Tag Archives: haram

Boko Haram Attack Kills Dozens in Nigeria

by forskolindiet1 Posted on January 8, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This week, Boko Haram, the Islamist terror group based in northern Nigeria, launched a massive attack on the town of Baga, killing dozens, according to Reuters. Other initial reports put the number of dead in the hundreds or thousands. The attack is the latest in the group’s increasingly bloody campaign to establish an Islamic state in the West African country. The group attained international infamy last April after it abducted some 300 girls. More than 200 of them are still missing.

Over the course of this Tuesday and Wednesday, the militants set fire to buildings in Baga and shot indiscriminately at civilians. Nearly the entire town was torched, according to the BBC. Baga, which had roughly 10,000 residents, is now “virtually non-existent,” Musa Alhaji Bukar, a senior government official, told the British news agency.

Here’s more from the BBC:

Those who fled reported that they had been unable to bury the dead, and corpses littered the town’s streets, he said.

Boko Haram was now in control of Baga and 16 neighbouring towns after the military retreated, Mr Bukar said.

While he raised fears that some 2,000 had been killed in the raids, other reports put the number in the hundreds.

The attack follows an assault by Boko Haram on a military base in Baga on Saturday.

The AFP reported late Thursday that the terror group also decimated over a dozen towns and villages surrounding Baga:

Boko Haram launched renewed attacks around a captured town in restive northeast Nigeria this week, razing at least 16 towns and villages, a local government and a union official told AFP.

‘They burnt to the ground all the 16 towns and villages including Baga, Dorn-Baga, Mile 4, Mile 3, Kauyen Kuros and Bunduram,’ said Musa Bukar, head of the Kukawa local government in Borno state.

Boko Haram has been terrorizing Nigeria for more than five years. Over the past year, the group has killed more than 10,000 people, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

See the article here:  

Boko Haram Attack Kills Dozens in Nigeria

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Boko Haram Attack Kills Dozens in Nigeria

How Environmental Disaster Is Making Boko Haram Violence Worse

by JaniceNeustadt Posted on June 10, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Blessing sits on the floor, knees into chest, in an empty room in Bukakotto village in eastern Nigeria. She’s “40 something,” but looks 25, and her face is scarred with tribal markings razor cut into her face as a baby. Just the day before, her sister was murdered. She went to her farm to look for firewood, Blessing says through a translator, and she was knifed to death by nomadic cattle herders with machetes. “They hacked her all over.”

A pink and white scarf hangs off Blessing’s head, and she arranges and rearranges it as she speaks, looking straight ahead into nothing. “We picked up her corpse and buried it yesterday.”

Blessing’s sister is another casualty in Nigeria’s long-running battle between mostly Christian farmers and mostly Muslim cattle herders over access to land. This increasingly violent clash is playing out alongside the Boko Haram terror campaign that has captivated the world since the group kidnapped more than 300 schoolgirls in April. On the surface, the two conflicts—which have both resulted in thousands of deaths over the past few years—appear unrelated. One is centered around Islamic fundamentalism, the other around grass and water. But look a bit further and you find that both conflicts are deeply tied to a massive ecological crisis that is breeding desperate poverty in the north of the country.

For centuries, the nomadic Fulani people drove their cattle east and west across the Sahel, the expanse of land just south of the Sahara desert. With the onset of a string of droughts in the early 20th century, Fulanis began to shift their migratory routes north to south. Land battles between nomadic Muslim cattle herders and Christian farmers were first reported about 60 years ago. The clashes have intensified since the start of another series of droughts beginning in the late 1960s that parched the land up north, driving more farmers and herders south for longer periods of time.

“They come south because of the nature of the climate in the north,” says Mohammed Husaini, a Fulani herdsman and official with Nigeria’s cattle breeder trade association. He’s seated on a plastic lawn chair inside his spartan cattle vitamin shop in the eastern Nigerian town of Garaku. Just outside the open front door, a young man chants the Koran into the afternoon heat.

“The period of time that northern Fulani nomads used to spend in the middle of the country used to be December to May,” he says. “Now it’s December to June or July, and some nomadic Fulanis decide to just stay here.” Why? Because, he explains, the grasses up north “don’t grow totally” any more.

Mohammed Husaini’s cattle vitamin shop in Garaku, Nigeria. Erika Eichelberger

Along with drought, Nigeria’s population explosion—about 125 million new people over the past half century—has overburdened the land and caused 136,000 square miles to turn to useless dust. Thirty-five percent of the land that was cultivatable in much of northern Nigeria 50 years ago is no longer arable.

And Lake Chad, which is perched along Nigeria’s northeasternmost edge, and whose waters once supported vast swathes of farming and grazing land, has lost more than 90 percent of its original size. Part of this shrinkage is due to recurrent droughts, though they have become less frequent in recent years. Just as important, humans have drained Lake Chad at an alarming rate; between 1983 and 1994, failed irrigation efforts were responsible for half of the decrease in the lake’s size.

Climate change has also contributed to the environmental changes in northern Nigeria, though it is not yet clear how much. Scientists are unsure, for example, how global warming has affected rainfall over the past few decades. What is clear is that the air over Nigeria has warmed by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the mid-20th century, and even more in the north of the country. Hotter temperatures mean that water is evaporating more quickly from Lake Chad, according to Chris Lennard, one of the lead authors of the most recent massive report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—though he says the effect of evaporation is relatively small compared to the devastation caused by droughts and irrigation.

The dying lake has collapsed the fishing industry and starved grazing lands and crops, displacing tens of thousands of Nigerians.

Hassan Garaba, a 24 year-old farmer and cattle herder who spends part of the year in the north of the country, calls the farmland up there “bakyau“—unfavorable. Three years ago, he harvested 30 bags of corn. This year, only 20. “The crops have been getting bad,” he says through a translator. “Some just died off.”

Continue Reading »

Follow this link:  

How Environmental Disaster Is Making Boko Haram Violence Worse

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, Northeastern, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Environmental Disaster Is Making Boko Haram Violence Worse

Should We Step in to Help Nigeria Find Kidnapped Girls?

by y0afvun Posted on May 1, 2014

Mother Jones

Two weeks ago, 234 Nigerian girls were kidnapped from a boarding school in the country’s northernmost state of Borno by the al Qaeda-linked group Boko Haram. Today, most of them are still missing, and Nigerian lawmakers are calling on the international community to step in to help the rescue effort.

“Nigeria should seek international help,” says Rep. Eziuche Ubani, who sits on the country’s house of representatives’ committee on defense. “The Nigerian armed forces are not in a position to defeat the insurgency in the northeast.”

The schoolgirls were captured during a predawn raid on April 15 in the town of Chibok by members of Boko Haram, which the Obama administration recently designated as a terrorist organization. The group, whose name means “Western education is sinful,” believes the Nigerian government has been corrupted by Western ways. In an effort to return the country to the pre-colonial days of Muslim rule, the group has terrorized the country over the past four-plus years, targeting schools in many of its killing sprees, and attacking churches, military checkpoints, highways, the UN building, and, recently, a bus station in the capital city of Abuja.

Though the abduction happened weeks ago, international press coverage of the missing girls has shot up in recent days after Nigerians criticized the foreign media’s initial silence on the issue and launched the Twitter hashtag #BringBackOurGirls.

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has vowed to rescue the girls, but two weeks after the kidnapping, many of the victim’s parents are losing faith in the government’s efforts, especially as reports have emerged that many of them have since been married off to the Boko Haram militants.

“Nigeria has one of the best armed forces” on the continent, says Kyari Mohammed, a professor of security studies at Modibbo Adama University of Technology in northern Nigeria, “but they are not trained for asymmetric warfare.” The militants disguise themselves easily amongst their fellow Nigerians in Borno, and often escape to bordering countries or hideouts in the dense northern forests.

So elected officials in the country are calling for outside aid. The government must do “whatever it takes, even seeking external support to make sure these girls are released,” Nigerian Sen. Ali Ndume told the Associated Press Wednesday. His colleague, Sen. Bukola Saraki, tells Mother Jones the international community should lend a hand to Nigeria in the same way it did to families of the victims of missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370.

The US gives about $1 million a year in aid to the Nigerian military and soon plans to start training Nigerian special forces to fight the insurgency in the north, but American forces would not be able to enter the country to help search for the kidnapped girls unless Nigeria officially requests that the US do so. A spokeswoman for the US State Department says that the department is “in discussions with the Nigerian government on what we might do to help support their efforts to find and free these young women.”

Not everyone buys into the argument that Nigeria needs outside help. “What has happened to the girls is not what is beyond the capability of the Nigerian security forces to handle,” says Mausi Segun, a Human Rights Watch researcher based in Borno state. “The reports we’re getting out of the North is that nothing much is being done on the part of the security forces. They are not using information provided to them by residents and locals in that region.” Parents have been searching the forests near Boko Haram camps in the north on their own for over a week, but they can only do so much, as they are in danger themselves of being killed by militants. Segun says the Nigerian military should make a good faith effort to find the girls before asking for international help.

The Nigerian military doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to stemming attacks by the Islamist militants. Jonathan has promised to defeat Boko Haram, but the insurgency has become bloodier than ever over the past few months. One reason for that, Ubani says, is that the military does not coordinate with security forces in the countries that border Borno state—including Chad, Cameroon, and Niger—where Boko Haram members have been known to hide out. And the Nigerian military’s expenditures are not tracked, Mohammed explains, so even though the country spends about $6 billion a year on its military, it is hard to determine how much of that money goes toward fighting Boko Haram and how it’s used.

Human rights advocates contend the military is not only ineffectual, but that Nigerian security forces’ response to the insurgency, including the indiscriminate killing of northern Muslim men, is worsening Boko Haram violence. The terrorist group has killed some 5,000 Nigerian men, women, and children since it emerged in 2009. In the the first few months of 2014, it has already killed 1,500 people. Boko Haram has abducted school children before, but this time the scale is unprecedented.

Link: 

Should We Step in to Help Nigeria Find Kidnapped Girls?

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Sterling, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Should We Step in to Help Nigeria Find Kidnapped Girls?