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By Ben Farmer
America is close to sealing a security pact with Nigeria after US President Donald Trump threatened to send in troops “guns a-blazing” to stop the persecution of Christians.
A delegation of US congressmen who toured the country say Washington is nearing an agreement, which is expected to include intelligence sharing and training for Nigeria’s forces.
Mr Trump in November threatened military action after saying Christianity faced an “existential threat” from attacks by Muslim militants in the West African nation.
“They’re killing the Christians and killing them in very large numbers,” he said at the time.
“We’re not going to allow that to happen.”
His accusation was rejected by the Nigerian government, which accused him of over-simplifying the country’s deep-rooted security woes to fire up his conservative evangelical base.
Security experts say Nigeria is beset by instability, banditry and long-running insurgencies that strike Christians and Muslims alike.
However, Mr Trump’s intervention was welcomed by Church leaders in Nigeria, who say Christians are being killed for their faith and have been abandoned by the central government.
Mr Trump dispatched a fact-finding mission led by Republican Congressman Riley Moore to report back to Washington.
Mr Moore said this week that he believed the US was “close to a strategic security framework”.
Any defence cooperation is expected to include intelligence sharing, with the Pentagon potentially training Nigerian troops. Nigeria also hopes to secure fast-tracked military equipment deals and access to surplus US kit.
Mr Trump’s comments, combined with a spate of high-profile attacks and mass kidnappings, have heaped pressure on the leadership of Africa’s most populous nation.
President Bola Tinubu has declared a nationwide emergency and said the government will recruit 20,000 additional police officers, raising the total to 50,000.
The nation of around 240 million people is roughly 56 per cent Muslim and 43 per cent Christian. The north is predominantly Muslim and the south largely Christian, although the faiths often live side by side across the country.
Nigeria is racked by overlapping security crises. In the north-east, the Boko Haram jihadist insurgency became notorious for the 2014 mass kidnapping of schoolgirls and has killed thousands of civilians.
Long-standing banditry and organised criminality also plague much of the country.
But it is the Middle Belt — where the Church says Christian farmers are under attack from predominantly Muslim Fulani herders — that has become the focus of American concern.
Mr Moore said his report to Mr Trump would “outline a path forward to work with the Nigerian government in a coordinated and cooperative manner to end the slaughter of innocent Christians in the Middle Belt and stop the ongoing terrorist threat in the north-east”.
Analysts say the Middle Belt violence is largely driven by competition for land and resources, though religious identity is often drawn in.
Cheta Nwanze, lead partner at Lagos-based risk advisory firm SBM Intelligence, said: “Nigeria is experiencing not merely a security crisis but a fundamental crisis of state legitimacy.
“Over 10,000 people have been killed by armed groups in the last two years alone, displacing hundreds of thousands of farmers and creating a humanitarian crisis.
“Large swathes of territory have become ungoverned spaces where armed groups collect taxes, control roads and conduct kidnappings with little interference.”