Defense Head Quarters, DHQ, Nigeria’s military high command says it received over 30 distress calls from the villagers of Plateau State when the attacks were taking place and could not respond soon enough because the terrain in those communities is bad.
A deadly spate of violence in Nigeria’s North Central Plateau State since December 2010, has killed hundreds of people. The victims, including children, have been hacked to death, burned alive, “disappeared,” or dragged off buses and murdered in tit-for-tat killings.
Director, Defence Media Operations (DMO), Maj.-Gen. Edward Buba, who made this known in Abuja during a bi-weekly and end-of-the-year press briefing noted that troops intervened in 19 out of the 36 villages in Plateau after receiving distress calls from villagers.
He explained that the intervention of the troops in Bokkos and Barkin Ladi Local Government Areas forced some of the militants to withdraw after wreaking havoc on the defenseless villagers.
Buba said over 100 marauding armed militant herders suspected to be mercenaries, carried out the series of unprovoked attacks from multiple fronts on Kambarpeli village in Bokkos while the locals were asleep. According to him, the distress calls reported a series of coordinated attacks by armed militant herders on isolated villages in the two local government areas.
“Not less than 17 communities have been completely burned down and those who survived are presently in internally displaced people’s camps,” Caleb Mutfwang, the governor of Plateau State, said during an interview with local broadcaster.
The military assured that it had taken necessary measures to overcome all identified challenges and ensure that such tragic occurrences were avoided in the future
Parts of North central Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation with about 200 million inhabitants, have seen an increase in violence in recent years over grazing rights between farming communities and herders being driven into the region by the southward advance of the Sahara Desert. More than 1,000 people have died in similar violence this year in Plateau and nearby states of Benue, Taraba, and Nassarawa, according to official casualty figures.