YELWATA, Nigeria — Villagers scrub streaks of blood from the walls of brick huts and barns. Others still search through torched sacks of crops, clothes and scattered belongings, to salvage what they can, weeks after a massacre.
Last month, dozens of attackers stormed the farming village of Yelwata in Benue state — Nigeria's fertile "breadbasket" — killing at least 160 people. Armed with rifles, machetes and fuel, they struck as families slept. The assault, one of the deadliest in recent memory, sparked outrage from religious leaders and lawmakers around the world.
The massacre unfolded in the country's volatile Middle Belt, where Christian farming communities like Yelwata sit on fertile land—and at the fault lines of Nigeria's deepening farmer-herder crisis.
Once contained to local disputes resolved between communities, the violence has exploded into mass killings fueled by population growth, the climate crisis, and the collapse of traditional peacemaking.
"They were burnt alive"
When NPR visited Yelwata in the aftermath of the killings Christian prayer books littered the ruins. Groups of young men were searching through the debris while flies swarmed around bones and human remains.
45-year-old farmer Terhemba Lormba farmed rice, maize, cashew nuts and citrus and sat on a stool outside what's left of his home. Eight of his family were killed. "Most of them were burnt alive," including three of his children, he said, wiping his eyes with his shirt as he spoke. "They were hiding in the bedroom." His brother, Lormba was shot dead as he tried to escape.
Thirty-five-year-old Mathias Dze had taken shelter in a nearby Catholic church in Yelwata during the attacks. When it was over, he went to search for his brother, 30-year-old Elijah. He found him covered in machete wounds. "He was still breathing, so we rushed him to the hospital but before we reached there, he gave up," he said.
A crisis decades in the making
Most of the suspects, according to police, are bandits or armed herders — ethnically Fulani pastoralists who are majority Muslim. Clashes between farmers and herders are rife in Nigeria and across the Sahel region, spanning West to Eastern Africa.
But decades of escalating tensions have grown more deadly according to the International Crisis Group. In many disputes, farmers accuse herders of grazing on their land and destroying crops; herders in turn blame communities and criminals of stealing cattle. Once settled through local mediation, these disputes have escalated into a major security threat as traditional systems of accountability break down.
In Benue close to 300 people have been killed since April this year according to local media, while almost half a million people have been displaced by the violence, according to the United Nations — most from farming communities that have suffered massacres.
Two weeks before the attacks in Yelwata, two herders were killed according to the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association, an umbrella group for pastoralists. The group said Fulani herders "seek peaceful co-existence" with farmers but are themselves often profiled, robbed and killed and that more than 500 herders have been killed across Nigeria in the past year.
"We are being driven from the land in droves."
But farming communities in Benue deny the attacks are an escalation of tit-for-tat violence between herders and farmers, but part of a campaign to displace farming communities from their land entirely.
Professor James Ayatse, a traditional monarch and leader of the Tiv people, the dominant ethnic group in Benue State, visited Yelwata a week after the attacks. "We are still finding bodies," he said, walking through the ruins in the village.
"If you want to kill a people, then you must be interested in what they have and we believe that it's the land," he said. "The land is rich, it's fertile. But we are being driven from the land in droves."
As attacks have mounted, so have claims of complicity by the government and security forces, accused of not doing enough. Survivors say police stationed in Yelwata were quickly overwhelmed—and that no reinforcements came, even after hours of gunfire. "The attack lasted over three hours," said Mathias Dze. "People are asking: Why didn't the security forces come?"
The attacks have also raised complicated questions around the safety of Christians in northern and central Nigeria. In the aftermath of the killings, Nigeria's Muslim president, Bola Tinubu, was criticized for failing to adequately acknowledge the attacks. He then promised to visit the region but failed to visit the village itself, blaming the state of the roads.
Pope Leo offered prayers for "Christian communities in Benue who have been ceaseless victims of violence." and U.S. lawmakers are pressuring the Trump administration to designate Nigeria a "country of particular concern" for religious persecution.
But Nigeria's foreign ministry has pushed back, saying the violence isn't about religion. "Any narrative that seeks to give such incidents a coloration of religious persecution is erroneous and misleading," it said in a statement. In northern Nigeria, where the population is largely Muslim, most farming communities targeted in similar attacks are also predominantly Muslim.
"He's asking for his dad"
While the damage from the violence is gradually repaired in the village, at the Benue University Teaching Hospital, many of the survivors have been left with life-altering injuries. Several are children as young as 9 months old, with deep cuts from machetes or bullet wounds.
Among them is four-year-old Onyuso David, who sits with bandages around his hand and ankle, watching a comedy show on his grandmother's phone. His parents were both killed in the attack, said 62-year-old Felicia David, sitting by his side. "He was hiding with his mother when they killed her in front of him," she said, while his father was killed elsewhere in the village.
"He's been crying and crying, and asking for his dad to come and see him. I don't know how to tell him he has died.
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