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How ransom markets finance ongoing violence in Nigeria · Cultural Wars | America Out Loud News

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I'm your host, Lieutenant Colonel Sorgis and Gear, U.S.
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Army retired and CEO of the Near East Center for Strategic Engagement and a board member of the National Security Hour.
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My guest and a returning guest is uh Douglas Burton, who is an award-winning journalist and conflict reporter specializing in the coverage of sectarian political violence and war in Nigeria.
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He is a managing editor of TruthNigeria.com, Truth Nigeria.com, a journalist website where he mentors local reporters in North Central Nigeria and oversees field investigations into terrorism, insurgency and the religious persecution.
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And uh the reason I wanted to have uh Doug back on the show again is because, of course, of all the work that he has done and the efforts that have been undertaken uh by him over the years.
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Uh we're at a point at least, not as possible that uh the United States uh um especially uh in reference to what uh representative more promise or the U.S.
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will stand with Nigeria kidnapped Christians, and of course, we just came out of the uh holy week, and uh the sorry, uh I should say the Nigerian Christians were attacked again.
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Um Doug, I'm gonna welcome you here to the show.
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Thank you.
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It's my honor, my old Iraqi uh army buddy.
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Yeah, we've known we've known each other.
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We've been dealing in the same uh same sectors for years, and uh it's amazing everywhere you turn, it doesn't matter if it's in Iraq, uh Syria, uh Africa, uh Nigeria or what it be South Sudan, the Christians are really going through a hell of a lot uh during this process.
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But I do want to start off with maybe looking at something that uh uh maybe we haven't discussed them all uh a lot, but maybe it's something that also affects us here in the United States.
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I mean, uh I know in the past we've spoken, uh, you know, you talked about the civilized uh civilizational crisis that is being uh felt by the Nigerians.
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Um can you start with that if you don't mind, Doug, and talk a little bit about it and see how it affects us here in the U.S.
3:17
Yeah, thank you.
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Well, uh, I think in the kind of the wacky world that we live in today, a lot of people wonder what is happening to America.
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Like what is that what is the say the situation of our culture and our in our so-called civilization, right?
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Uh I happen to be a person of faith.
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Uh I'm politically active.
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Most of my uh compatriots in the conservative movement, the Republicans, uh, we are people of faith.
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We love our country, love its heritage, we like of our we love our people, like our president says we like all of our people, all backgrounds, all ethnicities, right?
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We don't we don't separate one ethnicity out as uh the enemy and affirm that other ethnicities because they were oppressed 200 years ago that they're morally superior.
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No.
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So I you know, I wondered uh, you know, when I lived overseas like yourself, I was in Iraq in 2006 and 2007.
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You were in the army, I was in the State Department, I was helping to stand up what we thought was a democratic regime.
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And then when I came back to the United States uh from in 2007, and I started, after a few years, I started to write about the campaign to recover Mosul during the ISIS period when they came in and took over one third of uh Iraq.
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And so during that time, uh the it seemed like the whole world was kind of turned upside down, right?
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And the way I I kind of see ourselves now, uh, you know, in the United States, I believe that as a person of faith, we're in a state of civilizational crisis.
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And the interesting thing is I write about Nigeria, I meant mentor a team of writers.
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What I discovered about Nigeria when I started to write about it in 2019 is Nigeria is also in a state of civilizational crisis, though it's 5,000 miles away, and the people have a very different history, and they don't look like most people in the United States, and yet the more you look into their civil war, you look into the politics, you look into the things they're dealing with, there you seek parallels to the to the American people.
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And that is why I care deeply.
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That's one of the reasons I care about Nigeria, because they're facing the same existential crisis as we are.
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Now, what do I mean by civilizational crisis?
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Essentially, Sargus, that means in our world, there's no consensus about what truth is.
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Two thousand years ago, conscious pilot asked Jesus, what is truth?
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In in uh in the Bible, the New Testament, Jesus said the truth shall make you free.
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Uh, this sentence is known to all Christians.
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The truth he was referring to is a religious truth, right?
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But in fact, it's also true that truth of any kind makes you free because it enables you to think logically and it enables you to prosper as a human being.
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What we encounter in the United States is there's no consensus about truth.
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For example, uh when Justice uh Katinji Jackson was interviewed for her uh for her nomination to the U.S.
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Supreme Court, she was asked by one U.S.
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senator, could she define what a woman is?
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And Helen Katanji Jackson could not say what a woman is.
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Astonishingly.
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That's an example of civilizational crisis.
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Is there consensus in our country about what the cause of COVID was, the COVID pandemic?
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Well, I think if we go back, we go back six years, there was a consensus.
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It virtually everyone thought uh it was a virus and it came from China.
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It came, it was it came out of a wet market in Southeast China, and then it spread like pandemic spread.
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After a year or two, uh the consensus changed radically.
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People realize that no, the real origin of this pandemic was the Wuhan uh biological weapons laboratory.
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Uh so we we've lost our faith in the administrative scientific state.
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But what about other sources of authority?
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What about climate change?
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Do we all believe in climate change now, like we did 20 years ago?
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50 years ago, Mr.
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Paul Ehrlich uh wrote his book, you know, the the the climate bomb or whatever.
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And this guy was the originator of the climate crisis theory.
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This man was hugely influential in his lifetime.
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Uh, unfortunately, he passed away at age 94 just a few weeks ago.
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Paul Ehrlich was hugely influential, but he was 100% wrong about all of his claims about uh global warming, about the uh the ice caps melting, about you know, the sea levels rising.
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Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
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Okay, no consensus about climate change.
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Is there consensus about gender?
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Uh many some Americans, especially those in the Democratic Socialist Party Party, believe there are more than two genders.
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There's maybe 20 genders, maybe 30 genders.
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Okay.
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Uh this is an example of the wildly evolving new truth about gender.
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But many Americans like me don't believe that uh that we don't believe that there are more than two genders.
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So there we're we're in crisis there.
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What what does it mean?
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What does it mean uh to have a reliable security state?
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Do we have confidence?
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Do we have faith?
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Do we have trust in our security agencies?
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I mean, like the CIA, the FBI, uh, the Department of Justice.
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I think if we go back 15 years, most people still had faith in their police agencies, but not after the political campaigns of 2016, not after the impeachment campaigns against Donald Trump, not after January 6th.
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No, since then, millions, tens of millions of Americans have lost faith in their so-called deep state agencies.
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So, in many ways, Americans are at a they're they're in an impasse where they don't know who to trust.
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The same thing is happening in Nigeria.
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Uh, the Nigerian Civil War uh has slowly evolved over the last 15 to 20 years, especially since 2015.
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It's a very complex war whereby a
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Constitutional Republic, patterned after the British model.
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It's a parliamentary system.
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Its constitution has many parallels to that of the United States.
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It's an emerging democracy, thoroughly corrupt, like many countries in the world.
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It's corrupt from top to bottom.
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I saw that when I visited Nigeria.
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Yet at the same time, it has it has African characteristics of 300 to 600 tribes.
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Very complex situation.
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But Nigeria has a parallel, many parallels to the United States.
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It's a fairly sophisticated country, very wealthy country, the wealthiest country in Africa, according to some measures.
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Nigeria has sophisticated media.
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It has dozens of universities, like the United States.
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But here's a parallel.
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The U.S., according to Donald Trump from 2015, has a it has a media establishment.
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It has a fake news media.
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It's a media that always cleaves toward centralization of power.
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It's reflexively supportive of the democratic regime, and it's reflexively hostile to the Republican Party.
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Nigeria has something actually quite similar.
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They have a fake news media as well.
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Okay.
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Okay, so I'm sorry, let's turn this off.
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It has a fake news media.
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It has an elite uh university system that tends to cleave toward whatever the government line says.
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And Nigeria has uh because of the fake news media and because of the enormous influence of the government in shaping media.
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The government bribes uh reporters.
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I know that because the 10 reporters who worked for me, many of them were professional reporters until I met them three years ago, and they got they took minor bribes every time they went to a press conference.
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They were paid a they were given a little packet of money uh by the uh spokesman for the press conference, usually an army officer.
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And so they tended to write things that the army's officer wanted to see in the newspapers.
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So Nigeria has a fake news media.
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It has a very powerful uh central government that can punish people easily if they get criticized, and the Nigerian uh government naturally, uh unsurprisingly, has intimidated the the not only the fourth estate, that's the journalist, they've also intimidated the clergy.
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Okay, so the clergy of the major churches in a country that is uh extremely religious.
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The leaders of the churches who should be the social critics, they should be the voice of protest against injustice.
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They tend to be uh they tend to be overly sympathetic to the government or afraid to criticize the government.
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This is also a sign of a civilization in crisis.
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This country cannot be reformed if there is a Christian genocide, and the leaders of Christianity are not willing to speak up.
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When we say Christian genocide, this is one of the central claims of the website that I run, Truth Nigeria.
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We see rampant evidence that there has been there is a genocide against Christians.
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Nigeria is the most dangerous country in the world for Christians.
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Uh approximately already this year, close to 4,000 uh people, nearly all of them Christians have been murdered.
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They've been killed uh in the various regions of Nigeria, chiefly in the north and in the middle belt.
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Nigeria has a problem with violence against Christians.
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There is a war on Christians in West Africa.
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But hello, here's another parallel.
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Many people claim that there's a war on Christians in the United States.
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There was a war on conservative Catholics during the Biden administration.
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There was a war that on uh uh on Christians when the FBI was tracking conservative Catholics, the followers of the old mass.
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There's a war on Christians when praying Catholics can't they can't get closer to than 25 feet to you know to uh an abortion mill uh without being arrested.
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There's a war on Christians uh when the Christians are cancelled when they're when they're uh stopped from uh uh being able to speak online.
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There is a war against people of faith all over the world, and there's a war on Christians in Nigeria.
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So these in many ways, uh I I've told my writers, you are in a situation where you're facing existential challenges.
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You're faced with a corrupt state, you're faced with rigged elections, you're faced with a fake news media, and yet these are existential challenges that Americans have.
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Many Americans believe the election of 2020 was entirely rigged, completely.
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Many Americans believe we have a fake news media, and that we are misguided.
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We are misinformed, and we are victims of an overarching, over overarching uh leftist-leaning atheistic cultural establishment.
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No, they do, and um um again, that's what uh as we you you kind of laid it out.
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That's what uh civilizational crisis is, and we're facing it here.
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Um for listeners out there, um, if you want to know the definition of civilizational crisis refers to a significant and often systematic failure within a complex society leading to a decline in social, political, economic structures, which uh um I think you did a wonderful job as far as laying that out.
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As far as the corruption index for um Nigeria, the uh uh transparency uh.org or global corruption barometer uh had uh asked uh uh the Nigerians and they do basically uh opinion polls uh of hundreds of thousands and 44% of Nigerians uh of the public service users paid a bribe in the previous 12 months uh to be able to operate, and then 43% of the people who taught corruption increase in the previous 12 months is what the number looks like.
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I do um I want to talk in our second segment um on the issues, especially with the Pope, a recent visit to Africa.
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And uh as you laid out that uh the churches are really not uh taking a leadership step to be able to address these issues.
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Uh, and uh hopefully we can uh dive a little bit deeper and see how we maybe be able to uh um open up uh or um uh address that friction point, uh, give some um uh uh possible uh ideas as to how the churches might be able to do a better job as far as representing the Christians of Nigeria.
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But that's it.
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We'll be back for the second portion of our discussion with Doug Burton.
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19:07
Welcome back to National Security Hour on American Outlaw Talk Radio Network on iHeart Radio.
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Again, I'm your host, Lieutenant Colonel Sorge Sangeri, U.S.
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Army Retired, and the CEO of the Near East Center for Strategic Engagement.
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19:53
Uh, my discussion continues with uh good friend of mine, um, uh Doug Burton.
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Uh he phones.
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2015 to 2017.
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He reported the multi-campaign against the Islamic State for Zengir News as an independent reporter before turning his focus to the Christian persecutions in Nigeria since 2019.
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Doug has uh authored hundreds of reports for publication, including Truth Nigeria.com.
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I recommend everybody please go to truthnigeria.com uh during our show and uh uh take a look at articles that are posted and share those oracles, the Epoch Times, Catholic News Agency, and Providence Magazine, his reporting has been featured by Fox Nation, the Christian Broadcasting Network, the Washington Times, Epic Times TV, and also the uh Westminster Institute.
20:45
Um Doug, uh, as we continue our discussions, I know that the Pope was uh in Africa this week.
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When uh you look at uh what he may have addressed in the past, uh uh really just uh in the past he's just expressed sorrow and concern over the recent wave of uh uh deadly attacks in Nigeria, and he urged the government uh to ensure the safety and persecution, uh, or sorry, protections uh of all the citizens.
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Uh he also highlighted the uh humanitarian crisis and the need for authentic religious freedom aimed uh or admit uh escalating violence affecting both Christians and he also Muslims in the region.
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Um but uh with his visit, of course, uh he did not make a specific uh uh you know trip to um actually go to uh Nigeria.
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Um and I again uh I had written an article in uh 2015, um, and the article that I wrote uh talked about who should speak for Islam or who speaks for Islam, who should speak for Islam.
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And frankly, I I noted that in that uh capacity, the Middle East really doesn't have any specific leader like we have a Pope, you know, who could go to the UN speak there, and even though you have various different branches of Christianity, at least everybody still listens, even though if you don't agree with uh the Pope or you don't fall under his chain of command from a uh from a multi-perspective.
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Uh the uh issue is that uh in this particular case, even with this visit, he really uh uh did not uh make a trip specifically uh to Nigeria to um really put emphasis on what is happening.
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Um just your thoughts uh about as we spoke in the last segment that the churches are really not taking those steps, and I was interviewed recently on um uh news broadcast, and they asked me about the issues of why the root of Christianity in this case of certain Christians in the Iraqas are are about to be uh uh eradicated and I said they they could be eradicated under President Trump uh over the next three years.
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I mean, you know, they're in a level of crisis that they cannot recover from.
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Uh, you know, I mean, uh, the entire root of Christianity uh languages you spoke Aramaic could be wiped out, but nobody really from the Western churches are engaged to even care about helping them.
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Um what is the issue at heart?
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Uh I know that Trump recently and his back and forth with the uh Pope said that uh, you know, where were the churches when uh there was a lockdown of the churches or in the COVID times?
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What steps did you take to be able to ensure that uh you still kept the churches open uh and were still able to you know expand the gospel message um you know throughout the entire world, and I'm not sure if the church is so maybe bogged on the fighting that they have loss of focus that uh their main job should be and had to be uh the expansion of the uh gospel uh throughout the entire world.
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Just your little perspective, and how does that affect uh Nigeria itself?
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Sargus Nigeria is in a crisis, it's a crisis of faith, and they are in an existential crisis because Christianity is being wiped out uh in Nigeria.
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Now, that may sound like a radical statement because approximately half of the people in Nigeria has a population of 226 million people, half of them, roughly half, are Christian.
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But why do I say it's being wiped out?
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Because I study Nigeria, I study it every day.
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I talk to battlefield reporters, I talk to conflict reporters, I edit their pieces six days a week.
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And the the pieces that we publish on Truth Nigeria are about Christian genocide, it's about uh rampant ongoing attacks against Christians that are violent, and sometimes they, if they're not a uh violent attacks, they are legal procedures that marginalize Christians, take away the religious freedom, force underage girls to parry to marry uh uh older men, for example, force Christian girls to wear the hijab uh covering when they go to school.
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There are hundreds and hundreds of ways that the Muslim elites in Nigeria, which is supposed to be a constitutional republic, enforce Islamization onto the Christian half of the country.
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And the Christians are not responding, they're not defending themselves.
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They are not fighting back, and unless Nigerians fight back and they defend themselves against terrorism until they fight back and assert pride in their faith and evangelize and convert Muslims, they're going to continue to lose ground.
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They're going to continue to lose market share in the northern parts of the country where Muslims are the majority.
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They're going to lose market share in the very populous southern regions of Nigeria where they have huge cities.
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Lagos, for example, is the largest city in Africa.
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It's got more than 20 million people, majority Christian, but many millions of people who are Muslim.
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There are other huge cities in Nigeria.
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The Nigerian Christians are chiefly concentrated in the South, and many of them are overconfident.
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They don't think that they're threatened by Islamization because they don't hear, they don't suffer attacks on a weekly basis, like the Christians who live in the middle and northern parts of the country.
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But the days coming when they will be threatened and they'll be on the run as acutely and as tragically as the Assyrian minority population on this plains of Nineveh.
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Now, I was in Iraq for two years.
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And I visited several times.
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I think four times I went back, I went to the Kurdish Republic of Northern uh Nigeria.
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I mean northern Iraq.
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And I visited, I I visited Mosul, I visited these towns uh that were on the front lines of the ISIS takeover of northern Iraq.
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Something similar is happening in Nigeria, but at a at a at a different stage.
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Islamism is a killer ideology.
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It is more than a religion.
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It's more than a faith.
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It is a power religion, and it's the basis for a civilization, which I believe is far inferior to Christianity.
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There's no comparison.
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The difference, a key difference between Isla Islamism, which means surrender, it means total surrender to Islam, and Christianity is that Christianity is the basis for freedom.
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Just let that sink in.
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Christianity is the basis for freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom of faith, freedom of movement, and freedom to create your own world.
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The basis of our great country that you and I both love, and I think your listeners love it, is that our the covenant of our founders in 1776 was uh along these lines.
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It was a covenant with our uh our divine creator, uh, that allowed that all human beings, all men are created, are endowed with life, liberty, the the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
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That's our covenant with our founder.
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Okay.
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And what I've come to understand is that that covenant that our our create our founders established in our declaration of independence, that is a covenant that all people in the world have a right to.
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In fact, one of my uh pastor friends, uh the uh Laddie Thompson has written a great book that's going to be published soon about this very thing.
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All Nigerians love America.
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They want to visit America.
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Many have relatives in the United States, and the reason they love America is America is where people can worship freely and they can be anything they want to be.
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They don't have to worry about discrimination, about treated second class.
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That's their that is a universal barrier for Christians in Nigeria.
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So here's the point.
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We the people in Nigeria are in a struggle.
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They're in a struggle for they're in a fight in to the death to live for freedom, to experience freedom, and to have the freedom to express their faith because they're fighting against Islamism.
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Now, this is politically incorrect to say, but the fact is if you examine Nigerian history, if you examine their constitution, you see rampant discrimination against Christians.
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For example, in the Nigerian in the Nigerian constitution, which was not written uh freely by legislators who came in a constitutional convention, it was written by
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The autocratic uh dick dictatorial regime in in Nigeria 1999.
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It mentions Islam or uh Islamic faith 234 times.
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It doesn't mention mention Christianity a single time.
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Okay.
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The symbol for the uh Nigerian defense department symbol has Arabic script at the very center of it.
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Why Arabic script?
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Because that's the core of their national consensus created by the pro-Muslim jihadist oriented uh rulers, the dictatorial regime that wrote the constitution uh in 1999.
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Nigeria has a skewed, it has a skewed political system that's uh that's rigged against Christians.
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So Nigeria isn't a fight, and it will never get out of the fight unless it faces and it faces its dilemma, faces the its threat clearly and unequivocally and sees that it is threatened by it is threatened by discrimination, it's threatened by Islamism, and it's threatened by sectarian hatred.
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That's why uh Nigeria is the most dangerous country for Christians to live in the entire world, according to open doors, okay, which is a a respected uh uh Christian uh website that tracks persecution of Christians worldwide.
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So Nigerians are they're in an uphill fight, and Christians in the West, especially in the United States, need to identify with them and realize that their fight is our fight.
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We are them and they are us.
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They're further along in this fight than we are, because half of their country is is is Muslim, not Islamist, just Muslim.
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However, the core, the the core agency uh that's causing the discrimination causing the death, the genocide in Christianity is a small group of people associated with chiefly one ethnicity.
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It's the Falani tribe, uh, which is a large tribe in the north of Nigeria, and the house of people, which is the largest uh ethnicity in Nigeria.
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These two groups, houses and Felani people, chiefly occupying the northern part of the country, tend to be Muslim, especially the Felani people.
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And one of the most one of the deadliest terrorist groups in in Nigeria is rarely mentioned.
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It's not tracked by the United States, but it is the most deadly.
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That is the Falani ethnic militia.
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They kill these Felani ethnic uh gangs, often called bandit gangs, are radicalized.
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They uh they always attack villages and and they massacre people uh under the cry of Alahu Akbar, which means God is great.
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They see the the elimination they see the uh the extermination and the cleansing of Christians from the northern part of the country as part of their religious duty, and and they uh and they are completely they're vicious and they are heartless in the way they uh attack, kill, kidnap, and torture Christians.
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In fact, one of the stories that we're that is on our website, uh, which might be which might be a the a feature in the in the Washington Times tomorrow or day after tomorrow, I'm not sure.
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It's a story about very very about mass rape as a tool of terrorism.
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It's a it's a story about uh uh kidnap uh hostage kidnap camps that produce unbelievable amounts of money for these Felani ethnic gangs.
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We have estimated we have done studies on these criminal groups in the north central Nigeria.
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These are not associated with insurgencies you might have heard about, like Boko Haram, which means uh Western learning is for forbidden or ISIS.
33:56
You and I know a lot about ISIS because we were fighting ISIS while we are in Iraq.
34:01
No.
34:02
Uh these are radicalized so-called bandit gangs, but they have an ideology and an attitude toward Christians, which is essentially the same, virtually the same as ISIS.
34:13
When these various groups are seen as an as an aggregated whole, that is the bandit gangs, the and the ISIS and the radicalized groups, including all the al-Qaeda groups in Nigeria.
34:26
When you see what their end game is, it's it's the complete cleansing or the subjugation of Christians in the entire Niger basin.
34:37
Okay.
34:38
That means it's it's the extermination of Christianity.
34:42
That means it's very similar to the Nazi goal of ridding Europe of all the Jews.
34:49
It's racial, it is vicious, it is inhumane, it is satanic, and it has to be seen that way.
34:57
This doesn't mean that half of the Nigeria's people are evil, satanic.
35:01
No, not at all.
35:03
But what it means is that this brand of Islamic fanaticism, call it jihadism.
35:10
It has to be identified, it has to be critiqued, it has to be exposed, and it has to be opposed.
35:16
Okay.
35:17
So that is why this a very wonderful man named Judd Saul, who is a documentary filmmaker and he's a missionary to Nigeria, has he has hired me uh three and a half years ago to help him create a website called Truthnigeria.com.
35:33
Our purpose is to show with facts uh and and with expert reporting to expose the Christian genocide.
35:42
We do it by emphasizing uh three things.
35:45
We emphasize truth, we emphasize the truth of science in our reporting with the truth of common sense, and sometimes the wisdom of the Bible, these three things.
35:57
Truth of science, truth of common sense, and the wisdom of the Bible.
36:01
Because through these founts of authority, we're showing that the crisis of civilization in Nigeria is something that Americans can relate to because many Americans realize that there is a war on Christianity in this country.
36:16
There is a war on there's a war on family in this country, there's a war on biblical truth, there is a war on faith.
36:24
There's a war on faith, family, and uh religion, faith, family, and country in this uh in this country as well.
36:33
That is why Nigerians and the American people are in a common struggle.
36:39
Yeah, they they are.
36:40
I mean, literally the Nigerians are the Americans of Africa right now dealing with this issue, just like we are here.
36:47
And maybe that's a point that the police needs to know.
36:50
Uh and uh because he has a vision as what he wants for the United States, if it's explained that way to them, uh, that the Nigerians want to sing for themselves.
36:58
He might be more easily able to um maybe get the uh U.S.
37:03
apparatus to kind of look into that conflict as you were measuring that uh, you know, everybody in the international community is focused on the jihadist groups like Boko Haram and the Islamic State, West Africa province or IS uh Iswap, um, but really the most devastating threat as you have been talking about is systematically eradicating uh complete communities out of Nigeria is the Falani ethnic uh militia.
37:29
There was a uh uh research that was done uh looking at uh Orfadat Africa and between 2019 and September 2024, they documented 66,656 deaths across Nigeria and 36,000 plus or civilians, of course.
37:48
And there were 47% of those deaths were tied to uh what the uh Falani ethnic militia has conducted, uh while Sunnian killings uh more than uh five times of the combined deaths that have been uh you know uh attributed to Boko Haram and the uh Islamic State West Africa province all combined together, which only accounts for 11% of those deaths.
38:14
So uh in this particular case, we know who the uh total in the world is, and frankly, uh I think when you confront them, you're gonna confront them with the violence and combat.
38:26
Because these individuals are not gonna stop.
38:28
Otherwise, you get to go in and you gotta shut off their funding streams, and I do want to talk about that and the third segment uh of our discussion as to the funding that these individuals are getting.
38:38
We'll continue our uh discussion with Doc Burton, an award-winning uh journalist um and uh also conflict reporter specializing in the coverage of sectarian political violence and war in Nigeria, and he's the managing editor of TruthNigeria.com.
38:53
We'll be back for the final segment of our discussion.
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40:52
Welcome back to National Security Hour on America Now Bob Talk Radio Network on iHeart Radio, where you're hearing the voices of freedom and A Black Truth from uh today from Doug Burton Dog himself, uh, as I stated uh the award-winning uh journalist and a conflict reporter specializing in the coverage of sectarian violence and war in Nigeria, and he's also, of course, the editing manager of truthnigeria.com.
41:19
Uh Doug, um, as we're looking at this uh issue, and you kind of laid it out where well, I know you have an article coming out uh in the Washington Post.
41:28
I, if I'm not mistaken, it was uh pulse of today, but it might be posted tomorrow.
41:33
But uh you were able to look uh at uh basically the rape sex torture of women and kidnapped camps uh that has been cited by uh woman AGO uh and I know that you're the uh uh byline writer for this particular article for the Washington Times.
41:51
Uh I'm glad that a representative more uh has promised that US will staminarian kidnap Christians.
41:58
Tell us a little bit about uh how these networks are uh making money for themselves and how is it possible for us to be able to counter it?
42:06
First, we need to, of course, know about it, and what are the processes and steps you have to take to be able to counter it to ensure that their supply chain is that is feeding them the dollars that they're making uh and on this effort uh that is finally stopped, so we can at least combat them on the battlefield also.
42:23
Exactly.
42:24
Well, Sergis, many people have asked uh how does ISIS get its money?
42:30
Where do they get the money for weapons?
42:31
Where do they get the money for ammunition for their you know their armored personnel carriers, etc.?
42:39
Where do they get it?
42:41
So is it coming from the Persian Gulf?
42:43
Is it coming from Saudi Arabia?
42:44
Uh is it coming from Turkey?
42:46
Uh is it coming from Iran?
42:48
Well, possibly all of those countries could be some of it, but the fact is, according to uh diplomatic uh sources that I've talked to, uh, you know, the our the ambassador for the Sahelian region uh uh is that I've interviewed for stories.
43:06
Most of the money for jihadism in Nigeria, it comes from within Nigeria.
43:11
Uh the groups called the Islamic State of West Africa, for example, Al Qaeda, they're they're not funded by the Persian Gulf.
43:19
They might be, they might get some funding, so they might get some financing, but actually they make their they make money based upon doing crime within Nigeria, like kidnapping for ransom.
43:30
And if you study the origins of Islamic state of, if you study the origins of uh the Islamic state uh uh of the of the Levant, ISIS, the Islamic uh state of uh Yeah, I I saw at the time, Islamic State of Lama.
43:49
ISIS uh of course we're saying how did they start out?
43:53
If you look at their origins, they began as remnants of al-Qaeda who were not destroyed by the U.S.
44:00
Army and the victorious uh Iraqi forces in 2011.
44:06
They escaped and they many of them uh established in the rural areas of Syria.
44:13
Okay, and they began to support themselves with kidnapping for ransom with extortion and theft, and they built up very successful uh criminal organizations.
44:22
They did all kinds of crime.
44:24
Well, kidnapping for ransom was the chief uh revenue for them, and they they made millions of dollars through kidnapping for ransom, and they continue to do that through all of the time that ISIS was established as a world power in Mosul.
44:39
That kind of criminality has uh been raised to the uh the highest level in Nigeria, especially in the south-central parts of the country.
44:50
There's one particular state that's got more than five million people where kidnapping for ransom has devastated farming communities uh in the southern part of the state where most of the people are Christian.
45:02
And this is a the uh the tragic uh, you know, report content that I had to report today uh in the article that I submitted to the Washington Times.
45:13
I hope that they publish it.
45:15
It's based upon uh a devastating revelation in a Zoom call we had this very day.
45:21
One of my friends, one of my uh sources in Kaduna City, Miss uh Al Hari uh uh Bawa explained that she runs a an NGO for women and she takes care of uh women who have been traumatized by uh sexual attacks by rape by these kidnappers.
45:43
Now, the kidnappers typically come into villages and they kidnap defenseless Christians who are either unarmed or they're underarmed.
45:51
They might have some shotguns or homemade guns, but they don't have the same weapons that the kidnappers have.
45:57
The kidnappers carry AK-47 or AK-49 assault rifles, and they're allowed to have these rifles, even though there's very strict gun control in Nigeria.
46:07
They're allowed to carry them because the government of Nigeria has a two-tiered legal system.
46:14
They allow members of the preferred ethnicity, the Felani Muslims, they allow those people who are associated with cattle herding, they're allowed to carry weapons anywhere, all the time.
46:28
They are never disarmed.
46:30
But the gun control laws are enforced against the Christian farmers rigorously.
46:36
So when police or soldiers see local people in these Christian villages carrying a shotgun, they have they are challenged.
46:47
And if they don't have a license uh to have a gun, the licenses would say they're a registered hunter or they're or they are parts of a local community guard, which is supposed to do security for their village, then that that gun will be taken away.
47:02
So the Nigerian authorities regularly disarm Christians and give them a huge disadvantage when they are attacked by these well-armed Filani ethnic militia.
47:15
So the well-armed Filani militia are highly organized by their cattle cattle herding barons who are very, very wealthy men uh in the northern part of Nigeria, and they uh come into the towns and villages in the middle belt of the country, and they massacre people.
47:36
Oftentimes they massacre some people, or they kidnap many people.
47:40
For example, on Easter Sunday, there were attacks in eight different states.
47:44
And in the state of Kaduna, there was an attack in a town called uh Arico, uh, which is uh not too far from the capital of Abuja in Arico.
47:56
Uh, a group of uh 30 to 50 militia came into town on Easter Sunday.
48:02
They attacked people in two different churches.
48:05
They killed seven, they killed seven men, and they kidnapped 60 people, but fortunately, uh 31 people were able to get away.
48:15
They were ran into the bushes when the kidnappers tried to move them out of the town.
48:20
But 37 people, chiefly uh women and small children uh were driven into the forest, and they've been sheltered, they've been held as captives for 10 days with no shelter, sitting down chained together under foliage and during the rain and the beatings of their captors for 10 days.
48:40
But not only that, according to the lady uh Ms.
48:45
Bawa, who counsels women who've been raped, the the women in this group are very likely being raped daily.
48:52
They're being raped, and the men are also being attacked sexually.
48:56
Many of in many of these hostage camps, and there are large ones uh in the the middle belt of Nigeria.
49:03
There uh there are four, at least four large hostage camps that we know of.
49:08
Uh the uh there are hundreds of uh of captives, and they're held for long periods of time until the relatives can uh gather very huge, the painful ransoms to get them out of these camps.
49:24
We have done Truth Nigeria has published more than 18 investigative stories based on videotaped interviews with survivors of these camps.
49:34
Some Western media have come have uh interviewed our reporters, such as Christian Broadcasting, but the but the Nigerian media based in Nigeria itself, they have done no corroborations of our reporting uh because they know if they do, they're going to be persecuted by the Nigerian government.
49:53
The licenses of the media owners are going to be challenged, and the reporters themselves know that.
50:00
that they uh they criticize the government they're not going to they're they're not going to be given work they're not going to be they're going to be tracked they will not be preferred by their companies so they dare not compliment or is they dare not copy our stories and reveal the existence of these hostage camps although the government itself in February of 2025 uh did a big showcase ceremony in a buja itself in which the national security administrator he paraded 59 men and women who had been held in a kidnap hostage camp in Regana this this town of Rijanna which is about uh 40 miles south of Kaduna is very proud of the fact that the security authorities had rescued these people but a week later Truth Nigeria published an interludes with survivors of these camps in Rajana and the government never acknowledged it would not the uh the police and the uh the FBI people in the Nigeria would never return calls from our reporters who are prize winning reporters by the way and uh in the in the interim since that time Truth Nigeria has published 18 stories about hostage holding camps and about the tortures the tortures and the uh the sexual violations the gender crimes against people against both men and women there are many instances according to uh a reporter today in the zoom poll of uh young men whose genitals are being beaten with sticks until they pass out uh the crimes are so serious that many people require many weeks and months of therapy uh rehabilitation uh therapy this is an atrocity and according to uh Dr.
52:03
Gregory Stanton who's the founder of the respected research group called genocide watch this is a war crime and the Nigerian government is complicit with it our founder judge saul has said uh to us and it's in the story that uh he's been helping the survivors of these camps for a year and a half and it's clear to him that the Nigerian government knows about the camps they know exactly where they are they know what's going on and they are complicit with this business we we did a study of all the people and the ransoms that were paid for people who the hundreds of people who had been captured and ransomed out uh from these kidnap camps over a one year period in the state of of Kaduna and we concluded that at least 1.8 million dollars in ransoms were collected by these organized killers many of the people who go to these camps they never come out they get executed because their relatives cannot come up with the funds to get them out uh when the people do come out they've been starved for all the days that they're there uh Doug if I may uh jump in here real quick we got five minutes left in the sh uh in the show I do want to get a couple of things here looked at because I I'm I'm interested to see if the administration in the portos knows about this and whether or not they're doing anything about it.
53:27
I know you mentioned the ranchers and just looking at the economic benefits of ranching um uh which of course as we know in Nigeria has been you know talked about whether or not it becomes an issue of uh land rights and the economic benefits but the government projections uh has looked at the modern ranching in Nigeria uh can yield up to at least 74 billion dollars over the pet next five years for them so that's a huge amount of money that they'd be willing to execute anybody on the ground especially the farmers and get them out of the uh way um is this is ahead of the snake the uh the these ranch uh ranchers the the bosses uh which if that's ahead of the snake uh you know um uh is up to the people who are being killed whether or not I want to go in and uh kill the head of the snake or is it uh uh nation states like uh near peer like China and others that are tied to uh basically to these ranchers who are basically their puppets are executing these operations I mean 74 billion dollars is a lot of money over a five five year period I can understand why uh you would clear a range of Christians out of an area in order to be able to secure it for your own benefit in the long term Sargus they don't have any ranches there are no ranches in Nigeria the the people who own these large cattle herds and by the way these herds are owned by very wealthy men they they all have as many as 2,000 cattle uh in a single herd and they uh they migrate from the northern parts of the country to the south and they they this is their this is their their traditional uh route of passing through public land or privately owned land uh from during the rainy season and then to through the dry season so it's a seasonal migration tradition the people who own these herds do not have ranches ranches are almost unheard of in Nigeria because the people who own the cattle industry don't want them they want to use the public land and they want to use uh grazing they want to graze their cattle over the farmland that is owned by private uh farmers private the the private plots of farmers many of whom maybe the majority of whom are christian so the government says this is a this is a conflict and what we have in this country is squabbles clashes between farmers and herders and it's it's not unique to Nigeria it happens all over Africa.
56:05
I wish we could talk a little bit more unfortunately we're out of time today um we will have you back again for an update hopefully in another three four months and I hope by then um uh that we have uh cleared up all the issues of the Middle East and we can be focused on a little bit more as to what's happening uh in the region especially in Nigeria um my uh guest today was uh uh Douglas Burton an award winning journalist and conflict reporter specializing in the coverage of sectarian violence uh and war in Nigeria he's a managing editor of Truthnigeria.com please go ahead and visit Truthnigeria.com god bless you all and we will talk to you guys next week