Churches Wrecked, Men Hide in Trees in Nigeria’s North-east

   Boko haram gunmen

In areas of Nigeria where the Islamist group Boko Haram is trying to establish its self-styled caliphate, some Christian men hide in woodlands and ditches to avoid militant patrols, witnesses said.

“There is death everywhere on the streets,” Martins Daniel, a 36-year-old, who fled the north-eastern town of Mubi, said in an interview in the Adamawa State capital, Yola. “Our people cannot stay in their homes and have to sleep in trees and hide in holes to stay alive and not be conscripted to become ruthless killers.”

For the past month in Mubi, which government forces retook on November 13, there were daily killings of “infidels, those who cannot recite part of the Koran known as Kalimatu Shahada,” or the words of witnessing, he said. Thieves had their hands cut off, while those convicted of fornication were flogged.

After five years of fighting to establish Shariah, or Islamic law, in Africa’s biggest oil producer, Boko Haram has started setting up an administration in parts of the north-eastern states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe. With at least 20 local government areas under its control, the militants tell residents that they, not the government, can protect them.

“They gather people to deliver sermons in various places and assure them that they will not fight or kill anyone except the Nigerian security forces,” Mubi resident, Tasiu Nasiru, a 42-year-old father of five, said by phone from the town.

“They broke into shops to allow people to take foodstuffs, and then they took the bulk of the goods.”

Armoured Vehicles

A Boko Haram video released on November 9 starts by paying homage to Islamist groups in countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Yemen before showing hundreds of armed militants standing in front of armoured vehicles and patrolling towns they overran in Nigeria’s north-east. A militant leader is shown preaching to residents, some of whom are shown on camera praising the jihadists and life under Shariah.

“With insurgents taking hold of territory and setting up administrations, you’ll be seeing staging posts for further incursions,” Clement Nwankwo, executive director of the Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre, said in an interview in Abuja, the capital.

“And a weak military unable to repel this portends greater instability for the country.”

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, who officially declared his bid for re-election on November 11, vowed to step up the fight against Boko Haram, which is suspected of a school suicide bombing in the town of Potiskum that killed 47 students a day earlier. He also renewed his pledge to free more than 200 schoolgirls Boko Haram abducted from the town of Chibok in April. The vote is scheduled for February 14.

‘Senseless War’

“We are equipping the armed forces and deploying special forces to engage the terrorists and end this senseless war,” Jonathan said. “I will do everything humanly possible to end this criminal violence.”

More suicide attacks have since followed in other northern towns and cities, targeting a teachers’ college in Kontagora, policemen in Kano and a market in Azare, leaving at least 21 people dead, according to the police. The conflict has forced more than 678,773 people in the northeast to flee their homes this year, according to Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA).

Jonathan said Boko Haram has killed at least 13,000 people in the past five years.

Hundreds of kilometres north of the capital, churches in Boko Haram-controlled areas are being destroyed, and Christians, who refuse to convert are being killed, church leaders in Adamawa State said in a statement handed to reporters, citing witnesses who escaped militant-run areas.

“All the existing churches in the captured territories were completely destroyed by the Islamist insurgents,” the Christian leaders said in the November 11 statement.

Food Shortages

Joshua Wariya, a 60-year-old resident who fled to the Borno State capital, Maiduguri, from the militant-held town of Gwoza, said hundreds of people are still trapped in surrounding hills with no food.

Women, who used to venture out to search for food no longer dare because they’re now being killed if they can’t recite parts of the Koran, he said on November 7 at a displaced people’s camp in Maiduguri.

“They are throwing tear gas into caves where they suspect people are hiding in the Gwoza area and are smoking them out like rabbits,” said Yusuf Suya, a 30-year-old man, who also escaped from there.

When Jaafaru Kabiru tried to sneak into the north-eastern Nigerian town of Mubi to evacuate his parents, two militants caught him at the edge of the town and asked where he was going.

When he said he was going to stay with his parents in Mubi, “they replied it is no longer Mubi but Madinatul-Islam, ‘the City of Islam,’” Kabiru, a 19-year-old trader based in Yola, said in an interview.

They let him proceed on his motorised tricycle after he was able to recite Muslim prayers at gunpoint.

•Culled from Bloomberg