Forty-two dead as sect, police clash in Nigeria

by Aminu Abubakar Aminu Abubakar – 9 mins ago

KANO, Nigeria (AFP) – Forty-two people were killed Sunday in clashes between police and members of a radical Islamic sect in Nigeria that is inspired by the Taliban in Afghanistan, a hospital source said.

"We have received a total of 42 bodies," Awwal Isa, a nurse at Bauchi Specialist Hospital in the northern city of Bauchi where the violence took place, told AFP by telephone.

They were victims of "fighting between security personnel and members of the Taliban," he said, alluding to the sect founded in Nigeria in 2004 with a mission to set up a strict Islamic state in Nigeria.

The two sides exchanged gunfire after a failed dawn attack on a police station in the neighbourhood of Dutsen Tenshin.

"Our men succeeded in repelling the dawn attack by the Taliban and killed five members of the group in the exchange of gunfire," Bauchi police spokesman Mohammed Barau told AFP by telephone.

"We have launched a manhunt for other members of the group that have fled," Barau added.

Local journalists who went to Bauchi Specialist Hospital told AFP earlier on Sunday they had counted nine bodies there -- six Taliban militants and three local inhabitants.

Isa said that, initially, the hospital received nine bodies, followed by another 33. He added that one of the dead was a soldier, the rest were members of the Taliban sect.

Police have so far declined to give a total death toll from the gun battle, which according to the hospital figures would amount to the biggest number of casualties the Taliban sect has suffered in clashes with Nigerian authorities. The Nigerian Taliban debuted in 2004 when it set up a base -- dubbed Afghanistan -- in Kanamma village in northern Yobe state, on the border with Niger, from where it attacked police outposts and killed police officers.

Its membership is mainly drawn from university dropouts.

The north of Nigeria is majority Muslim, although large Christian minorities have settled in the main towns, raising tensions between the two groups.

Since 1999 and the return of a civilian regime to Nigeria's central government, 12 northern states have introduced Islamic Sharia law.

Religious clashes between Muslims and Christians in Bauchi state killed five people in February.

A Muslim mob went on the rampage, attacking Christians and burning churches in reprisals over the burning of two mosques, which Muslims blamed on Christians, they said.

More than 700 people died last November in Jos, capital of Plateau state, when a political feud over a local election degenerated into bloody confrontation between Muslims and Christians.

One of the Nigerian Taliban leaders, Aminu Tashen-Ilimi, told AFP in a 2005 interview that the group intended to lead an armed insurrection and rid society of "immorality" and "infidelity."

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Q+A-Who are the Islamic sect in northern Nigeria?
31 Jul 2009 07:13:27 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Nick Tattersall

LAGOS, July 31 (Reuters) - The leader of a radical Islamic sect in northern Nigeria was shot dead in police custody late on Thursday after days of clashes between his followers and the security forces killed hundreds of people.

Militant preacher Mohammed Yusuf, whose Boko Haram sect wants a wider adoption of sharia (Islamic law) across Africa's most populous nation, was captured after a manhunt involving military helicopters, soldiers and armed police.

The violence first erupted on Sunday in Bauchi state after some members of the group were arrested on suspicion of plotting to attack a police station.

For the latest story, click on [nLV406672]

Following are questions and answers on who the group are, what they want, and whether their ideology is widely followed.

WHO OR WHAT IS BOKO HARAM?

Sometimes referred to as the "Nigerian Taliban", the group's members are followers of a self-proclaimed Islamic scholar, Mohammed Yusuf, who was radically opposed to Western education and wants sharia (Islamic law) to be adopted across Nigeria.

Based in Maiduguri, capital of the northeastern state of Borno, his followers include former university lecturers and students in other northern states including Kano, Yobe, Sokoto and Bauchi, as well as illiterate, jobless youths.

Boko Haram means "Western education is sinful" in the Hausa language spoken across northern Nigeria and sums up the main pillar of the group's ideology. Some of its members resigned their jobs as lecturers when they joined the sect.

Yusuf himself, who was born in 1970, had 4 wives and 12 children. He had considerable private wealth and received a Western-style education, but his followers -- who come from diverse ethnic backgrounds in the predominantly Muslim north -- say he was also educated in Iran.

Boko Haram followers pray in separate mosques in cities including Maiduguri, Kano and Sokoto, and wear long beards and red or black headscarves.

They believe their wives should not be seen by any men other than themselves and are not supposed to use Western-made goods.

Anybody who does not follow their strict ideology -- whether Christian or Muslim -- is considered an infidel.

WHY DID THE VIOLENCE ERUPT?

President Umaru Yar'Adua has said the security agencies had been tracking the sect for several years, describing them as a "potentially dangerous group" who have been gathering weapons and intelligence to try to force their views on Nigerians.

Violence broke out in Bauchi state on Sunday when some members of the group were arrested on suspicion of plotting to attack a police station. Unrest quickly spread to other cities across northern Nigeria.

Yar'Adua ordered the security forces to use all necessary means to control the situation after sect members armed with machetes, knives, home-made hunting rifles and petrol bombs went on the rampage attacking churches and government buildings.

IS THERE A HISTORY OF SECTARIAN VIOLENCE IN NIGERIA?

Africa's most populous nation is roughly equally divided between Christians and Muslims and more than 200 ethnic groups generally live peacefully side by side, although civil war left one million dead between 1967 and 1970.

The stricter enforcement of sharia in 12 of Nigeria's 36 states in 2000 alienated sizeable Christian minorities in the north and sparked clashes which killed thousands.

In 2002 at least 215 people died in rioting in the northern city of Kaduna following a newspaper article suggesting the Prophet Mohammad would probably have married one of the beauty queens at a Miss World contest being held in Abuja.

A Muslim protest against Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad in the northern city of Maiduguri ran out of control in 2006, sparking a week of rioting which killed at least 157.

There have also been clashes between Muslim and Christian gangs in central Nigeria, a region known as the Middle Belt, most recently last November in the wake of a disputed local government chairmanship election, although the hostilities were more about politics than religion.

DOES RADICAL ISLAM HAVE A FOOTHOLD IN WEST AFRICA?

West Africa has a strong tradition of moderate Sufi Islam whose brotherhoods are renowned for their tolerance, particularly in the Sahel -- the southern fringe of the Sahara desert stretching across the northern edge of Nigeria.

Salafist insurgents from Algeria, Tablighi clerics from Pakistan and Wahabist missionaries from Saudi Arabia -- all seen as potential threats by Western intelligence services -- have tried to gain a foothold in the region in recent years.

By and large they have failed.

Islamic jurisprudence in Nigeria is based on the moderate Maliki school of Sunni Islam, and Boko Haram's ideology is widely dismissed by the country's Muslim leaders and believers.

The main militant threat in the Sahara is seen as al Qaeda's North African wing, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which grew out of Algeria's civil war in the 1990s and was formerly known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC).

Nigeria arrested a group of Islamists with suspected links to al Qaeda in 2007 and some Western diplomats have expressed concerns that -- with its huge population, widespread poverty and strategic importance as an oil supplier to the West and to China -- it could become a target for radical Islamic groups.

Boko Haram's apparently chaotic tactics have little in common with those of Islamic militant groups elsewhere and no conclusive evidence of al Qaeda's presence in Nigeria or of links to the Taliban in Afghanistan has been made public.

(For more Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: http://af.reuters.com/ ) (Additional reporting by Ibrahim Mshelizza in Maiduguri, Faruku Umar in Sokoto, Ardo Hazzad in Bauchi)