Three Dates in Nigeria: The Anatomy of the World's Deadliest Place to Follow Christ

On a Sunday in January, in the Kajuru area of Kaduna State, armed men waited for the singing to start. Then they blocked the church doors and marched the congregation out at gunpoint. One hundred seventy-two people. Nine escaped in the first hours. The other 163, men, women, and children, were walked into the forest, and the local police spokesman's phone rang unanswered all the next afternoon.

On the eighth of June, nine United Nations human rights experts did something the UN rarely does. They put the plain facts on official letterhead: credible reports of killings, abductions, sexual violence, forced conversion, and forced marriage in Nigeria, targeting Christians and other religious minorities, and above all their women and girls.

And on a day in late October before either of those, a signature in Washington put Nigeria back on the short list of the world's worst violators of religious freedom, four years after another signature had quietly taken it off.

Three dates. A pew, a letterhead, a signature. Hold them together and you can see the whole shape of the largest ongoing assault on Christians anywhere on earth, and the reason you have probably read almost nothing about it.

This is the dossier.