NIGERIA TODAY: Christian Mourners, Burying Martyrs, Attacked by Fulani Militia. Casualties Mounting.
Eyewitness Says Soldiers Joined the Attackers.
The Question: Why Always Barkin Ladi?
By Mike Arnold
They came over the hills while the graves were still being dug.
May 6, 2026. Nding village, Fan District, Barkin Ladi Local Government Area. Mourners gathered to bury seven of their neighbors. The night before, a family of five had been wiped out in their home. Plus one more. The mourners brought shovels. They brought one another. They brought what was left of seven Christian bodies.
They got about two feet down before the gunmen came off the surrounding hills. At least five communities under coordinated assault at the same time.
That is the eyewitness account from Masara Kim, a Plateau-born conflict reporter and senior editor at Truth Nigeria — one of the bravest journalists working in Nigeria today. He stood there. He watched a civilian defender cut down in front of him — a brave man holding a line with a homemade gun against AK-47s. The mourners dumped the seven bodies into the shallow trench and ran.
About that homemade gun — let’s be honest about what it means. Nigeria has strict gun control, for those over whom the law is enforced. So it was either a Dane gun or a pipe gun. A Dane gun is a 19th-century flintlock musket. Black powder, single shot, made by the village blacksmith from scrap. A pipe gun is two pieces of plumbing pipe and a nail. That is what Berom civilian defenders bring to a fight against AK-47s.
The cry that always leads these attacks — Allahu Akbar — has been documented by every reporter who has survived one. Bishop Wilfred Anagbe testified to it before the European Parliament. Pastor Ezekiel Dachomo named it for Christianity Today. The Berom widows of Bassa carry placards that name it.
I broke this story to an international audience this morning. I had it from people in the field and from the head of a notable human rights group while AP and Reuters were still asleep. Within minutes, a man in northern Nigeria named Salihu M. Lawal posted the regime’s standard reply on my page: “How comes someone living from different continent knows about what’s going on…? He is among the engineers of so called he posted.”
The man two continents away who posted the news is the engineer. Not the men with rifles on the hills. Not the regime that lets them walk. Not the blood mineral barons. The witness is the criminal.
That is the regime playbook. Report the crime, you become the criminal. It tells you the post landed.
Whatever the final body count, one thing is already certain: Barkin Ladi keeps coming up.
Then the eyewitness called
It got worse.
I got a young man on the phone this afternoon from Barkin Ladi. A local. He had just come back from the mortuary. He told me he and Pastor Ezekiel Dachomo’s media team had personally moved a body there an hour earlier.
The body, he said, was a young Berom man. He told me the man was not killed by the Fulani militia coming over the hills.
He told me the man was killed by the Nigerian military.
Here it is in his own words: “Just when the attack was going on, there were some military personnel who came with a HELOCs van, and then with their gun truck, and they started shooting our youth.”
Then: “The people, the military who were sent to protect lives and properties, who were sent to protect us, are the ones now killing us.”
Then this: “I think the military are with the enemies, are with the terrorists. And that is what the world need to pay attention into. Like, the government are involved in all this terrorism happening in Nigeria… It clearly shows today we saw it with our own eyes.”
That is one eyewitness. It has not been independently verified at the time of this writing. But it is from a man who told me this was happening this morning, long before the world knew, and sent me his own pictures from the scene — and it lines up with what Plateau communities have been saying for years.
Two weeks ago, on April 21, residents of Gashish in this same Barkin Ladi LGA tore down the military checkpoint in their community. Thousands of them. Men, women, youth. They demanded the soldiers leave. Their accusation: the army fails to respond to distress calls, then surfaces after the killing to arrest the survivors.
Two weeks later, in the same LGA, Berom defenders are reportedly shot by soldiers while trying to protect a Christian burial.
Who is in charge
The senior military commander over Plateau State is Major General Folunsho Oyinlola, General Officer Commanding the Nigerian Army’s 3rd Division at Rukuba and Commander of Operation Enduring Peace, the joint task force responsible for security in Plateau since 2010.
Above him: Lieutenant General Waidi Shaibu, Chief of Army Staff. Above Shaibu: General Olufemi Oluyede, Chief of Defence Staff. Above Oluyede: Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Commander-in-Chief.
In February, Oyinlola told reporters: “Our loyalty is to the Constitution and the collective safety of Nigerians.”
If the eyewitness account holds up, that statement deserves a Senate hearing.
Prodigal sons
Now here is what the man over Oyinlola said.
In late March, at the inaugural lecture of the Armed Forces Joint Doctrine and Warfare Centre in Abuja, Chief of Defence Staff General Olufemi Oluyede was asked why his troops were being told to rehabilitate terrorists rather than kill them. His answer, on the record: “Even in the Bible, we heard about the prodigal son. If there was not that window for the man to come back, would they have come back?”
The killers, he said, are “Nigerians, mostly. And it’s important for us to give them that window to repent.”
The Chief of Defence Staff of Nigeria called the men who hack pregnant women to death at mining pits and shoot mourners burying their dead prodigal sons.
His counterpart, National Security Adviser Nuhu Ribadu, calls them “our brothers.”
Brothers. Prodigal sons. From the two men in Abuja who issue the orders to the army that is supposed to be defending Plateau.
Three weeks after Oluyede’s prodigal sons speech, his “prodigal sons” overran the 29 Task Force Brigade headquarters in Benisheikh, Borno State, and killed Brigadier General Oseni Omo Braimah along with multiple soldiers.
Today the same prodigal sons attacked a Christian burial in Plateau State. According to the eyewitness, soldiers under Oluyede’s chain of command shot the Berom defenders themselves.
The same name, over and over
Barkin Ladi. The Fan District. Atoso. Mazat. Tosho. Gakok. Nding. The same handful of square miles, again and again, in the casualty registers.
December 16, 2025: Fulani militia raid the mining site at Atoso in Fan District. Pastor Ezekiel Dachomo — friend, COCIN regional leader, the white-haired graveside prophet who has buried more than 3,000 of his own members — publishes the names and ages of all twelve dead miners.
December 17, 2025: another twelve miners killed in Fan District.
January 23, 2026: seven killed at a mining site in Gakok, Jos South.
Late April 2026: pregnant woman among four killed at the Mazat mining site, Fan District.
May 3, 2026: five ambushed coming home at night. Same district.
May 5, 2026: family of five plus one wiped out at Nding. Same district.
May 6, 2026: today. Mourners attacked at the burial. Eyewitness says Berom defenders shot by soldiers. Same district.
Same district. Same district. Same district.
When a pattern shows up that cleanly, you stop calling it tragedy and start calling it strategy.
And notice the targets. Not soldiers. Not government convoys. Miners. Mining sites. Mining families. The Berom artisanal miners with shovels and buckets and pulleys made from tree trunks.
Why always the miners?
What is under their feet
The Jos Plateau is the densest concentrated mineral belt in West Africa. Tin. Columbite. Tantalite. Zircon. Wolframite. Monazite. Niobium. Uranium. Lithium running through the same pegmatite veins that carry the tin.
Plateau State holds more than 29 different solid minerals. Tin from the Jos Plateau put Nigeria among the top five global producers from the 1940s through the 1960s. Columbite — the ore of niobium — has its richest Nigerian deposits right under Berom country. Tantalite is the metal that runs every smartphone, laptop capacitor, and missile guidance system on earth. Lithium is the battery in every electric vehicle being built in Detroit, Shenzhen, and Stuttgart.
The minerals are in Berom country. The killings are in Berom country.
In 2024 I sat in former President Goodluck Jonathan’s living room in Abuja for a private meeting. He leaned in and told me to investigate the blood minerals — that is what he named it. Said it was a main driver of the slaughter. The most courageous Nigerian president of the modern era — the man who was pushing back the jihad before Washington threw him out — pointed me at this and said look here.
That same trip, I drove the road from Jos to Bokkos and back, through Barkin Ladi. With my own eyes I saw mountains of fresh dirt rising on land that had been cleared by massacre. The people erased. The machinery arrived. The dirt heap is the receipt.
The racket, in his own words
The eyewitness didn’t just describe today’s killings. He described the structure that is making him and his neighbors disposable.
In his own Berom village, right now, a Chinese mining operation is running. He told me it started under a Chinese national. The Chinese man then handed it over to a Yoruba intermediary — a Nigerian face for the operation. They fell out. Somebody else took it over. The mining kept going.
The Berom landowners — the families whose ground it sits on — have never been compensated. When they protested, they were arrested and detained.
That is exactly the structure the U.S. congressional bill describes. Chinese capital. Local Nigerian fronts. Shell companies. The minerals leave. The owners get nothing. The protesters go to jail.
He is not theorizing. He is reporting from inside it.
Why always the miners
This is the part nobody wants to print.
The Berom artisanal miners are not just sitting on minerals. They are competition. Competition to a syndicate that has already sold the same ground.
Five Republican congressmen — Riley Moore, Chris Smith, Bill Huizenga, Brian Mast, and Mario Diaz-Balart — wrote it into the Nigeria Religious Freedom and Accountability Act of 2026. The bill states plainly that Chinese illegal mining operators in Nigeria pay protection money to Fulani militias for access to mining sites.
SBM Intelligence in Lagos documented it with audio. Militant leaders on tape boasting that Chinese miners pay rent to operate in their strongholds. The Times of London ran the videos. WikkiTimes in Bauchi traced one Chinese-affiliated operation to the terror faction of bandit leader Dogo Gide — the negotiations went through Dogo Gide’s own mother before mining could begin.
Tinubu himself has admitted it. He stood up and attributed the escalation of violence in northern Nigeria to unlawful mining. Said the proceeds arm the militias. Asked the international community for help. SBM Intelligence puts the cost at $9 to $10 billion a year. Off the books. Most of it from these hills.
But here is the part Tinubu did not say out loud.
On that same 2024 trip, across Plateau and Nasarawa, several very top community leaders told me the same thing — sitting across from me, looking me in the eye. They told me the blood mineral money does not just buy the militia its bullets. They told me a cut goes to the generals. To stand down. To not intervene.
That is testimony from senior sources on the ground. It is not yet a charge against any named officer. But it lines up with what the people of Gashish said when they tore down the checkpoint two weeks ago. It lines up with what the eyewitness told me today. And it lines up with the official policy: that the killers are brothers. That they are prodigal sons.
If that pattern is real, the contract has been quietly evolving. The Chinese front operator pays the syndicate for access. The syndicate pays the militia to clear the ground. According to those community leaders, the militia pays the generals to keep the army in the barracks while the village burns. The army surfaces afterward to arrest the survivors. The minerals leave through Lagos and Lome. The dollars come back through European shell companies. Everybody up the chain gets paid.
That is why the attacks always hit mining sites. That is why miners are gunned down at midnight while they sleep at the camp. That is why the Atoso massacre on December 16 killed twelve miners specifically — at a mining site. That is why pregnant Berom women die at the Mazat pit. The Berom artisanal miner is the small holder being cleared off ground that has already been promised to somebody else.
In Niger State — same playbook. In Zamfara — same playbook. In Kogi — same playbook. The map of “banditry” and the map of illegal mining are the same map.
What is over their head
The Berom never fell to the jihad of 1804. Usman dan Fodio’s armies could not climb the Plateau. So the descendants of that jihad built emirates around it instead — Bauchi to the north, Wase to the south. They have been working ever since to finish what dan Fodio’s cavalry could not.
The Berom paramount, the Gbong Gwom Jos, is a Christian seat over a Christian people. There is no traditional Muslim authority over Barkin Ladi in the proper sense. The land was never conquered.
But Plateau State has a Muslim traditional authority laid on top of it anyway. The Emir of Wase, Alhaji Muhammad Sambo Haruna II — first-class chief of a jihad-founded emirate, and Chairman of Jama’atu Nasril Islam in Plateau State. JNI is the operational arm of the Sultan of Sokoto’s Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs at the state level. He oversees JNI executive committees in all 17 LGAs of Plateau State.
The Sultan in Sokoto. The Emir in Wase. The chain of Islamic traditional authority over the Plateau Muslim ummah runs Sokoto to Wase to every JNI chapter in every LGA where the killing is happening.
When the killers attack Christian villages, the Emir calls for peace and dialogue. When Fulani are ambushed, he leads “powerful delegations” and demands arrests. After the Mangu attack on Fulani travelers last June, twenty-two suspects were arrested in days. After twenty years of slaughter of Christian Berom, Tarok, Mwaghavul, Irigwe, and Bokkos villagers, the equivalent has never happened.
He has never named the killers. He has never said genocide. He has never disowned Miyetti Allah.
The Christian governor of Plateau, Caleb Mutfwang, has used the word genocide on broadcast television. The Catholic Bishop of Makurdi has used it at the European Parliament. CAN has used it. The widows in Bassa carry it on placards.
The Muslim head over the area has not used it. The Sultan has not, either.
That silence is the story.
The chain
Lay it on the table.
You have, in one geography, the richest concentrated mineral belt in West Africa. You have indigenous Christian populations who have farmed and mined that ground for generations. You have a jihad-founded emirate structure laying religious-traditional claim over the same territory. You have Chinese illegal mining operators paying Fulani militia protection money for access. You have senior community leaders saying a cut of that money goes to the generals to stand down — and now an eyewitness saying the soldiers did more than stand down today. You have a Chief of Defence Staff who calls the killers prodigal sons and a National Security Adviser who calls them brothers. You have a federal regime that takes Washington money to insist this is “farmer-herder conflict.” You have a traditional Muslim authority on the Plateau who has never named the killers. You have ten billion dollars a year disappearing off the books.
And when an American who has been to Nigeria sixteen times reports a coordinated attack on a Christian burial — within minutes a stranger in northern Nigeria accuses him of engineering the conflict from a different continent.
Plateau bleeds because Plateau is rich. The killers know exactly what they are clearing. The buyers know exactly what they are paying for. The regime knows exactly whose silence keeps the contracts alive, as they wallow in rivers of blood money.
Pastor Dachomo prays over fresh graves with a Bible in hand. Masara Kim runs to the gunshots with his phone recording. The civilian defenders go out with their pipe guns to face AK-47s. And now — if the eyewitness is telling the truth, and I believe he is — to face the soldiers who are supposed to protect them.
They are not the engineers of anything. They are the witnesses. They are the heroes.
The engineers sit in palaces and embassies and lobby firms. In the front offices of mining companies registered to addresses in Beijing and London and Lagos that nobody ever knocks on. And — if the people on the ground are telling the truth, and the receipts keep piling up that they are — in the HQs of generals who took the money to look away.
The world needs to pay attention. Today.
#EarthShaker
Mike Arnold is the author of EPICENTER: Nigeria, Radical Islam, and the War for Global Order (#1 Amazon Bestseller) and founder of Africa Arise International.