A bishop in Nigeria has warned of the threat of genocide against Christians in the country’s Middle Belt region, describing an upsurge of violence by militant Fulani herdsmen as “ethnic cleansing”.

Bishop William Avenya of Gboko told Aid to the Church in Need, the Catholic charity for persecuted Christians, of growing fears amid reports that, so far this year, 492 people have died in his state of Benue, which has a Christian-majority population.

In an appeal to the international community, he told ACN: “Don’t wait for the genocide to happen before intervening..Please don’t make the same mistake as was made with the genocide in Rwanda. It happened beneath our noses, but no one stopped it. And we know well how that ended.”

Local reports on 27 June said extremists “slaughtered more than 200 people” in 10 mainly Christian communities near the city of Jos, although police said there were only 86 fatalities.

Bishop Avenya, speaking to ACN said that Fulani were not attacking majority Muslim areas.

“We are convinced that what is happening is an ethnic cleansing of Christians,” he continued.

His comments come after other senior Church figures from the region described the militant Fulani campaign as a “clear agenda of Islamising the Nigerian Middle Belt”.

They include two other prelates from Benue State – Bishop Peter Adoboh of Katsina-Ala, Bishop Wilfred Anagbe of Makurdi – and Bishop Matthew Audu of Lafia, from nearby Nassarawa state.

According to research by Christian persecution charity Open Doors, between May 2016 and September 2017, as many as 725 people died in violence in the Middle Belt’s southern Kaduna region – 98 percent of them Christians.

The Fulani themselves say the violence is solely about cattle.

“These attacks are retaliatory,” said a spokesman for the Miyetti Allah, the Fulani herders’ principal advocacy group, speaking in reference to the violence in Plateau state.

The country’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, has described the attacks as “deeply unfortunate” but his response to the violence has been seen as half-hearted, with previous military operations doing little to restore the peace, raising suspicions that he is turning a blind eye because he himself is Fulani.

Bishop Avenya called on the West to save lives in the country, saying: “Our faithful are being murdered or forced to live as refugees as a result of the violence. And the West continues to view the matter of the Fulani as merely an internal problem.”

His comments come after the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria (CBCN) issued a statement calling on President Buhari to consider resigning for alleged inaction in response to what the CBCN called “the killing fields and mass graveyard that our country has become”.

Bishop Avenya also spoke of the supply of weaponry now used by militant Fulani. He said: “At one time these pastoralists were armed only with sticks. But now they are armed with AK-47 rifles – expensive weapons that they could not possibly afford. So who is supplying them?”

He added: “And besides, in these areas there are checkpoints every two kilometres. Is it possible that armed men followed by their flocks of cattle could have somehow become invisible?”

More than 1,000 people have been killed since the start of the year, making Nigeria’s cattle wars more deadly than the Islamist insurgency waged by the Boko Haram militant group in the north of the country.