With a sudden attack on some villagers this weekend the Nigeria insurgency group called boko haram has left at least 65 people dead as Villagers who were walking home from a funeral in northeast Nigeria this weekend were ambush by gunmen on motorbikes them surrounded them in a graveyard and opened fire.
The latest round of bloodshed comes almost exactly 10 years after Nigerian forces tangled with extremists at a mosque in Borno state, a battle that killed hundreds and is considered the beginning of Boko Haram’s uprising.
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Boko Haram, an extremist group that has killed 27,000 in 10 years. Boko Haram is one of several extremist groups that aims to build an Islamist state in the region. The name of the organization is Hausa for “Western education is taboo.”
Over the last decade, the group has killed approximately 27,000 people and forced at estimated 2 million more from their homes in its quest to wipe out secular rule and impose Sharia law. The Boko haram team in 2014 kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok in Borno state.
How Saturday’s funeral turned into a massacre, Hassan Ahmadu, 38, said he was in a cemetery just before noon for the funeral of a relative when strangers on motorbikes approached.
“My heart started skipping a beat,” he said, “and I told an elderly person next to me that I am not comfortable with those people coming to us.”
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Before they could move, he said, the men started spraying bullets into the crowd.
“I was shot on my right thigh and shoulders and left for dead,” he said from his hospital bed in Maiduguri.
Ahmadu lost five family members in the attack: his grandfather, uncle, half brother and two cousins. He felt lucky to be alive, he said, because the gunmen started checking the bodies to make sure people were dead.
“They stopped and left before reaching my place,” he said.
Muhammed Bulama, the local government chairman, told reporters the attack appeared to be an act of retaliation.
Two weeks ago, he said, villagers in the area fought off suspected members of Boko Haram who they said routinely steal their cows and produce. They killed 11 in the scuffle, Bulama said.
Modu Kanumbu, a self-described vigilante, was at home Saturday in a nearby village when he said people knocked on his door, pleading for help. Kanumbu said he picked up his double-barreled shotgun and phoned soldiers in the area for backup.
Then they hurried toward the graveyard and saw a group of young girls running toward them. The girls pointed the way.
“We headed there only to find bodies lying everywhere,” Kanumbu said in an interview. “Those who could talk urged us to go after Boko Haram, saying they were fleeing.”
Kanumbu and said he and the soldiers followed the terrorists’ trail, but it was too late.
BLIZ NEWS 