[ 2015-01-09 ]

The leader of the Nigerian Islamist extremist group Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau

Boko Haram ‘kills 2,000’ as it burns Nigerian army town
Militants from the Nigerian terrorist group Boko
Haram have slaughtered more than 2,000 people over
five days in the northern town of Baga, according
to local officials.

Baga’s streets are strewn with bodies and almost
every building has been burnt down after the
Islamists went on a killing spree in one of the
key towns in Borno state, the main battlefield in
the government’s war on the extremists.

If the reports — made by witnesses to members of
Baga’s local council — are correct, Boko Haram
has murdered a fifth of the town’s 10,000
population.

Since it declared war on the Nigerian state in
2009, the jihadists have raped, murdered and
kidnapped thousands of people, and forced more
than 1.6 million from their homes, in the name of
establishing an Islamic state in the
half-Christian, half-Muslim country. The words
“Boko Haram” translate as: “Western
education is sin.”

Members of the group attacked a military base in
Baga on Saturday, and the soldiers there fled,
leaving the town unprotected. On Wednesday, the
militants are understood to have launched their
offensive against the town.

Residents fleeing Baga said that they had been
unable to bury their dead and had to leave corpses
on the streets. The town is now “virtually
non-existent”, Musa Alhaji Bukar, a senior
official, said, adding: “It has been burnt
down.” A large number of residents were reported
to have drowned as they fled across Lake Chad
after Saturday’s initial attack.

Alex Badeh, the chief of defence staff, said that
the military was working to reclaim the town,
though he could not say how fast it could get it
back.

“I can’t give you exactly what is going to
happen,” he said. “It [the situation] will
improve, by God’s grace.”

Critics condemned President Jonathan as
“shameless” as he launched his party’s
re-election campaign yesterday, despite the
carnage in the north. His People’s Democratic
Party (PDP) is seeking a second term in
Nigeria’s general election on February 14.

President Jonathan’s first rally was, he said,
aimed at first-time voters, though he said little
about the threat Boko Haram posed to youth in his
country’s northern states. He chose instead to
warn them against voting for the opposition, led
by Muhammadu Buhari, the former military ruler.

“You have to vote for your liberation or your
imprisonment,” he said.

“They [the opposition] want power at all costs.
All they want to use power for is to lock up their
enemies. I have no enemies to fight.”

He urged every Nigerian to vote, in spite of fears
that voting in parts of Nigeria’s embattled
northeast may not go ahead next month because of
Boko Haram’s campaign of terror.

He added darkly: “Any country that does not
accept the rule of law is a jungle,” an
apparently unintentional indictment of his own
country, where Boko Haram has run riot in the face
of the state of emergency he declared in Borno,
Yobe and Adamawa states in 2013.

Last week he made the latest in a string of vows
to win the war against the militants. “We will
bring justice to the savage terrorists known as
Boko Haram,” he said. “They will be defeated.
We will not forget. We will not look the other
way.”

However, many accuse President Jonathan of doing
just that, particularly in the case of the more
than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped from their
dormitory in Chibok, another town in Borno state.
Most are still missing nine months after they were
taken. Their families have appealed to the United
Nations to help to find them after the government
has failed to “bring back” a single girl,
despite many promises to do so.

“If the government cannot take action, we are
asking for the UN to come in and help and if they
reject [our pleas], we just don’t know what to
do,” said the Reverend Enoch Mark, the
parents’ leader.

Fifty of the schoolgirls who were initially taken
are free, but only because they escaped and not as
a result of any government or military
intervention.

According to Mr Buhari’s party, the All
Progressives Congress (APC), the 20,000 square
kilometres of Nigeria that have fallen under Boko
Haram’s control have done so “under
Jonathan’s watch”, in an unprecedented “orgy
of violence, armed robbery, killings, kidnappings
and other forms of crime”.

The APC — an alliance between Nigeria’s three
biggest opposition parties — poses the biggest
threat yet to the PDP’s grip on power, unbroken
since the country moved from military to
democratic rule in 1999. Violence after the 2011
election left 800 people dead.

Source - The Times(UK)

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