DefenseNews: Two unrelated attacks by jihadist groups in northeast and northwestern Nigeria have killed 28 people, the military and residents told AFP on Thursday.
ABUJA, July 4 (Xinhua) -- Jihadist groups have killed 28 people in two separate attacks in northern Nigeria, media reported on Thursday, citing the military and residents. Militants from the jihadist group Lakurawa raided a village in Nigeria's northwestern Sokoto state on Wednesday, killing 17 people, residents said.
At least 11 people were killed on Thursday when jihadists from IS-aligned Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) stormed the town of Malam Fatori on the border with Niger, opening fire on a camp for internally displaced people, a spokesman for a multinational military coalition said.
“ISWAP terrorists attacked Malam Fatori this morning. They killed 11 people, but the area is now under military control,” said lieutenant colonel Olaniyo Osoba, of the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) in the Lake Chad region.
The MNJTF, which comprises troops from Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon, was formed in 1998 to combat cross-border crime but its mandate was expanded to fight jihadists in the region.
More than 40,000 people have been killed and around two million displaced in the northeast in 16 years of jihadist violence.
The militants drove into the town in several vans fitted with machine guns around 0120 GMT and attacked the camp housing thousands of people displaced by jihadist violence, said Abor Mallum, an anti-jihadist militia member assisting the military in fighting jihadists.
The attackers set fire to a hospital and government buildings before withdrawing, said Mallum, who put the toll at 12.
He said 20 others were wounded and taken to a hospital in Bosso across the border in Niger.
Malam Fatori, which lies 200 kilometers from the Borno state capital Maiduguri on the fringes of Lake Chad, was seized by Boko Haram jihadists in 2014 but was clawed back by the military in 2015.
The military established a base in the town and has repelled dozens of ISWAP attacks. ISWAP split from Boko Haram in 2016 and turned Lake Chad into its bastion.
Sharia Law
More than 1,000 kilometers away in Sokoto state, militants from another jihadist group, Lakurawa, raided Kwallajiya village on Wednesday, killing 17 people, residents said.
“The Lakurawa terrorists attacked… when people were preparing for afternoon prayers,” resident Muhammad Bello said, adding that 17 people, many of them working on their farms on the village outskirts, were killed.
Residents believed the attack was reprisal for the killing of three jihadists by vigilantes in a failed raid on the community days earlier.
The assailants entered the village “shooting indiscriminately,” burning homes, farmlands, and telecommunications masts, an imam of the village mosque told AFP.
Sokoto state police spokesman Ahmed Rufa’i confirmed the attack but gave no toll, saying that details were “sketchy.”
Lakurawa jihadists from Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso crossed into Nigeria last year and settled in a forest which stretches into Niger.
They stage deadly attacks, rustling livestock, and imposing tax on locals.
The group encourages people to rebel against secular authorities, while imposing its own strict interpretation of Sharia law in the districts it operates in.
Lakurawa’s emergence has worsened the insecurity in the northwest, which has been reeling under deadly attacks by criminal gangs.
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