CSI Under Siege Campaign for Nigeria Christians Today

Christian Solidarity International (CSI) launched a three-month campaign on 5 November 2026, "Christians in Nigeria: Under Siege", to spotlight the suffering of Christians in Nigeria's Middle Belt. CSI says one Christian is killed every 86 minutes in the Middle Belt, and 4,216 Christians were assassinated in the first nine months of 2026 alone.

Now picture the night that number became a name. Longdi, a pregnant Christian woman in the Middle Belt, escaped into the darkness while in labour as attackers killed her husband and four members of his family that same night. She survived by running into the dark with a child on the way, while the people she loved most did not survive the night at all.

That is the human reality behind the campaign's headline figures. CSI is not asking the world to look at a statistic. It is asking the world to look at a woman who ran for her life in labour, and at the empty places left behind in her family.

One Christian Killed Every 86 Minutes

The numbers in the CSI release are hard to read slowly, and they should be. One Christian killed every 86 minutes means that by the time a Sunday service ends, more than one more believer in the Middle Belt may already be dead. Over nine months, that pace added up to 4,216 Christians assassinated in 2026 alone.

Behind those figures sits a longer pattern documented by the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa (ORFA). Its study attributes 18,577 civilian deaths to Fulani groups between October 2019 and September 2025. The ORFA research gives the campaign's numbers a second, independent anchor, and it shows that the violence in the Middle Belt did not begin this year.

The campaign runs for three months, and its purpose is plain: to mobilsie support for persecuted Christians in Nigeria. CSI wants churches, policymakers and ordinary believers outside Nigeria to know what is happening, and to act on it while the killing continues.

What the June Visit Found in Plateau State

The campaign is built on what CSI saw with its own eyes. In June 2026, a CSI team visited Plateau State in the Middle Belt, meeting survivors, journalists and lawyers to document what Christians there are living through. During their two-week stay, at least 50 Christians were killed.

Think about that for a moment. In the fortnight a visiting team spent listening to survivors, 50 more people died. The team did not have to dig into old records to find the violence. It was happening around them, in real time, while they were there.

Plateau State has been in the news again and again this year for attacks on Christian communities. The same state saw fresh killings in late October and early November, and a local pastor warned that Christians had been told they would not live to see Christmas. The story is told in Latest: Three Christians Killed in Plateau State as Pastor Warns Christians Won't See Christmas, and it shows the same pattern the CSI team witnessed in June.

The violence is not confined to one state either. In neighbouring Benue, gunmen attacked a market-day gathering in early November and killed a pastor among four victims, as reported in Pastor Terungwa Tyonungo Killed in Benue Market Attack. And in Kaduna, 17 worshippers abducted from three churches died in captivity, a story covered in 17 Kaduna Worshippers Died in Captivity, 4 Still Held. Each of these stories is a different place, and yet they keep pointing to the same crisis.

A Campaign Built on Thirteen Years of Aid

CSI is not new to Nigeria. The organisation has aided Nigerian Christian victims since 2013, and in 2020 it issued a Genocide Warning for Middle Belt Christians. That warning was a serious step, and the years since have not made it look like an overstatement.

The new campaign carries that history with it. It is not a first response to a sudden crisis. It is the latest chapter in more than a decade of work with victims, and it arrives at a moment when the killing has reached a pace of one Christian every 86 minutes.

One detail in the reporting deserves honesty. The Nigerian Voice also covered the launch on 5 November, but its piece republishes the CSI release, so it is not a fully independent account. The strongest ground for the campaign's figures is the CSI release itself and the ORFA study it draws on, and that is where the numbers in this article come from.

What happens next depends on whether anyone outside Nigeria is listening. CSI's three-month campaign will keep telling stories like Longdi's, and keep publishing numbers like 4,216, for as long as it runs. The question is whether the world will still be listening when the campaign ends, or whether the Middle Belt's Christians will be left to face the next 86 minutes alone. Longdi's child will be born into a family with five empty places at the table, and that child will grow up in a land where the question of who protects Christians is still unanswered.

But the most surprising part of this story is yet to come — keep reading.