Nigeria Escalation
Is there a genocide unfolding against Christians while the World looks away?
Curfew collusion with Fulani militants as “genocide” unfolds in Nigeria with 33 Christians killed in new multiple attacks. Military and security forces stood idly by during a 24-hour curfew, as at least 33 people were killed on 5 and 6 August in Fulani militant attacks on five Christian communities in Zangon Kataf Local Government Area, southern Kaduna State, Nigeria.
According to Barnabas contacts, security personnel are patrolling and strictly enforcing the 65-day-long regional curfew on the mainly Christian residents, who are trapped in their homes and facing hunger, lack of medical care and arrest if they attempt to tend to crops. But military and other security forces were absent when the armed Fulani militants struck the communities.
In the first attack, at 11 p.m. on 5 August, Fulani militants arrived on trucks, passing through military checkpoints under the curfew, to attack Apiashyim and Kibori villages. Six people were murdered in Apiashyim. The militants then looted homes and razed 20 houses. In Kibori seven people were killed.
A local witness reported that, despite being aware an attack was underway, security personnel arrived only after it was over. “The security agencies are not here to protect us but to serve the interest of those attacking us,” said the witness.
Around midnight on 6 August, the militants descended on Atakmawei village, killing twelve people as they slept and burning down ten homes.
The Fulani militia went on to launch simultaneous assaults on Apyiako and Magamiya villages, leaving another three and five dead, respectively. The militants burnt out several homes in the communities.
According to terrified survivors in Apyiako, who watched from maize fields where they hid to escape the attack, armoured military vehicles and motorbikes arrived in the village square while the assault was underway, but no attempt was made to halt the violence. The assaults on villages raged on un-challenged by security forces until 4 a.m.
It is now difficult for families to source food under the rigid curfew and child malnutrition is on the rise. A local church and community leader said, “Parents cannot go out and look for food for their starving children. The sick are trapped at home. No one wants to risk the brutality of the military that are enforcing the curfew. Even if the curfew is lifted, freely grazing cattle herded by armed Fulani men have eaten up and trampled over thousands of hectares of grain farms, yam farms, [and] sugar cane crops among others.”
Nigerian Christian leaders have appealed to the international community and “men and women of conscience all over the world” to come to the aid of Christians facing “what looks like a government sponsored genocide” in southern Kaduna State. In early August, the Southern Kaduna People’s Union (SOKAPU) sent a letter to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague asking for it to act now against the “pernicious genocide” in northern Nigeria.
Ex-senior banker claims Nigerian government “unwilling and unable” to protect Christian farming communities
A former deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria was arrested on 12 August after telling a radio interviewer that the security forces were colluding in attacks on Christian communities in Kaduna State.
Dr Obadiah Mailafia was summoned to the Department of State Services (DSS) in Jos where he was interrogated for 6 hours about the 55-minute radio interview discussing the escalating violence in Plateau State, where he was born. The interview also raised the issue of Fulani extremist infiltration throughout the country, including southern Nigeria.
Since released on bail, Dr Mailafia claimed that the Nigerian authorities were unable and unwilling to protect the mainly-Christian farming communities in southern Kaduna and that the security forces were colluding in assaults on villages and farms. He added that people who blame “farmer-herder violence” for the killings are “accessories to genocide”.
The former banker’s father was a Christian missionary pastor and he has Muslim aunts, uncles and cousins. He went on to expose that “repentant terrorists” had informed him that an incumbent governor of a northern state is the “commander of Boko Haram in Nigeria”.
“Boko Haram and the bandits are one and the same,” said Dr Mailafia, explaining that they have a sophisticated network and, during lockdown, their planes continued to move freely, transporting ammunitions and money to different parts of the country.
Nigerian Christians say “our lives matter” in protest against Fulani militant killings outside London High Commission
Nigerian Christians and church leaders gathered outside the Nigerian High Commission in London, on 20 August, to demonstrate against Fulani militants’ slaughter of Christians in Kaduna State, before submitting a letter protesting the relentless attacks on communities by Fulani militia.
The peaceful protestors carried banners stating, “Stop the Killings,” “Enough is Enough,” and “Justice for South Kaduna Christians”, as they chanted “It’s not a conflict, it’s a genocide” and “Our lives matter”.
The letter, submitted under the umbrella of the Southern Kaduna Peoples Diaspora (SOKAPDA), accused the international media of “a conspiracy of silence” regarding the deadly spate of violence that spiked this year resulting in the loss of more than 200 lives in Kaduna State since the beginning of July. The group called on Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari to declare the Fulani militia a terrorist organisation.
The SOKAPDA protestors plan to deliver further letters of protest to the UK Parliament and Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Downing Street.
The group criticised a recent television interview by Nasir el Rufai, the governor of Kaduna State, in which he seemed to blame the people of southern Kaduna for the killings when he stated, “they organise these killings and then, their leaders are invited by the governor, they wine and dine and they are given brown envelopes.” He went on to accuse the Christian community’s leaders of raising “a spectre of genocide … so they can get donations and money into their bank accounts from abroad.” Governor El Rufai added that his administration is “compiling evidence” to arrest them.
In a response to the governor’s controversial interview, which has been widely condemned, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) withdrew his invitation to be keynote speaker its 60th Annual General Conference in August.
In the meantime, the slaughter of Christians in southern Kaduna is continuing under an ongoing 24-hour regional curfew, which limits the movement of citizens but has failed to control the violent rampage of the heavily armed Fulani militants. The deployment of special military forces in the state has also done little to curb the violence and witnesses have reported that military and security personnel stood idly by during multiple night-time attacks in August that saw at least 33 Christians killed.
A Nigerian church leader told Barnabas after the massacre of 32 believers, including 21 guests at a wedding, in a two-day Fulani militant attack on 19 July, “it is as if the lives of Christians no longer matter”.
In early August, the Southern Kaduna People’s Union (SOKAPU) sent a letter to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague asking for it to act now against the “pernicious genocide” in northern Nigeria. The Nigerian Christian leaders’ statement also highlighted that around 50,000 Christians have been displaced from rural communities by the violence.
Jihadi militants take 100s hostage in north -east Nigeria raid on Christian community
A convoy of 22 trucks loaded with heavily armed jihadists thundered into mainly-Christian Kukawa town, in north-eastern Nigeria, with the militants taking hundreds hostage in a raid on 18 August.
The heavily armed Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) terrorist group, an off-shoot of Boko Haram, captured local people as they fled and launched an attack on a nearby military station protecting the town.
The 1,200 residents had only recently returned to their home town in Borno State, near the border with Lake Chad, after spending two years in refugee camps 120 miles to the south in Maiduguri, the state capital.
A local community leader, who escaped capture, lamented that the residents had returned full of hope to restart their lives and cultivate their farmlands “only to end up in the hands of the insurgents”.
Local government authorities had declared the town safe and ordered the residents to return under a military escort.
In the past two years, some two million internally displaced people (IDPs) have been repatriated to towns in the north-east. But despite security forces’ claim to have defeated the terror groups in the region, many IDPs are wary that jihadists still have a foothold and it remains unsafe for them to return to their homes.
In July, Nigerian pastor, Joel Billi, called for urgent action to be taken to halt the relentless Boko Haram killings, abduction and rapes in the north. The Christian leader who is head of one of the region’s largest Christian denominations, Church of the Brethren in Nigeria (EYN), said that more than 8,370 church members and eight pastors had been killed, with countless more abducted during the insurgency, and some 700,000 displaced.
Pastor Joel described a statement made by President Buhari on 12 June as “unfortunate, misleading and demoralising”. The politician had claimed that “all local governments” taken over by Boko Haram insurgents in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa States “have long been recovered” and their people returned to ancestral homes.
The pastor countered, “The fact on the ground is this: EYN had four District Church Councils prior to the insurgency in Gwoza Local Government Area of Borno State [of] which none is existing today.”
In a recent report focusing on the impact of the jihadi insurgency on children in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe states, the UN stated that 7.1 million people, including 4.2 million children, needed humanitarian assistance in north-east Nigeria by the end of 2019.