In Kaduna State, 30-year-old Ladidi Sunday says militants flung her four-month-old across the room and shot her husband. No official has come to her door.
By Mike Odeh James and Luka Binniyat
KAJURU, Nigeria — Eight gunmen burst into Ladidi Sunday’s home in Nigeria’s Kaduna State, flung her four-month-old daughter across the room, then shot her husband in the head.
It was about 8 p.m. on September 9 in Angwan Gamo, a farming village in Kajuru local government area. Southern Kaduna is the mostly Christian end of Nigeria’s Middle Belt, where the Muslim north meets the Christian south.
“They were Fulani-speaking. My husband and I were about to sleep when they burst into our inner room,” Ladidi told TruthNigeria. “One of them grabbed Miracle, one of my twin daughters, from the hands of my husband and flung her towards the window. She landed on the ground with a thud.”
Her husband, Sunday Musa, lunged at the man. Six others pinned him to the floor, tied him and beat him with gun butts.
“They asked him to run,” Ladidi said. “Then, as he was moving towards the gate, they shot him on the head.”
Widowed at 30, Fatherless at Four Months
Ladidi is 30 and raising seven children alone, including two sets of twins: six-year-old boys named Peter and Paul, and the four-month-old girls, Miracle and Mirabel.
“With the killing of my husband, I will be left to feed my children and send them to school, pay house rent and other things,” she said. “As I talk to you, the state government, the federal government and the military have not made any move to see me.”
“As I talk to you, the state government, the federal government and the military have not made any move to see me.” — Ladidi Sunday, widow of Sunday Musa
Sunday Musa was a Christian. His killers belong to what TruthNigeria identifies as the Fulani Ethnic Militia (FEM), armed men from Fulani herding communities who have attacked Christian farming villages across the Middle Belt for over a decade. These are not cattle raids. The targets, the timing and the villages emptied point to a jihadist purpose: clearing Christian communities off the land. Nigerian officials call them “bandits” or “herdsmen,” language that strips the killings of any pattern.
Eight Days of Violence
Angwan Gamo was the fourth attack in eight days, said Ado Alipiri, who chairs the internally displaced persons camps in Kajuru local government area.
The sequence began September 1 at Angwan Tsapta, near Mararaban Kajuru, where residents were seized. No outlet but TruthNigeria reported it.
“On the evening of September 6, Fulani terrorists invaded Ungwan Makama in the Karji area of Chikun local government area. They killed a young man and kidnapped seven men,” Alipiri told TruthNigeria. “This incident was not reported by the mainstream media, but it happened.”
Two days later, on September 8, gunmen struck Rimi, directly behind Ungwan Makama. One person was killed and four were marched toward Rijana, the forest camp complex on the Abuja-Kaduna highway that TruthNigeria documented this year as a working hostage economy.
Then, on September 9, they came for Ladidi’s family.
A Blackout, and a Bargain
Neither the military nor the Kaduna State government has responded publicly to any of the four attacks, Alipiri said. Nigerian newspapers and broadcasters have largely ignored them.
That silence is deliberate, said David Onyilokwu Idah of the International Human Rights Commission in Abuja.
“There is a deliberate attempt by media in Kaduna to downplay the reportage of kidnappings and killings of Christians in Kaduna State,” Idah told TruthNigeria. “The reason this is happening is that the state government has stated that it has a peace deal with the Fulani Ethnic Militia in which they would not kidnap or kill people again. Reporting the incidents would cast the governor in a bad light.”
TruthNigeria could not independently verify the existence of such an agreement.
Washington Is Watching, For Now
Angwan Gamo is now an American foreign policy question. In late 2025, President Donald Trump designated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern, the U.S. State Department’s label for governments that commit or tolerate severe religious freedom violations. He accused Abuja of allowing the killing of Christians and threatened to halt all American aid.
On December 26, 2025, U.S. aircraft struck Islamic State-linked positions in Sokoto State. President Bola Tinubu’s government, which denies any Christian genocide and argues that jihadists kill Muslims and Christians alike, answered with cooperation rather than defiance. A U.S.-Nigeria Joint Working Group on security was inaugurated in Abuja in January.
Nine months on, the killing has not stopped. The Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa, a Netherlands-based monitor working with Nigerian field researchers, documented 79,323 people killed and 34,917 abducted in terror-linked attacks between October 2019 and September 2025. Its six-year report, released in June, counted 18,915 Christians killed by Islamists, with Benue, Plateau and Kaduna the worst-hit states. Fulani militia killed at least 10,965 of them — four times the civilian toll of Boko Haram and ISWAP combined. U.S. troops deployed to the region withdraw at the end of September.
A bill pending in the U.S. House, the Nigeria Religious Freedom and Accountability Act, would force the State Department to report to Congress on what Washington is actually doing. Appropriators have already withheld funding from Abuja.
None of it reached Angwan Gamo.
An American Charity Fills the Gap
What did reach her was a small U.S. Christian charity. After TruthNigeria reported the Kajuru kidnappings, Judd Saul, founder and executive director of Equipping the Persecuted (ETP), approved emergency assistance. The group paid the hospital bill of Daniel Bulus, hospitalized after an attack, and gave Ladidi diapers, rice and an undisclosed sum. Five victims have been helped this month.
“ETP has paid between $10,000 and $13,000 in medical bills, food and other items for victims in Kajuru local government area between March and September 2026,” Alipiri said. “Over 200 persons have benefited.”
Those figures are Alipiri’s estimate, not independently audited. ETP also funds TruthNigeria’s reporting.
For a widow with seven children in a village no official has visited, that charity is the whole safety net. The government Washington is pressing has not sent anyone to take down her husband’s name.
Mike Odeh James and Luka Binniyat are conflict reporters. They write for TruthNigeria.
