Nigeria: Christians on the front line

remains of a Christian house fire bombed by Boko Haram. The inhabitants were killed in the attack.

Imagine you go to church on Sunday morning, and shortly after the service begins a man sitting in the middle of the congregation detonates a suicide vest. The explosion kills a quarter of the people in the church, and wounds most of the survivors. The walls are peppered with shrapnel, the ceiling is sagging, and the altar and many of the pews are damaged.

Then, imagine being one of the walking wounded who returns to the ruins of that church the same day for the evening service. Stoic and determined, the Christians of Nigeria are truly on the front lines, defending their faith through sheer courage.

I've just returned from Nigeria's so-called middle belt, where thousands of Christians from Borno state in the country's north east have fled. They are being ethnically cleansed by Boko Haram, the Islamist insurgents who target Christians and those Muslims who refuse to subscribe to Boko Haram's narrow and repressive Salafi interpretation of Islam. They are funded by wealthy individuals from the Gulf Arab states who sponsor violent jihad across the globe.

Boko Haram leaders have skilfully used social media to inspire disgruntled Muslim youth in other parts of Nigeria, pursuing the Christians and uncooperative Muslims fleeing Borno state. What is essentially an uprising about unemployment and economic marginalisation has been manipulated and warped into a religious war. Hence the years of attacks on churches, markets and Christian communities; beheading pastors and their families; and abducting young men as soldiers and young women to be their "wives."

In the middle belt city of Jos alone an estimated 20,000 have been killed since 2001. However, the Nigerian government is loath to publicise the true extent of the slaughter, preferring to claim the number of dead nationwide is 15,000. Until recently its security forces were half-hearted at best in their defence of civilians. Villagers whom I interviewed told of calling the local police and army repeatedly as they were attacked in 2010. The massacre continued for four hours, leaving nearly five hundred people dead. When the security services finally appeared, it was to loan the survivors a digger so the village leaders could dig a mass grave and bury the corpses.

President Buhari claims Boko Haram has retreated from many of its north-eastern strongholds. Reliable reports describe a tactical withdrawal into the bush and swamps in the Lake Chad region, where hundreds of unmonitored roads lead into neighbouring countries where insurgents hide. In other words, it is too early to claim victory, or for Boko Haram's targets to believe they are now safe.

Some areas of Borno state have been under the Boko Haram "caliphate" for five years, and starvation is rampant because farmers were discouraged from going into their fields. A staff member of a Christian charity told me that when her colleagues returned from a visit to the north east, they were so disturbed by what they had seen that they could not eat for a week. UNICEF claims a quarter of a million children in Borno state are at risk of imminent starvation. The UN believes a million more civilians in the Lake Chad area are cut off and at risk of starvation.

Alongside hunger is profound trauma, affecting almost everyone, both in the north east and in many parts of the middle belt. The constant threat of attack, day or night, eventually takes its toll, as does reliving an assault, or witnessing a massacre. Our small charity, Network for Africa, hopes to work with churches in Jos to replicate the trauma counselling we have used successfully with survivors of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army. Only by training local people to counsel their peers on how to manage trauma can we hope to reach all the people who need help.

Although my team was shaken by touring burnt-out neighbourhoods and seeing mass graves, we left feeling far more optimistic than we expected: Nigeria positively buzzes with entrepreneurial energy and a dogged determination to carry on regardless. It is hard to resist.

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