Americans woke up this week to the gut‑punch of another U.S. citizen seized abroad — an evangelical missionary reportedly abducted from the streets of Niamey, Niger’s capital. The assault on an American who was simply trying to live out his faith is both a human tragedy and a national warning: jihadist violence that used to be confined to the Sahel has crawled into capitals.
According to multiple security sources the man, described as a pilot for the missionary group Serving In Mission, was taken by three armed suspects and driven out of town toward areas where Islamic State‑linked militants operate. Reports that the victim’s phone pinged north of Niamey into militant sanctuaries make clear this was not a garden‑variety criminal grab but the kind of organized abduction jihadists use to fund terror and terrorize the West.
The State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Niamey say they are working with local authorities to secure the man’s release, but that official response — while necessary — is no substitute for a broader, tougher American posture. When Americans are kidnapped doing the work of mercy, our government should move quicker and with more teeth to protect them and punish those who prey on them.
This abduction didn’t happen in a vacuum. Niger’s security has frayed since the 2023 coup that ousted the elected government and pushed Western partners out of the fight against jihadism; the result has been a vacuum that extremists and criminal networks happily exploit. If we learned anything over the past two decades it’s that retreating from the field only makes it easier for our enemies to expand their reach, putting Americans and humanitarian workers at meat‑market risk.
Americans of faith should be particularly alarmed because missionaries are not spies or soldiers — they are neighbors and servants whose only mission is faith and charity. The growing pattern of Westerners kidnapped across Niger and the Sahel is squeezing Christian outreach, forcing aid groups to scale back and leaving millions more vulnerable to extremist recruitment and suffering. Conservative patriots who cherish religious liberty must demand our leaders stop treating these assaults as remote items on a cable news crawl.
The voice of a man who lived through abduction and survived deserves attention. Josh Sullivan, an American missionary who was kidnapped in South Africa earlier this year and later rescued, has publicly urged Americans and media outlets to keep the spotlight on victims so pressure grows for their safe return. His story — a family man taken in a church service and then found after a high‑intensity police operation — is a stark reminder that evil targets the faithful and that silence is complicity.
Now is the time for principled action, not platitudes. Congress and the executive branch must prioritize secure evacuations for Americans in unstable hotspots, restore robust intelligence and partner capacities in the Sahel, and push back hard against regimes and actors who enable terrorists. Above all, we must stand openly with our missionaries and aid workers, refuse to let their sacrifices be ignored, and show the world that America still defends the helpless and the heroic.
