There was fierce fighting yesterday between members of the Joint Task Force (JTF) and the Boko Haram Islamist sect in the town of Baga, Borno State that killed about 185 people.
Baga is a town on the shores of the Lake Chad about 200 km north of the state capital, Maiduguri, and well-known for its exports of dry catfish and hosts a Federal College of Freshwater Fisheries.
The fighting was said to have begun on Friday, when soldiers surrounded a mosque they believed to be housing sect members. It then resulted into heavy fighting that saw the insurgents use rocket-propelled grenades, while soldiers spray machine-gun fire into neighbourhoods filled with civilians, most of whom had been sent fleeing into the surrounding arid scrublands.
It was not until Sunday that government officials felt it was safe enough to conduct an assessment of the area. By then, the area was littered with homes, businesses and vehicles.
The attack is one of the deadliest involving Boko Haram, and it also shows an escalation in the insurgency in Northern Nigeria, with the sect using military-grade weaponry on the soldiers in coordinated assaults.
Lawan Kole, a local government official told the Borno State Governor, Kashim Shettima who had gone to the scene that by Sunday, authorities had found and buried at least 185 bodies.
However, officials could not give a breakdown of civilian casualties versus those of militants and extremists. Many of the bodies were said to have been burnt beyond recognition as a result of the fires that razed many sections of the town, and they were all buried immediately according to Islamic traditions.
A commander of the JTF, Brig-Gen Austin Edokpaye who also visited did not dispute casualty figures, but said that Boko Haram had used heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades in the assault. He also said that the insurgents had killed a military officer before the assault started.
Edokpaye said extremists used civilians as human shields during the fighting – implying that soldiers opened fire in neighborhoods where they knew civilians lived.
“When we reinforced and returned to the scene the terrorists came out with heavy firepower, including (rocket-propelled grenades), which usually has a conflagration effect,” the general said.
However, local residents saidthat soldiers set the fires during the attack during the attacks on fire. The JTF has been accused previously of violence by security forces in the northeast targeting civilians, and in many cases, it has been captured on video and widely documented by journalists and human rights activists. A similar raid in Maiduguri, Borno state’s capital, in October after extremists killed a military officer saw soldiers kill at least 30 civilians and set fires across a neighborhood.
Fearful residents of the town had begun packing to leave with their remaining family members before nightfall, despite Shettima trying to convince some to stay.
Bashir Isa, a vegetable seller, said, “Everyone has been in the bush since Friday night; we started returning back to town because the governor came to town today. To get food to eat in the town now is a problem because even the markets are burnt. We are still picking corpses of women and children in the bush and creeks.”