NEW YORK, United States (AFP) — The African Union chief said there was no genocide in Nigeria’s volatile north after US President Donald Trump claimed that Christians were being slaughtered by jihadists and faced an “existential threat.”

Trump this month threatened to carry out an armed intervention in Nigeria, saying radical Islamists were killing “Christians in very large numbers.” 

The US leader said Christianity was “facing an existential threat” in the west African nation, adding that if Nigeria does not stem the killings, the US will attack and “it will be fast, vicious and sweet.”

Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, chair of the African Union Commission, told a press conference on Wednesday in New York that “there is no genocide in northern Nigeria.”

“The complexity of the situation in northern Nigeria should push us to to think twice before making such statements,” he added.

Youssouf said “the first victims of Boko Haram (the most prominent jihadist group in the region) are Muslims, not Christians.”

Nigeria, the continent’s most populous country with 230 million inhabitants, is divided roughly equally between a predominantly Christian south and a Muslim-majority north. 

It is the scene of numerous conflicts, including jihadist insurgencies, which kill both Christians and Muslims, often indiscriminately. 

The Boko Haram jihadist insurgency, active since 2009, has killed more than 40,000 people and forced more than two million to flee their homes, according to UN figures. 

“The first victims of Boko Haram are Muslims, not Christians,” Mahamoud Ali Youssouf also stated.