Nigeria's Boko Haram crisis reaches deadliest phase

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After tricking people into thinking they were soldiers who had come to protect them, they opened fire - chasing those who fled on motorbikes.

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch | UK Desk
Source/Credit: BBC News, Nigeria
By Will Ross | 12 June 2014

Since the abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls two months ago and subsequent international promises of assistance to Nigeria, attacks by Islamist Boko Haram militants have been relentless.

This year has been without doubt the most violent stage of the conflict so far, with at least 3,300 people killed in Boko Haram-related violence since January.

And where the insurgents are operating they are killing, looting and torching entire villages often with little or no resistance.

"If government can't protect us, let them give us guns," one resident of a village near Chibok, from where the girls were abducted, told me.

"We are sick and tired of running away every night," he said, adding that people were increasingly relying on traditional medicine for protection - performing rituals in a desperate hope of becoming what is known as "bulletproof".

Hit and occupy

Given the nature of a counter-insurgency, the military faces a huge challenge.

Boko Haram fighters can hide out and then converge to pick a target, easily outnumbering the defensive troops at that location.

"The army has to be everywhere; Boko Haram does not," says James Hall, a retired colonel and former UK military attache to Nigeria.

"The Nigerian military is outgunned because Boko Haram can concentrate its firepower on one place where the army is not present.

"They need a lot higher density of troops per square mile in the north-east than they have."

But there are also complaints of being totally let down by the military in the worst-affected areas.

Take Gwoza district in Borno state for example, where the militants have raised black-and-white jihadist flags in several villages.

On 1 June, they attacked a church in Attagara, killing nine people - but the villagers retaliated, killing many more militants.

Two days later, the insurgents returned to punish the entire village.

After tricking people into thinking they were soldiers who had come to protect them, they opened fire - chasing those who fled on motorbikes.

Attagara survivor

Survivors hid in the nearby hills from where they could see billowing smoke as village after village came under attack.

They told the BBC that more than a week after the attacks started soldiers had not reached the area.

These were not hit-and-run attacks, they were hit and occupy.

It was too dangerous for men to go back to the village and young women risked abduction, so they sent elderly women to bury the dead.

"The women went around with their hoes and dug shallow graves where they found the corpses," a survivor said.

Neither the government nor the military said a word about the attacks until 6 June.


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