The 2025 Nigeria data does not describe a single national emergency with regional variations. It describes four distinct systems of violence that differ in who carries them out, what they are trying to achieve, how they generate casualties, and who they affect. Their statistical signatures are not merely different — in the two largest cases they are close to opposite.
A single national figure of 4,728 killed and 4,160 abducted averages these four systems together. That average describes none of them accurately, and it obscures the finding most useful to advocacy: that the region with the highest lethality against Christian communities and the region with the highest abduction volume are different places, driven by different actors, with different victim profiles.
