Amid US claims of ‘Christian genocide’, locals and experts say crisis is multilayered, dismissing calls for foreign military intervention.

Lagos, Nigeria — When Lawrence Zhongo and his wife got married in 2023, relatives and friends from across their region in central Nigeria attended the ceremony. But in the years since, he has been left distraught time and again with each new report of a deadly attack that has claimed the lives of people who celebrated with the couple.

“I can’t count the number of relatives and friends I have lost. My wife lost eight relatives in the Ziki attack in April,” Zhongo, a yam and maize farmer in Miango village in Plateau State, told Al Jazeera. “These are people that came for my wedding.”

In that attack, armed men stormed into homes in Zike village in the Bassa local government area, in overnight raids that reports said killed more than 50 people, including children. Days earlier, 40 people were reportedly killed in a similar attack in the Bokkos local government area.

For decades, Nigeria’s middle belt or central region has been the site of deadly communal violence between usually Muslim Fulani pastoral herders and the majority Christian farmers of various ethnicities, whom experts say are clashing over competition for resources.

At the same time, in northern Nigeria, Boko Haram and other ISIL (ISIS)-affiliated armed groups have launched deadly attacks for more than a decade, killing thousands and forcing hundreds of thousands to be displaced, as the groups attempt to impose harsh interpretations of Islamic law in the country’s mainly Muslim north.

Though the victims of violence are from different cultures and religions, the attacks have led to United States President Donald Trump threatening to invade Nigeria “guns-a-blazing” over what right-wing lawmakers in the US allege is a “Christian genocide“.

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“I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform last Saturday.