Up to 150 people drowned in a river or were
shot dead fleeing Boko
Haram gunmen who raided a remote village in
Nigeria’s northeastern Yobe state, residents said on Tuesday.
Dozens
of militants arrived on motorcycles and in a car on Thursday last week
and sprayed automatic gunfire, scattering terrified inhabitants of
Kukuwa-Gari.
“They opened fire instantly, which forced residents
to flee. They shot a number of people. Unfortunately many residents who
tried to flee plunged into the river which is full from the rain. Many
drowned,” Modu Balumi, a resident of the village, told AFP.
“By
our latest toll we have 150 people either (shot dead) or drowned in the
attack. The gunmen deliberately killed a fisherman who tried to save
drowning residents of the village.”
Balumi said the bodies of many of the drowned were picked out by locals several kilometres away.
News
of the attack was slow to emerge because the militants have destroyed
telecom masts around the village, about 50 kilometres (30 miles) from
Yobe State capital Damaturu, since the insurgency began in 2009.
“Most
residents, particularly women and children, ran towards the river in
confusion,”said Bukar Tijjani, another villager, who confirmed the death
toll.
“They were pursued by the gunmen who kept firing at them.
In the frantic effort to escape they jumped into the river, which was
full to the brim.”
A local government official confirmed the attack but put the death toll much lower, at around 50.
– Massacre –
The higher count would constitute the largest loss
of life in any single Boko Haram attack since President Muhammadu
Buhari swept to power on May 29, vowing to crush the insurgency.
The
ambush came during the region’s peak rainy season, when most waterways
in northeastern Nigeria are swollen and can flow with dangerous speed.
The
village was still reeling from a raid by suspected Boko Haram militants
on July 31 when at least 10 people were killed by gunmen who burned
homes, food silos and livestock.
The Gujba area of Yobe state,
where Kukuwa-Gari village is located, has been hit hard by Boko Haram
violence in the past but had seen relative calm since troops reclaimed
it in March.
In September 2013 scores of students of an agricultural college in the area were massacred as they slept in their dormitories.
In
February last year dozens of students of a boarding secondary school in
the main town of Buni Yadi were also killed in a gun attack on their
hostels.
Boko Haram claimed responsibility for both attacks.
The
jihadist militia, which has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State
group, has waged a violent campaign for a separate Islamic homeland in
the northeast which has seen more than 15,000 deaths since 2009.
Ryan
Cummings, chief security analyst at South African consultancy Red 24
and an expert on the Nigerian insurgency, said the Kukuwa-Gari attack
underlined that victory against the Islamists could not be defined by
territorial control.
Many areas liberated by the army were more
than likely abandoned by Boko Haram who preferred not to engage troops
in conventional warfare, he said.
– Suicide attacks –
“Consequently,
while localities such as Kukuwa-Gari have been reclaimed from rebel
hands, Boko Haram continues to possess both the intent and operational
capacity to execute attacks against these settlements,” he told AFP.
“Furthermore,
what the Nigerian army is witnessing now is that snapshot operations to
liberate civilian populations is a much easier task than actually
securing communities from the ever-present threat of further attacks.”
The
military under Buhari’s predecessor Goodluck Jonathan was heavily
criticised for poor handling of the insurgency and its failure to free
more than 200 schoolgirls abducted from the northeastern town of Chibok
in April last year.
Since Buhari took office, the militants have
stepped up their campaign with a wave of raids, bombings and suicide
attacks which have left more than 1,000 people dead in Nigeria alone,
according to an AFP count.
The Islamists have also carried out
deadly ambushes across Nigeria’s borders and in recent weeks suicide
bombers, many of them women, have staged several attacks in Nigeria,
Cameroon and Chad.
Nigeria’s new leader replaced his military
chiefs last week, ordering them to end the insurgency within three
months, and a five-nation regional force of 8,700 troops from Nigeria
and its neighbours is expected to deploy imminently.
Chadian
leader Idriss Deby declared on August 12 that efforts to combat Boko
Haram had succeeded in “decapitating” the group and that its fearsome
leader Abubakar Shekau had been replaced by a commander open to
negotiations.
But Shekau dramatically rebuffed the claim in an
audio recording released on Sunday and authenticated by security
analysts, dismissing the Chadian head-of-state as a “hypocrite” and a
“tyrant”.
Source: PM News
No comments:
Post a Comment