JOS, Nigeria—A wave of terrorist attacks following Nigeria’s presidential elections has terrified Christians and renewed fears of an Islamic caliphate in Africa’s most populous nation.

At least 1,041 Christians have been killed across the country since January by Islamic extremists, according to Emeka Umeagbalasi, a respected criminologist and genocide researcher.

Umeagbalasi said the attacks are influenced by the outcomes of the presidential elections, which produced a Muslim president and vice president-elect for the first time in the country.

Umeagbalasi is the board chairman of the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety), an organization that tracks and reports genocide in Nigeria.

He told The Epoch Times in a phone interview that, “70 to 80 percent of the attacks occurred a week before the elections or shortly after.”

According to Umeagbalasi, Boko Haram and ISIS terrorists seeking to establish an Islamic state are responsible for the attacks, together with militants from the Fulani ethnicity.

The Fulani are a large ethnic group in West Africa that claims up to 20 million members in Nigeria.

Militants who identify as members of the tribe include village-raiding semi-nomadic herdsmen and kidnap-for-ransom bandit terrorists besieging the northwest and north-central regions.

Attacks by the Fulani militants have claimed six times more lives than Boko Haram in recent years, according to the HART foundation, a nonprofit organization in the UK.

And Fulani terrorists are responsible for more than half of killings this year, claiming the deaths of more than 528 Christians as of April 10, said Umeagbalasi.

The attacks in Nigeria are genocidal against Christians according to Solomon Maren, a member of the Nigerian House of Representatives.

But President Muhammadu Buhari—who boasted of making “successes on security” in a tweet for Easter on April 7—has “turned a blind eye” to the attacks which have surged in recent weeks, said Maren, who represents a district in Plateau state at the House of Representatives.

“Consistently we see Christians being massacred and the president who is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces is not doing anything to stop them,” Maren told The Epoch Times.

In one of the latest instances on April 16, a series of attacks were made on five villages 30 miles southeast of Jos, the capital of Plateau state.

The attacks claimed “several lives and properties” according to Governor Simon Lalong.

A former Speaker of the Plateau State House of Assembly, Titus Alams, hails from the area and said at least three people were killed.

For several hours, 200 to 300 terrorists armed with assault rifles swarmed the Christian communities on the boundaries of Mangu and Bokkos counties burning houses and shooting at residents as they tried to flee, Alams told The Epoch Times.

The terrorists started attacking Marish, Murish, Maitumbi, Bet, and Ruboi communities at about 2 pm, hours after three locals killed the previous day were buried, said Alams in a telephone interview.

A group of 20 to 30 civilian volunteers fighting with homemade single-shot guns in each community were only successful in delaying the terrorists to enable women and children to escape, Alams said.

“They were overwhelmed,” he said, noting a military task force located 10 miles away did not arrive at the scene until six hours later.

A spokesman of the Nigerian Army’s 3rd Division in Jos, Major Ishaku Takwa told The Epoch Times a convoy of military vehicles responding to the attacks crashed, injuring eight soldiers.

The attacks, which came three days after five people were killed at a mining site in the west of Bokkos, were carried out by Fulani militants, Alams said, and followed a mass invasion of a Christian town 100 miles away in the south of Kaduna state that killed at least 33 people.

A band of 100 armed terrorists invaded the farm town of Runji in the Zangon Kataf county on April 15, killing 33 and wounding at least six others according to county chairman Zimbo Machaudi.

“The terrorists razed at least 30 houses, incinerating more than 20 residents including babies trapped inside them before the military intervened,” said Machaudi to The Epoch Times.

The commander of the Special Task Force in charge of southern Kaduna, Brigadier General Timothy Opurum, told The Epoch Times his team had received advance notice of the attack but was outsmarted by the terrorists. “Before we got there, the attackers had already started killing,” he said.

Two days prior to that attack, nine people were killed in the town of Tanje, 10 miles from Runji according to media reports.

It was the second attack in the south of Kaduna since the disputed presidential elections that saw Islamic leaders calling their followers to vote for Muslims as a “jihad.”

Seventeen people were previously killed on March 12 in Ungwan Wakili, which is 20 miles from Tanje.

The attacks in Plateau and Kaduna are similar to a mass shelling of communities in Benue that has displaced more than 2 million residents in recent years, according to officials.

On April 7, displaced persons were attacked in their unprotected camps by the militants seeking to take over the state, according to Lt. Col. Paul Hemba who serves as the national security adviser to Governor Samuel Ortom.

More than 40 of them were sheltering in an abandoned government school when killed in the northwest part of Makurdi, the state capital, said Hemba to The Epoch Times.

The attack was intended to drive the refugees out of an area that is already experiencing an influx of Fulani militants, as part of an effort to Islamize the state, Hemba said.

“Already, they have seized many of our communities and turned them into no-go zones for Christians. When you go to some of those places, you will see them moving freely with their guns,” Hemba said.

The attack followed weeks of mass village invasions in Benue that had killed more than 100 residents according to media reports.

As of April 10, attacks in Benue have led to the deaths of at least 380 Christians this year, making it the most persecuted state in Nigeria, according to Umeagbalasi.

Leader of a Nigerian law group in America, Emmanuel Ogebe, has alleged the recent declaration of the Muslim candidate of the APC as the winner of the February 25 presidential elections in the country is responsible for the surging attacks.

“Already, Muslims have been celebrating an ‘Islamic republic of Nigeria’ because Tinubu [Bola Ahmed—the Nigerian president-elect] picked a fellow Muslim as vice president instead of a Christian as has been the practice,” wrote Ogebe to The Epoch Times in a text message.

The attacks often described by genocide deniers as clashes between sedentary farmers and semi-nomadic herdsmen are aimed at imposing an Islamic caliphate in Nigeria, said Maren.

“When you look at the patterns of attacks, who the victims are, and the fact that they always drive out people and settle in their lands, you cannot rule out the fact that there is an agenda that is being carefully and systematically implemented.”

Andrew Boyd, the spokesman of Release International in the United Kingdom concurs.

“The violence is often simplistically characterized as clashes between herders and farmers, ignoring the religious dimension behind many of the attacks which have the characteristics of an Islamist jihad.”

“Predominantly Christian villages have been overrun, church buildings destroyed, and pastors targeted for assassination. Villagers are being burned out of their homes,” wrote Boyd in a statement mailed to The Epoch Times.

Kyle Abs, the president of the International Committee on Nigeria, has called for international sanctions to be imposed on Nigerian officials for encouraging killings.

“The world must hold the Nigeria government accountable for the egregious manner in which it is destroying its citizens and their democracy,” wrote Abs to The Epoch Times in a text message.

“The Nigerian government lied to the world that they would be able to conduct a free and fair election and that the terrorism would stop. Neither happened and we have returned to violence, kidnappings, and killings,” he wrote.