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16-04-2021
By SJA Jafri + Bureau Report
ABUJA/ KARACHI: Over 77,000 Shia Muslims out of 93,000 people have fled from different cities, towns and areas of Nigeria after several threats given by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Islamic State (IS), Boko Haram, Taliban, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and many other anti-Shia local, national and international terrorist organizations, groups and individuals particularly from the northeastern Nigerian town of Damasak, sources told PMI.
The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) also claimed that fighters from the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) stormed the said town in Borno state three times in a week to strike a military garrison, burning homes and a UN office, and killing at least 12 people, the UNHCR said on Friday.
In the latest violence on Wednesday, the fighters attacked the garrison before being forced back into the town itself, military sources and residents said.
“Following the latest attack on Wednesday 14 April, the third in seven days, up to 80 percent of the town’s population which includes the local community and internally displaced people were forced to flee,” UNHCR spokesman Babar Baloch said.
Some have fled towards the regional capital, Maiduguri, and other nearby towns while others have crossed the border into Niger’s Diffa region, itself vulnerable to violence from armed groups.
“Due to insecurity, however, humanitarian access is increasingly challenging in many parts of Nigeria’s Borno State, including for UNHCR staff, who were forced to temporarily relocate out of Damasak in the past seven days,” Baloch said.
Jens Laerke, spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told the same briefing that aid operations had been temporarily suspended in the area since Sunday because of the insecurity.
“The situation on the ground is extremely critical and if this continues it will be impossible, maybe for longer periods of time, for us to deliver aid to those who desperately need it,” he said.
Laerke added that humanitarian workers appeared to be targets, amid reports of house-to-house searches for aid workers and the burning of their offices.
The incidents mark the latest violence in the Lake Chad basin area which in recent years has uprooted some 3.3 million people, the refugee agency said.
Damasak is host to one of the military’s so-called “super camps”, fortified garrisons the army has set up in an attempt to better defend against attacks.
Critics and residents say the strategy to close smaller bases and pull back into larger camps has left armed groups freer to roam unchallenged in rural areas.
Due to worsening security in the region, humanitarian workers are struggling to provide aid, with the number of people requiring urgent assistance expected to rise to 8.7 million this year.
ISWAP, which split from the armed group Boko Haram in 2016, has become a dominant threat in Nigeria, attacking soldiers and bases while killing and kidnapping civilians.
PMI has already been flashed some exclusive stories in this regard earlier.
