Boko Haram terror in Nigeria: Islamists execute 43 farmers

Sunday 29th November 2020

While local elections were being held in a provincial capital in Nigeria for the first time in more than ten years, an extremely brutal attack broke out in a nearby village: fighters from the Islamist Boko Haram militia shackled dozens of field workers and cut their throats.
According to a vigilante group, fighters from the Islamist group Boko Haram killed more than 40 farm workers in northeastern Nigeria. There are at least 43 victims, said militia leader Babakura Kolo. Six people were seriously injured in the attack near the city of Maiduguri. Eight other workers may have been kidnapped.

According to Kolos, whose militia is fighting against Boko Haram, the victims were attacked and handcuffed while they were working in rice fields in the village of Koshobe. Then their throats were cut. “We recovered 43 bodies,” said Kolo. The attack was “undoubtedly” carried out by fighters from the Boko Haram militia. The Islamists killed a total of 22 farm workers in two attacks near Maiduguri in October.

According to another member of the vigilante group, Ibrahim Liman, the farm workers had traveled to the northeast from the state of Sokoto, about a thousand kilometers away, to work in the fields. The eight missing people are believed to have been kidnapped by the Boko Haram fighters.

Attack on the day of the local elections

Maiduguri is the capital of the state of Borno. Local elections were held there on Saturday for the first time since the Islamist group’s armed uprising began more than ten years ago. Because of the ongoing violence, the vote had been postponed again and again. Boko Haram and the West African IS offshoot Iswap had recently increasingly attacked woodworkers, cattle farmers and fishermen because they allegedly worked as informants for the army.

In 2016, Iswap split from the Boko Haram militia, which has been violently fighting for an Islamist state in northeastern Nigeria since 2009. The attacks by the militias and their fighting with the army killed around 36,000 people in recent years, and two million more fled.