Three separate attacks this week have left untold dead – at least 162 and counting – in Kwara state, western Nigeria, many of the victims reportedly Muslims slaughtered by an Islamic State offshoot for failing to accept its jihadist ideology.
The attacks occurred in addition to other documented assaults by jihadists in multiple states in the north and center of the country this week. They also followed the confirmation on Tuesday by U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) that a “small team” of American military officers had been deployed to Nigeria to aid in the fight against terrorism. President Donald Trump declared Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) for religious freedom in October, citing its long-held status as the deadliest place in the world to practice Christianity, thanks to the large presence of radical Islamists. President Trump, with the cooperation of Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, bombed northwestern Nigeria on Christmas Day to neutralize the jihadist threat in the area. Experts suggested the likeliest targets of those airstrikes were members of the Islamic State affiliate Lakurawa.
Kwara has not traditionally been among the states experiencing high levels of jihadist violence. While Islamist massacres are not uncommon in the country, they have typically targeted Christian communities in the nation’s Middle Belt or in the northeast, where the terrorist organization Boko Haram operates. Reports on the various massacres in the past week – targeting at least the villages of Woro, Nuku, and Patigi – suggested that the “bandits,” as local media typically refers to Islamist extremists, killed at least 75 people in Woro alone. Nigerian media also documented jihadist attacks in several other states, including northern Katsina and the Middle Belt state of Benue, this week.
According to the Associated Press, citing Nigerian lawmaker Mohammed Omar Bio, authorities had documented at least 162 people dead in Woro and Nuku. Bio identified the culprits as members of “Lakurawa,” a relatively new jihadist terror organization associated with the Islamic State. Some reports on the killings blamed Boko Haram, which formally declared allegiance to the global Islamic State movement in 2015.
The early reports out of Woro described a horde of 200 jihadists torching as much of the community as possible.
“The terrorists were about 200 and they killed several people in the process. But unconfirmed reports reaching us is that about 10 people have been killed with several houses set ablaze”, local resident Ahmed Yinusa told the Daily Trust.
The Daily Trust reported on Thursday that the official death toll in the Woro attack currently stands at 75, as these are the number of dead bodies the survivors have managed to find, but that they expected that over 130 people will have been found to be killed once the operations to assess the damage conclude, including the attacks in Katsina and Benue. Over 100 of those killed are believed to have been in Woro village alone.
“75 people have been identified and some got burnt completely beyond recognition including Muslims and Christians,” village leader Alhaji Salihu Bio Umar told the outlet. “Others are yet to be traced up till this moment. We estimated about a hundred people with some corpses still in the bush and my palace was burnt. However we have information that some bodies are still in the bush.”
Among the dead, Umar said, were two of his sons.
“Two of my sons have been killed. They left with my Highlander Jeep. They also burnt all the shops in the community,” he explained.
The governor of Kwara state, AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq, issued a public statement in which he shared that 75 “local Muslims” were killed in Patigi and that police officials believe the attack was a response to the local Islamic community rejecting jihadist cries to war and genocide, what he referred to as a “strange doctrine.” It was not clear from his remarks if these killings were attributed to the same culprits or part of the same attack as that on Woro.
Speaking to the Daily Trust, Kwara Police Commissioner Adekimi Ojo appeared to substantiate this claim, explaining that an Islamic State affiliated had contacted the village previously.
“We learnt there was a time they wrote a letter that they were coming to preach, but the village head refused. I am sure this incident is a kind of reprisal for that refusal,” he posited.
The Daily Trust reported two other attacks in Nigeria this week attributable to “bandits”: the killing of at least 20 people in northern Katsina state, a majority Muslim region, and another 17 killed in Benue, a majority-Christian Middle Belt state plagued by genocidal jihadist violence, typically conducted by Fulani Islamist terrorists.
President Tinubu’s office announced on Wednesday that he would order an immediate deployment into Kwara, also identifying the attackers as Boko Haram.
“President Tinubu said the new military command will spearhead Operation Savannah Shield to checkmate the barbaric terrorists and protect defenceless communities,” the president’s office explained. “He condemned the cowardly and beastly attack and described the gunmen as heartless for choosing soft targets in their doomed campaign of terror.”
Tinubu also described the victims as Muslims who had “rejected their [the terrorists’] obnoxious attempt at indoctrination, choosing instead to practice Islam that is neither extreme nor violent.”
The Nigerian government, under Tinubu and his predecessors, has repeatedly faced global condemnation for doing little to protect Christian communities and curtail radical Islam. That condemnation appeared to persist as an eyewitness to the attack in Katsina lamented to the Daily Trust, “is there really a government in this country? They have failed us.” In Kwara, the newspaper reported that the attack’s deadliness was aided in part by locals being afraid to alert government authorities.
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