Pressmediaofindia
Related Articles
27-12-2025
ABUJA: An explosion has ripped through a mosque in northeastern Nigeria as worshippers gathered for their evening prayers, killing and wounding several people, according to media reports.
The blast took place at about 6pm on Wednesday (17:00 GMT) in the city of Maiduguri in Borno State, media reported, citing witnesses.
Police spokesman Nahum Daso confirmed the explosion and told media that an explosive ordnance team was already on site at the mosque in Maiduguri’s Gamboru market.
There was no official word on casualties but mosque leader Malam Abuna Yusuf told media at least eight people had died, while a militia leader, Babakura Kolo, put the figure at seven.
Another witness, Musa Yusha’u, told media that he saw “many victims being taken away for medical treatment”.
The cause of the blast was not immediately known, but it occurred in a city that has been at the heart of an armed rebellion waged by Boko Haram and ISIL’s (ISIS) offshoot in the region, the Islamic State West Africa Province, for nearly two decades.
The conflict has killed at least 40,000 people and displaced about two million from their homes since 2009, according to the United Nations.
Though the violence has waned since its peak about a decade ago, it has spilt into neighboring Niger, Chad and Cameroon.
Concerns are also growing about a resurgence of violence in parts of the northeast, where armed groups remain capable of mounting deadly attacks despite years of sustained military operations.
Maiduguri itself once the scene of nightly gun battles and bombings has been calm in recent years, with the last major attack recorded in 2021.
Nigeria must not become America’s next battlefield
In early November, United States President Donald Trump declared that “Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria”. In a series of posts on his Truth Social platform, he accused “radical Islamists” of “mass slaughter” and warned that the US “may very well go into that now disgraced country, guns-a-blazing“.
The claim rested on a familiar assumption: that violence in Nigeria is driven by religious ideology, with Christians targeted by Islamist militants.
In mid-November, a new wave of school abductions revealed how perilous parts of northern Nigeria have become for children of all faiths. On November 17, armed men raided Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in Maga, Kebbi State, killing a vice principal and abducting 25 students. The school was state-run, and the victims were Muslim girls. One escaped, and the remaining 24 were later rescued.
Days later, in the early hours of November 21, gunmen stormed St Mary’s Catholic Primary and Secondary School in Papiri, Niger State, abducting pupils and teachers. While some captives later escaped or were released, many remained missing into mid-December, leaving families in agonizing uncertainty. Parents continue to wait without answers, their desperation and anguish hardening into anger as official assurances fade.
Taken together, these attacks do not reflect a campaign of religious persecution. They follow a pattern that has become increasingly familiar across northern Nigeria: mass kidnapping for ransom, striking opportunistically rather than along religious lines. Trump’s remarks do more than misdiagnose this violence. They reimagine it. With a few lines of incendiary rhetoric, a country grappling with criminal insecurity and institutional collapse is recast as a front line in a civilizational struggle, a place where force, not reform, becomes the implied solution. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
