Baga Mayhem: ”We Are Still Picking Corpes Of Women, Children In The Bush”

Borno State is Nigeria’s self- acclaimed ‘Home of Peace’. That is the appellation. But you may not be wrong if you now describe it as ‘The Home of Ruins and Pieces’. The truth about the state is that it has become a theatre of a war unleashed by the Islamist group called Boko Haram. Insurgency has been the order of the day in the state, leaving in its trail bombings, shootings and deaths.

When the residents are lucky, the death toll is low, but sometimes it can be high. Some analysts blame the problem on the international borders with Chad, Niger and Cameroun which they believe is porous as to allow Islamic extremists from the countries to enter the state at will.
The Federal Government raised a military outfit under the aegis of the Joint Task Force (JTF) which it deployed to contain the Islamists. However, the efforts to abate the violence in the state have led to the JTF’s stand-off with the intransigent Islamists, claiming more lives. One of such incidents was the face-off of last week between the JTF and the Boko Haram elements which reportedly claimed about 185 lives – the JTF is the arrowhead of a multinational force working in the state to contain the insurgents.
The face-off took place at Baga, a remote village in Kukawa Local Government Area of Borno State, believed to have been a haven for the Islamist group. Most of those killed in the four-hour battle were said to have been civilians thus sparking national outrage.

The dead, according to reports, include women and children, while hundreds of houses were torched.
Baga, about 235 kilometers away from Maiduguri, Borno State capital, is a border town with Niger and Chad. It produces fish. Troops from Niger and Chad were reported to have been involved in the operation.
Until this incident, the last reported insurgent activity in the area was the killing of a Customs officer. This time, the multinational force took the battle to the ‘home’ of the Boko Haram Islamists. Reports said the civilian casualty was high as the Islamists used residents as human shields from the multinational force fire.
A Baga resident, who gave his name as Mallam Bana, said he survived the battle by whiskers. According to him, it all started at about 8pm penultimate Friday. “The soldiers were heartless that night in their approach; they killed and burnt our houses, chased everyone into the bush including women and children. So far, we have buried 185 corpses. – some were burnt beyond recognition; others are hospitalized with various degrees of injuries,” Bana said.

But the commander of the JTF, Brigadier General Austin Edokpaye, who confirmed the incident, while conducting Governor Kashim Shettima round the affected area, on Sunday, debunked the claim that scores of civilians were consumed during the battle. “We lost an officer during an attack on our men on patrol. We received intelligence report that some suspected Boko Haram members usually prayed and hid arms at a particular mosque in the town. It was around that mosque that our men were attacked with several of them injured and an officer died”, Edokpaye said.

“When we reinforced and returned to the scene, the terrorists came out with heavy firepower including RPGs which usually have a conflagration effect that caused houses with tatched roof or fencing to catch fire.”
The commander revealed that the fire that consumed the community and the resultant deaths should be blamed on the Boko Haram Islamists who opened fire on soldiers and using civilians as human shields. He denied the residents’ allegation that the shootout was unprovoked.
Edokpaye noted that in his many years of stay in Borno State, he had cultivated civil and military relations to the effect that Baga and environs had enjoyed relative peace.
He said those who died as a result of the incident could be victims of the crossfire between the soldiers and the Boko Haram gunmen, which he said was highly regrettable.
Shettima drove through the village with a large retinue of government functionaries, including the member of the House of Representatives representing the area, Hon. Isa Lawan Kangarwa, and the Secretary to the State Government, Alhaji Baba Ahmed Jidda.
The governor and his entourage also visited the General Hospital, Baga, where he commiserated with the women, children and aged men admitted for various cases of burns.
The governor took time to pacify the aggrieved residents and pleaded with those in the bush to return home.
He directed that those in hospital with severe cases of burns be transferred to the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital where they could get better treatment.

Shettima later expressed his displeasure with the way the soldiers carried out their duties on the fateful day, just as he implored the commander to “take full charge” of his operation and ensure he personally supervises his field officers from time to time “in order to avert such nasty incidents in the future.”
Before he left the town, he inaugurated a high-powered committee, led by Hon Isa Lawan Kangarwa, to ascertain the extent of the damage and how the people could be helped out of their “seemingly irreparable trauma”.

Sunday Vanguard checks revealed that food and other basic needs became a problem in the community throughout last weekend as a grocery merchant, who lost his house and business stall in the conflagration, Malam Bashir Isa, said, “Everyone has been in the bush since Friday night; we started returning to town because the governor came today. To get food to eat now is a problem because even the markets are burnt. We are still picking corpses of women and children in the bush”.

To cushion the effect of the hardship faced by the surviving residents, the Federal Government ordered the National Emergency Management Agency, NEMA, North East Zone to collaborate with Borno State government to mobilize to site on Wednesday to assist the victims with relief materials. Consequently, NEMA officials were deployed to the area.

Source: Vanguard

Source: Naij.com