Nuhu Dauda was on a missionary trip, about 125 miles away from his home in Plateau state, Nigeria, when he got a panicked call from his younger brother. “He said jihadists had surrounded my home and were chanting that they would kill everyone inside,” Dauda, a 67-year-old Christian evangelist, told The Epoch Times. The police helped rescue five family members before heavily armed men burned the house to the ground and killed a young fellow evangelist, he said. That was in 2005. “In the 20 years since then I have seen our people massacred,” Dauda said. “I saw my family members, in-laws, and friends killed. I’ve carried the bodies of my own and I buried them.” The plight of Christians in the country received relatively little global attention until the Trump administration threatened to intervene amid a recent spike in violence, to prevent mass killings it suggested amounts to “genocide.” The Nigerian government denies claims of religious persecution, rather framing the violence as a security crisis with “complex socio-economic and political roots” that impacts people of all faiths. But the increase in brutal attacks on Christian communities by radicalized insurgents in recent years both parallels and intersects a broader rise […]