DAKAR, Senegal — Refugees in northeast Nigeria fleeing an attack by the Islamist group Boko Haram have spoken of dozens of civilian deaths and scores of houses destroyed in an already hard-hit fishing village near Lake Chad. Local officials and witnesses who have fled to the regional capital, Maiduguri, described a days-long rampage of shooting, looting and arson. The scorched-earth tactics they described were consistent with those used previously by Boko Haram during an insurgency now entering its sixth year. In a single week from Dec. 27, the Nigeria Security Tracker kept by the Council on Foreign Relations counted about 56 people killed by Boko Haram in the region, and 40 abductions. That tally, relatively light in a conflict that has killed thousands, nonetheless indicates the terrorist group’s modus operandi — a ferocious policy designed to stamp out the few elements of state authority that exist in the remote region. No witness or official was able to give a precise number of the dead in the village, Baga. They said the killing began last Saturday, after the militants overpowered Nigerian soldiers at a military outpost there. Then the fighters turned on the residents. “They are following them to the bush, whether it is a man or a boy, they shoot them,” Alhaji Baba Abahassan, the Baga District head, said from Maiduguri. “Our people ran into the water. They are breaking houses and shops. They break each and every house and shop.” “After taking the goods, they put fire, and burn this place,” he said. “Even now, if they see a man, they will kill you. They killed many people, but nobody has the exact number. If I say this is the exact number of killed, I am telling lies.” The latest attack on Baga is the second time in less than two years that the fishing town near the borders with Niger and Chad has been sacked. The first time , in April 2013, the destruction and killing were the work of the military, according to witnesses and human rights groups. Some 200 people were killed then by enraged soldiers, witnesses said, and thousands of homes were burned by the military. Boko Haram has now captured or sacked many of the small towns in Maiduguri’s orbit, and appears to be encircling the city of several million, whose population has swelled with thousands of refugees. It did much the same thing last summer, but confounded expectations by refraining from making a move on the city, northeastern Nigeria’s regional hub.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 13:57:15 +0000
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