A United Nations special rapporteur has warned that repeated attacks on religious communities, combined with weak law enforcement and poor accountability, are causing victims in Nigeria to perceive the violence as persecution or even genocide. Nazila Ghanea, the UN's top expert on religious freedom, made the remarks following a two-week visit during which her team conducted over 200 interviews across Abuja, Kano, and Jos, finding that security concerns dominated nearly every conversation. While Ghanea acknowledged she found no evidence of direct government intent to destroy a religious community — a legal threshold for genocide — she noted that senior legal experts she consulted could not rule out that genocide was occurring somewhere in the country, underscoring the gravity of Nigeria's overlapping crises, which include a jihadist insurgency, bandit gangs, and farmer-herder conflicts that frequently divide along religious lines.