Hundreds of bodies – too many to count – remain strewn in the bush in Nigeria from an Islamic
extremist attack that Amnesty International described as the “deadliest massacre” in the history of
Boko Haram .
Fighting continued on Friday around Baga, a town on the border with Chad where insurgents
seized a key military base on 3 January and attacked again on Wednesday .
“Security forces have responded rapidly, and have deployed significant military assets and
conducted air strikes against militant targets,” said a government spokesman.
District head Baba Abba Hassan said most victims are children, women and elderly people who
could not run fast enough when insurgents drove into Baga, firing rocket-propelled grenades and
assault rifles on town residents.
“The human carnage perpetrated by Boko Haram terrorists in Baga was enormous,” Muhammad
Abba Gava, a spokesman for poorly armed civilians in a defence group that fights Boko Haram , told
the Associated Press.
He said the civilian fighters gave up on trying to count all
the bodies. “No one could attend to the corpses and even the
seriously injured ones who may have died by now,” Gava
said.
An Amnesty International statement said there are reports
the town was razed and as many as 2,000 people killed.
If true, “this marks a disturbing and bloody escalation of
Boko Haram’s ongoing onslaught,” said Daniel Eyre, Nigeria
researcher for Amnesty International.
The previous bloodiest day in the uprising involved soldiers
gunning down unarmed detainees freed in a 14 March 2014
attack on Giwa military barracks in Maiduguri city. Amnesty
said then that satellite imagery indicated more than 600
people were killed that day.
The attacks come five weeks away from presidential elections which are likely to trigger even more
bloodshed. Already under a state of emergency, the three north-eastern states worst hit by Boko
Haram asked the central government for more troops earlier this week. The government has said
voting will take place across Borno state although the worsening insecurity means few international
observers are likely to get clearance to oversee voting in an area that is traditionally opposition-
supporting.
Around 1.5 million people have been displaced by the violence, many of whom will not be able to
vote in the polls under Nigeria’s current electoral laws.
Boko Haram also appears to be regionalising the conflict, after threatening neighbouring Cameroon
in a video earlier this week.
The government has made no official comment on the alleged massacres. President Goodluck
Jonathan skimmed security issues when he relaunched his re-election bid in front of thousands of
cheering supporters in the economic capital, Lagos, on Thursday.
The five-year insurgency killed more than 10,000 people last year alone, according to the
Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations. More than a million people are displaced inside
Nigeria and hundreds of thousands have fled across its borders into Chad, Cameroon and Nigeria.
Emergency workers said this week they are having a hard time coping with scores of children
separated from their parents in the chaos of Boko Haram’s increasingly frequent and deadly
attacks.
Just seven children have been reunited with parents in Yola, capital of Adamawa state, where
about 140 others have no idea if their families are alive or dead, said Sa’ad Bello, the coordinator
of five refugee camps in Yola.
He said he was optimistic that more reunions will come as residents return to towns that the
military has retaken from extremists in recent weeks.
Suleiman Dauda, 12, said he ran into the bushes with neighbours when extremists attacked his
village, Askira Uba, near Yola last year.
“I saw them kill my father, they slaughtered him like a ram. And up until now I don’t know where
my mother is,” he told the Associated Press at Daware refugee camp in Yola.

www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/09/boko-haram-deadliest-massacre-baga-nigeria

hmmm..