Ten people were killed in a Christian-majority area of Kaduna state, Nigeria, on Tuesday, the latest in a string of attacks by Fulani herdsmen.

The attack took place early in the morning of August 16, according to World Watch Monitor.

The Fulani community is a group of nomadic cattle herders made up of mostly Muslims. They are involved in an ongoing dispute with mainly Christian farmers in Nigeria's central states, and hundreds have been killed in the conflict. Thousands more have been displaced.

In March, President Muhammadu Buhari ordered an investigation after an attack in Benue state left between 100 and 300 dead.

At least 500 people were reported to have been killed in a subsequent attack in northern Nigeria in April.

Angele Dikongue-Atangana, the representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said that in 20 years of working in humanitarian relief, she had "never seen such a level of destruction".

In 2014 the herders murdered more people than the Somali terror group al-Shabaab, rendering them the fourth most deadly terrorist outfit in the world, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace's Global Terrorism Index.

"This is another jihad like the one waged by Boko Haram in the north-east of the country," Rev Augustine Akpen Leva, chairman of the Christian Association of Nigeria in Benue State, earlier told World Watch Monitor.

"The attackers carry sophisticated weapons, sometimes they even used chemical weapons on our communities. They just come, often overnight when people are sleeping. They attack defenseless people and go away. They clearly have an agenda: to wipe out the Christian presence and take over the land."