Hundreds of bodies – too many to count – remain strewn in the bush
in Nigeria from an Islamic extremist attack that Amnesty International
described as the “deadliest massacre” in the history of Boko Haram.
Amnesty International calls the killings ‘a disturbing and bloody
escalation’ and a local defence group says its fighters have given up
trying to count the bodies.
Fighting continued on Friday around Baga, a town on the border with Chad where insurgents seized a key military base on 3 January and attacked again on Wednesday.
“Security forces have responded rapidly, and have deployed
significant military assets and conducted air strikes against militant
targets,” said a government spokesman.
District head Baba Abba Hassan said most victims are children, women
and elderly people who could not run fast enough when insurgents drove
into Baga, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles on town
residents.
“The human carnage perpetrated by Boko Haram terrorists in Baga was
enormous,” Muhammad Abba Gava, a spokesman for poorly armed civilians in
a defence group that fights Boko Haram, told the Associated Press.
He said the civilian fighters gave up on trying to count all the
bodies. “No one could attend to the corpses and even the seriously
injured ones who may have died by now,” Gava said.
An Amnesty International statement said there are reports the town was razed and as many as 2,000 people killed.
If true, “this marks a disturbing and bloody escalation of Boko
Haram’s ongoing onslaught,” said Daniel Eyre, Nigeria researcher for
Amnesty International.
The previous bloodiest day in the uprising involved soldiers gunning
down unarmed detainees freed in a 14 March 2014 attack on Giwa military
barracks in Maiduguri city. Amnesty said then that satellite imagery
indicated more than 600 people were killed that day.
The attacks come five weeks away from presidential elections which
are likely to trigger even more bloodshed. Already under a state of
emergency, the three north-eastern states worst hit by Boko Haram asked
the central government for more troops earlier this week. The government
has said voting will take place across Borno state although the
worsening insecurity means few international observers are likely to get
clearance to oversee voting in an area that is traditionally
opposition-supporting.
Around 1.5 million people have been displaced by the violence, many
of whom will not be able to vote in the polls under Nigeria’s current
electoral laws.
Boko Haram also appears to be regionalising the conflict, after threatening neighbouring Cameroon in a video earlier this week.
The government has made no official comment on the alleged massacres. President Goodluck Jonathan skimmed security issues when he relaunched his re-election bid in front of thousands of cheering supporters in the economic capital, Lagos, on Thursday.
The five-year insurgency killed more than 10,000 people last year
alone, according to the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations.
More than a million people are displaced inside Nigeria and hundreds of
thousands have fled across its borders into Chad and Cameroon.
Emergency workers said this week they are having a hard time coping
with scores of children separated from their parents in the chaos of
Boko Haram’s increasingly frequent and deadly attacks.
Just seven children have been reunited with parents in Yola, capital
of Adamawa state, where about 140 others have no idea if their families
are alive or dead, said Sa’ad Bello, the coordinator of five refugee
camps in Yola.
He said he was optimistic that more reunions will come as residents
return to towns that the military has retaken from extremists in recent
weeks.
Suleiman Dauda, 12, said he ran into the bushes with neighbours when
extremists attacked his village, Askira Uba, near Yola last year.
“I saw them kill my father, they slaughtered him like a ram. And up
until now I don’t know where my mother is,” he told the Associated Press
at Daware refugee camp in Yola.
Source:
Guardian Newspaper
No comments:
Post a Comment