“The death toll is 140 and climbing after a series of coordinated attacks” on Christians. “They attacked 20 Christian communities in Central Nigeria, raiding and burning homes while civilians were asleep. 300 are injured and 221 homes are destroyed. The authorities did not respond for over 12 hours, a source has told AP. In the past 2 decades, 62,000 Christians in Nigeria have been killed by Jihadists and another 5 million have been displaced.”
Nigeria is about 50% Muslim and 40% Christian. It has a Muslim north and a mostly Christian south. In the center of the country, there are conflicts between Christian farmers and Muslim herders from the Fulani ethnic group. The Fulani herders sometimes kill the Christian farmers.
PBS reports:
At least 140 people were killed by gunmen who attacked remote villages over two days in north-central Nigeria’s Plateau state, survivors and officials said Tuesday in the latest of such mass killings this year blamed on the West African nation’s farmer-herder crisis.
The assailants targeted 17 communities during the “senseless and unprovoked” attacks on Saturday and Sunday, during which most houses in the areas were burned down, Plateau Gov. Caleb Mutfwang said Tuesday in a broadcast on the local Channels Television.
“As I am talking to you, in Mangu local government alone, we buried 15 people. As of this morning, in Bokkos, we are counting not less than 100 corpses. I am yet to take stock of (the deaths in) Barkin Ladi,” Gov. Mutfwan said. “It has been a very terrifying Christmas for us here in Plateau.”….
“I called security but they never came. The ambush started 6 in the evening but security reached our place by 7 in the morning,” said Sunday Dawum, a youth leader in Bokkos. At least 27 people were killed in his village, Mbom Mbaru, including his brother, he said.
No group took responsibility for the attacks though the blame fell on herders from the Fulani tribe, who have been accused of carrying out such mass killings across the northwest and central regions where the decades-long conflict over access to land and water has further worsened the sectarian division between Christians and Muslims in Africa’s most populous nation.
The Nigerian army said it has begun “clearance operations” in search of the suspects, with the help of other security agencies, although arrests are rare in such attacks…Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, who was elected this year after promising to help tackle the security challenges that his predecessor failed to address, has yet to make any public comments about the latest attacks days after they happened.
Tinubu’s government and others in the past haven’t taken any “tangible action” to protect lives and ensure justice for victims in the conflict-hit northern region, Amnesty International Nigeria director Isa Sanusi told the AP.
“Sometimes they claim to make arrests but there is no proof they have done so … The brazen failure of the authorities to protect the people of Nigeria is gradually becoming the ‘norm,’” he said.
Nigeria’s president, Bola Tinubu, is a Muslim. But unlike his predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, he is not a member of the Fulani ethnic group that is in conflict with the Christian farmers.
Although 40% of Nigerians are Christian, most Nigerian presidents in recent years have been Muslim. Nigeria’s last Christian president, Goodluck Jonathan, served from 2010 to 2015, and he only became president because he was vice president at a time when the country’s Muslim president died.
Nigeria’s military is primarily composed of Muslims. In Nigeria’s Muslim north, it used to be common to find Christian merchants from the Igbo ethnic group in major cities. But thousands of Igbo were killed in anti-Igbo riots, resulting in Igbo merchants fleeing Nigeria’s north, and the northern cities of Nigeria becoming more uniformly Muslim.
Not all killings in Nigeria are based on religion. Last week, at least 500 people were slaughtered in eastern Nigeria near the border with Cameroon by terrorists from Cameroon. The terrorists appear to have been Muslim, but so were at least a third of their victims. The killings occurred in the south of Taraba state, which has a mainly Muslim north, and a mainly Christian south.
