The Trump administration should put pressure on the government of Nigeria to stop allowing Islamicists to attack Christians, a Catholic bishop told a congressional committee this week.

Militant Muslims have engaged in religious cleansing of large portions of the country — killing, kidnapping, raping, stealing land and renaming villages — said Bishop Wilfred Anagbe, a Claretian missionary who leads the Diocese of Makurdi, in the central region of the country.

“The experience of the Nigerian Christians today can be summed up as that of a Church under Islamist extermination. It is frightening to live there,” Bishop Anagbe told the U.S. House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa during a hearing Wednesday.

“Apart from the violent campaigns and attacks against Christian villages, there are now attempts by the Islamic Council of Nigeria and various Islamic groups to impose sharia [Islamic] law on the Christian populations,” he said.

In an interview outside the hearing room, he said militant Muslims want to eliminate Christianity in the country.

“The persecution of Christians generally, and Catholics, in Nigeria is the work of an Islamic agenda to conquer the territory and make it become an Islamic state in West Africa,” Bishop Anagbe told EWTN News Nightly on Wednesday.

The bishop told members of the Africa Subcommittee that government officials in Nigeria give Muslim attackers what he called “impunity.”

“When we call for help to the police and the army, they do not come,” Bishop Anagbe said.

A spokesman for Nigeria’s embassy to the United States in Washington, D.C., could not immediately be reached for comment on Friday afternoon.

The bishop told members of the subcommittee that he wants U.S. federal officials to designate Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC) under the federal International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, which would make Nigeria eligible for diplomatic and other sanctions.

President Donald Trump designated Nigeria as a CPC in December 2020, near the end of his first term. President Joe Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, lifted the designation in November 2021. The U.S. Department of State’s report that month described continuing anti-Christian attacks in the country but did not give a reason why Blinken changed the country’s status.

Nigeria, in West Africa, is the continent’s largest country and the sixth-largest country in the world, with a population of about 236 million. Estimates of its religious breakdown vary, but several find that a little more than half the country is Muslim and a little less than half is Christian, including the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook. About 10% of the country’s people are Roman Catholics.

Earlier this month, an organization called Open Doors, which supports persecuted Christians, listed Nigeria as among the most persecuting countries.

“More believers are killed for their faith in Nigeria than anywhere else in the world,” the organization said, as reported by ACI Africa, a sister news outlet to the Register, earlier this week.

During the past decade, 145 Catholic priests in Nigeria have been kidnapped, according to Agenzia Fides, a news agency of the Vatican. Of those, 11 have been killed and four are missing, the agency said, as reported earlier this week by ACI Africa.

During the hearing in Washington on Wednesday the bishop described the persecution of Christians in Nigeria as frequent and systematic.

“A long-term Islamic agenda to homogenize the population has been implemented over several presidencies, through a strategy to reduce and eventually eliminate the Christian identity of half of the population,” Bishop Anagbe said. “This strategy includes both violent and nonviolent actions, such as the exclusion of Christians from positions of power and abduction of church members, the raping of women, the killing and expulsion of Christians, the destruction of churches and farmlands of Christian farmers, followed by the occupation of such lands by the Fulani herders, and also changing the names of these villages.”

Fulani herders are semi-nomadic people in West Africa who herd cattle and often clash with farmers.

“They are taking over the places, so you clearly see an expansionist approach … and then they are making the people now flee and leave their villages and they take the concrete,” he said.

He also said that this year the governors of 12 states in northern Nigeria have closed all schools during the entire five-week period of Ramadan, which he said even predominantly Muslim countries in the region don’t do.

The hearing was the eighth the Africa Subcommittee has held on religious persecution in Nigeria since the first one in July 2012, said the chairman, U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J.

“Since then, however, the wanton violence against Christians in Nigeria has grown significantly worse,” Smith said.

He cited news reports of the kidnapping and murder of Father Sylvester Okechukwu, a Catholic priest in the north-central state of Kaduna, on Ash Wednesday.

“According to the sources in the diocese, Father Sylvester was bound by his kidnappers. He was shot in the head — and I saw the picture; it is heartbreaking to look at — shot at close range with an assault rifle, according to the officials of his diocese,” Smith said. “The systematic slaughter and abuse of Nigerian believers must stop. Delay is denial — and a death sentence to so many.”