Boko Haram crisis: Nigeria's Baga town hit by new assault (2,000 dead feared...)

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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-30728158

8 January 2015 Last updated at 08:22 ET
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Boko Haram crisis: Nigeria's Baga town hit by new assault
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Boko Haram controls large swathes of territory in north-eastern Nigeria
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Boko Haram
Nigeria's militant Islamists have carried out a second attack on the key north-eastern town of Baga, an official has told the BBC.

Boko Haram fighters burnt down almost the entire town on Wednesday, after over-running a military base on Saturday, Musa Alhaji Bukar said.

Bodies lay strewn on Baga's streets, amid fears that some 2,000 people had been killed in the raids, he added.

Boko Haram launched a military campaign in 2009 to create an Islamic state.

It has taken control of many towns and villages in north-eastern Nigeria in the last year.

The conflict has displaced at least 1.5 million people, while more than 2,000 were killed last year.

Abandoned
On Monday, lawmaker Maina Maaji Lawan said Boko Haram controlled 70% of Borno state, which is worst-affected by the insurgency.

Mr Bukar, a senior government official in the area, said that fleeing residents told him that the town, which had a population of about 10,000, was now "virtually non-existent".

"It has been burnt down," he said.

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Government troops were overpowered during Saturday's raid on Baga
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The group has torched many towns and villages in northern Nigeria
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 effectively in control of Baga and 16 neighbouring towns, Mr Bukar said.

Government troops abandoned the military base in Baga on Saturday, when the militants launched an assault.

It hosts the Multi-National Joint Task Force (MNJTF), made up of troops from Nigeria, Chad and Niger, although the BBC understands there were only Nigerian soldiers there at the time of the attack.

Set up in 1998 to fight trans-border crime in the Lake Chad region, the force more recently took on Boko Haram.

Thousands have fled Baga - many to Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, and others to Chad.

A large number reportedly drown as they crossed Lake Chad following Saturday's raid.

Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan declared a state of emergency in Borno and two neighbouring states in 2013, vowing to defeat the militants.

However, Boko Haram has stepped up attacks since then, and there are fears that many people in the area will not be able to vote in next month's general elections because of the conflict.

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Micky Mikey

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How is everyone silent after the murder of 2000 innocent people. The Nigerian people should be calling for blood. The Nigerian security forces are incompetent and completely unreliable.
And some you guys actually believe Nigeria is on the rise. Nigeria will never see its true potential until corruption is crushed out and those who jeopardize progress ie Book Haram are wiped out.
 

Liu Kang

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Nigeria: 2,000 feared killed in Boko Haram's 'deadliest massacre'
Amnesty International calls the killings ‘a disturbing and bloody escalation’ and a local defence group says its fighters have given up trying to count the bodies
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Fighting continued Friday around the town on Baga, near Nigeria’s border with Chad. Photograph: Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty Images

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 andattacked 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.
Terrible what's happening there. I don't what can be done to stop Boko Haram unfortunately.
 

88m3

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Terrible what's happening there. I don't what can be done to stop Boko Haram unfortunately.

I read this morning that Nigeria no longer plans to hold military actions in the north of the country. Unbelievable. I'll see if I can find the link it was on bbc as well.
 

Poitier

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Its sad but what do you expect when Britain and now government in the South ignores the mass poverty in the North?
 

humble forever

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Yeah i saw a tweet this morning that was along the lines of "it is feared 16 towns may have been wiped out by Boko Haram recently" and I was like :wtf:. How do you pull that off

hoping it was a major exaggeration
 

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I am against interventionism in general and the optics will be bad but we need to send an SF battalion in there to straighten out the Nigerian Army regulars.
 

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so why isn't the white media talking about this?
 
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