By Michael Ireland, Senior Reporter, ASSIST News Service answritermike@gmail.com
(ANS – BORNO STATE, NIGERIA, Feb.2, 2015)
-- Incessant attacks from Boko Haram militants in north-eastern Nigeria
have caused over a million people to flee their homes in terror,
reports Barnabas Aid (www.barnabasfund.org).
Often targeting predominantly
Christian villages, residents are killed and houses are razed.
Christians in northern Nigeria are also victims of repeated violence
from ethnic Fulani Muslims who are responsible for killings, burning
houses, and forcing Christians to flee.
Barnabas Aid says that on
Sunday, January 25, the strategic Nigerian town of Maiduguri in Borno
state was attacked. Earlier the same day, militants rampaged through
Monguno town in the same state, burning houses to the ground. Earlier,
on January 10, at least 19 people were killed in Nigeria when a
10-year-old girl was reported to have blown herself up in Maiduguri,
also in Borno state. And the next day, four people were killed and over
40 injured, in attacks from two female suicide bombers in Potiskum, Yobe
state, Nigeria.
The
ministry says Christians living in the Cameroonian villages close to
the Nigerian border document frequent attacks from Boko Haram militants
who are spreading terror as they seize cattle, sheep, goats, and
motorbikes; burn millet, cotton and peanut crops; and raze homes to the
grounds.
It explained that Cameroon
continues to receive tens of thousands of Nigerians fleeing the almost
daily attacks in the north-eastern states. According to the
International Organization for Migration, as of December 23, over a
million Nigerians had been displaced as a result of Boko Haram attacks,
with at least 912,000 internally displaced and the remainder spilling
over into Cameroon, Chad and Niger.
According to the ministry, the
numbers of displaced Nigerians will have increased in the five weeks
since then, not least because of the huge attack on the Nigerian town of
Baga on January 3 in which hundreds were killed and thousands forced to
flee. An estimated 3,400 people from Baga fled to Chad. The total
number of Nigerians newly uprooted in the ten days to 13 January is
around 7,900.
But Barnabas Aid says Boko
Haram is not the only threat to Nigerian Christians. Ethnic Fulani
Muslims frequently attack villages where residents are mainly Christian,
burning churches and houses, and killing the inhabitants.
Barnabas Fund is helping
Christian victims of violence and is helping to support displaced
Nigerian Christians including those who have fled to Cameroon, where the
ministry has recently provided 1,400 families with millet to eat and
mosquito nets, soap, bleach, buckets and mats (average cost per family
£38.50 (€52; US$58; AU$74; NZ$80).
In an online update, the
ministry says: “In Nigeria’s Kaduna state, we are assisting 350
displaced Christian families, many of them small-scale farmers who have
now lost their land. Unable to harvest their crops, they need food aid.
Barnabas is providing food packages containing rice, corn, cooking oil,
salt and stock cubes. Using mud, the families are building houses for
themselves, and Barnabas is providing metal sheeting, wood and nails for
the roofs.”
Nigerian Christian victims of
violence who received emergency kits from Barnabas after earlier attacks
were “full of praises to God for the gift items from their unseen
Christian family.” One of the ministry’s local partner organizations in
Nigeria said, “You have proven to us that the Body of Christ is one!”
Photo: Damage caused in Kaduna state, Nigeria, after Fulani Muslims attacked the Christians (Courtesy Barnabas Aid)
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