violent conflicts around the world, described the spiraling clashes as Nigeria's gravest security challenge, offering this outline of the farmer-herder conflict: In a major December 2018 report, Amnesty International also described the conflict as one being waged over access to natural resources, and they characterized ethnic (and thereby religious) links between communities as a factor that inflames retaliation rather than being a primary underlying cause of the conflict itself: In an email sent to Snopes.com, Brandon Kendhammer, associate professor of political science at Ohio University and an expert in Nigerian politics, said the religious dynamics of the conflict were further complicated by the fact that Fulani herders had also been attacking farmers in Zamfara State, where nearly all the farmers and victims are also Muslim. He added, Here, the conflict very clearly appears to be rooted in the impunity of criminal gangs. The farmer-herder conflict escalated further in early 2019 with a series of attacks, especially in Kaduna State in Northwestern Nigeria. Obtaining reliable, impartial information about the ongoing conflict from local news media is difficult, but the Nigeria Security Tracker -- a Council on Foreign Relations project run by former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell -- attempts to verify details by collating as many such reports as possible. According to the Nigeria Security Tracker, as downloaded on 19 March 2019, these are the recorded incidents of farmer-herder conflict-related violence between 1 February and 15 March 2019: Although not included in the 19 March Nigeria Security Tracker, additional killings appear to have taken place on 16 March when, according to reports, suspected Fulani militants set fire to dozens of homes and killed 10 people in the village of Nandu, in the Sanga LGA in Kaduna State. On 13 March, Kaduna State Governor Nasir el-Rufai imposed a 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM curfew in the Kajuru LGA and parts of the Chikun LGA in response to the spiraling violence. On 16 March, Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari released a statement condemning what he called internecine violence in Kaduna State, which read (in part): The ongoing herder-farmer conflict in Nigeria has claimed thousands of lives in recent years, particularly during an escalation of the violence in 2019 and especially in Kaduna State, where dozens of mostly Christian Adara were reported to have been killed in February and March by mostly Muslim Fulani militants. Local news reports, as recorded in the Council on Foreign Relations' Nigeria Security Tracker, largely corroborate the incidents and deaths described by Breitbart and the Christian Solidarity Worldwide non-profit group. However, reports by Breitbart and the Christian Post website failed readers by presenting a woefully narrow viewpoint on the conflict, emphasizing only the religious affiliations of the participants while neglecting to mention what impartial experts have highlighted as being the primary driving force behind it: a dispute over natural resources and land usage. Furthermore, while Breitbart's article provided details of several reported attacks by Fulani herders on farmers in Kaduna State in February and March 2019, it did not mention the attack on the mainly Muslim Fula ethnic group, which was the single largest reported atrocity during the time period in question. Notwithstanding the fact that some local Christian leaders disputed the death toll presented in that case, Breitbart's failure to even mention the attack on the Fula group constitutes a glaring omission in any article purporting to be a reliable or impartial examination of what is, to begin with, a volatile and complicated conflict.
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