TerrorismIslamists kill nearly 100 in weekend attacks in Nigeria

At least ninety people have been killed in three weekend attacks over the weekend by Islamist group Boko Haram. The attacks took place in northeast Nigeria, the area where the group attacks have killed thousands of people since 2009.

This past weekend’s attacks cap three weeks in which the Islamist militants killed more than 400 people.

The Guardian reports that on Saturday, two explosions in a crowded district of Maiduguri left at least fifty dead, while another thirty-nine were killed in the nearby village of Mainok by Boko Haram gunmen.

A Red Cross volunteer said he had “succeeded in evacuating fifty-one dead bodies” after working all night. “Children are most affected,” he said, adding that nearly sixty people were injured.

Hassan Ali, a leader of a vigilante group in Gomari, told the Guardian that many people remained buried under rubble.

He said many food sellers and children hawking in front of a cinema hall in the area were killed while more than twenty houses and shops were destroyed.

The New York Times quotes the health commissioner for Borno State, Dr. Salma Anas-Kolo, saying that in the Maiduguri bombings, children were the main victims of the explosions. The youths had gathered at a makeshift soccer stadium in the Gomari neighborhood to watch a soccer match when a bomb went off in a pickup truck.

When people in the densely inhabited neighborhood rushed to help, a second bomb exploded, according to Maikaramba Saddiq, the Maiduguri representative of Nigeria’s Civil Liberties Organization. Saddiq said about fifty children had been killed.

In a separate attack on Saturday, dozens of gunmen dressed in military uniform stormed Mainok, thirty miles from Maiduguri, firing rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikovs and killing thirty-nine people.

A senator who represents Borno in the Nigerian Senate, Ahmed Zanna, told the Times that a Nigerian military plane had mistakenly bombed fleeing villagers, killing many.

Boko Haram, which means “western education is evil” in the local Hausa language, is fighting to

create a strict Islamic state in the mainly Muslim northeast. The group has carried many bloody attacks since 2009, with many of the attacks focused on destroying schools and colleges and killing their teachers and students.

Since last May, the Nigerian government has placed three states in the region — Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe — under a state of emergency in an effort to defeat the Islamic insurgency, but to little effect. The Nigerian military campaign has been criticized by military experts, who say the military has adopted an approach which is too passive to be effective against nimble insurgents. The quality of the troops and their commanders is low, resulting in guard being left unstaffed, slow response – at times several hours — to reports of attacks and calls for help, and soldiers abandoning their posts and running away in the face of the attacks.