Islamic Gunmen Storm Church Sunday Service, Kill 22 Christians as Scores Murdered By Terrorists Across Nigeria
By Morgan Lee , Christian Post Reporter
January 27, 2014|4:39 pm
- (Reuters/Landov)Men walk amid rubble after Boko Haram militants raided the town of Benisheik in northeast Nigeria, on Sept. 19. The Islamist group has been waging an insurgency in northern and central Nigeria for the past four years and was recently placed on the U.S. list of terrorist groups.
Twenty-two
Nigerian Christians were killed in an attack after gunmen entered a
church service armed with weapons and explosives on Sunday.
Boko
Haram, a Nigerian Islamic terrorist group seeking to eradicate
Christianity from the African country and spread Muslim Shariah law, has
been blamed for the mass shooting in the village of Waga Chakawa in
Adamawa state, and also for violence that killed 52 people in Borno
state at the weekend, the BBC has reported.
Terrorists
reportedly attacked the village of Kawuri and detonated explosives
while merchants were shutting down the crowded market. They also set
alight to the homes of residents in the town, with residents still
inside many of the houses.
Ari Kolomi, who
fled his home in Kawuri to Maiduguri, the Borno state capital, described
the destruction left by the group as devastating.
"No
house was left standing ...The gunmen were more than 50; they were
using explosives and heavy-sounding guns," Kolomi told the Associated Press, adding that he was unsure if any of his relatives had made it out of the village alive.
The
majority of Nigeria's Christians live in the southern part of the
country, while the north is a predominantly Muslim region. Christians
living in Yobe, Borno and Adamawa, the country's three north-eastern
states and also the regions where Boko Haram is most active, are
particularly vulnerable to violence.
In May
2013, the Nigerian government ordered emergency rule for all three
states with the hopes of better cracking down on the terrorist
organization. Yet it is questionable whether the law has mitigated the
violence. Since May, more than 1,200 people have been killed from
fighting related to Boko Haram and Fulani herdsman.
The
ethnic Fulani herdsmen, some of whom come from outside the country,
have been accused of colluding with Boko Haram, which also has ties to
Al-Qaeda. The groups have used bombings, mass shootings and kidnappings
in order to terrorize the Christian communities and drive them out of
their homes.
According to Ann Bulwalda, the executive director of
the Jubilee campaign: "Approximately 60 percent of the world's
Christians that were killed for their faith [in 2013 were] in Northern
Nigeria."
In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal last
week, Orji Uzor Kalu, the former governor of Abia state, said fighting
against Boko Haram was not only in the best interests of Nigerian
Christians, but also should be a subject of international concern.
"As
the world globalizes, jihadist factions such as Boko Haram align
in-kind and gain both the intelligence and the capacity to strike in
increasingly urban centers and beyond national borders," Kalu wrote. "We
must make no mistake: This destabilizing network is a global problem,
larger in scope and indeed in mission than the international community
may presume. It is not just going to go away."
In 2013, the U.S. government officially designated Boko Haram a terrorist organization.
