Nigeria

For the Pentagon, Nigeria is firmly on the list of countries where terror has run amok. In 2025 and again in January and May this year, the US Air Force bombed rebel camps in the north in an effort to halt a spree of murders and abductions that has left thousands dead or missing. US bombings earlier this week killed Islamic State’s second in command, Abu Bakr al-Mainuki, but the insurgency shows no sign of slowing; 17 trainees died recently in an attack on the army’s special forces academy and the conflict has spread to nearby Mali. In Nigeria, keeping the peace is a challenge. Since independence from Britain in 1960, there have been six coups and a civil war.

Sunday November 2, 2025 marks the annual Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church. Global violence against Christians has doubled in the last thirty years, and one in seven believers now suffers persecution. Today, “Christians constitute by far the most widely persecuted religion,” in the world.In sub-Saharan Africa, more than 16 million Christians have fled for their lives to escape violence or been forcibly displaced. Congressman Riley Moore has described Nigeria as “the deadliest place in the world to be a Christian.” So far this year in Nigeria at least 7,000 Christians have been put to death. More than 19,000 Christian churches have been burned to the ground or attacked in the last fifteen years.

Some say the Roman Republic died when the Senate murdered Tiberius Gracchus, a populist reformer. When the elites whose negligence and hubris had fueled in the first place the rise to prominence of Tiberius and his brother, Gaius, chose violence over the political process, they peeled away any pretense of civility with the ruled. Something similar happened with Donald Trump. His presidential record is a mixture of half-truths and half-measures. He was too soft and too undisciplined for all the bluster about him as a competent threat to the established political order. He did, however, help reveal the true face of the regime as it attempted to snuff him out. In February, TIME ran a story about the 'shadow campaign' that altered the course of the 2020 election.