Eyewitness: Nigeria's "town of death"

[gottaB]

Felled trees, branches and piles of junk metal lie across the road to Yelwa.

They were placed there last week by armed men who wanted to stop security agencies coming into town and stopping the killings.

The closer we got to Yelwa, the more signs of destruction we saw.

Burned houses, and the twisted metal and shattered windows of cars, abandoned by the side of the road.

Nigeria's "town of death"....

[salin]

1. another humanitarian crisis - being largely overlooked

sounds horrendous.

[gottaB]

2. From Reuters

A Muslim community leader in the Nigerian town of Yelwa said yesterday that 630 bodies had been buried there after an attack by Christian militia on Sunday. The previous estimate of the death toll was 300.

Survivors of the attacks said many people were still missing and the final death toll could reach 1,000. Another 600 were said to be seriously wounded.

"We buried a total of 630 people yesterday, 1,500 people were injured and 600 were taken for emergency treatment," the community leader, Abdullahi Abdullahi, said.

Nigerian Muslims bury 600 after Christian slaughter....

***

The Reuters take is that this is at its root a religious conflict. Dan Isaacs of the BBC had an analysis yesterday that was more sophisticated, Nigeria's Simmering Tensions (previously entitled "Nigeria's Spiral of Violence"). I don't agree with Isaac's materialist argument, but I do agree with him that the gross simplifications are inadequate, and we should keep the many factors in view when assesssing the situation and trying to make sense of it.

[gottaB]

3. and from AFP

Nigerian town shocked after massacre:

The crowd gathering around the rescue workers was strangely silent: old men, women and children queued at a simple wooden table in the Nigerian town of Yelwa, waiting for their bullet wounds and machete gashes to be treated.

Some of the most seriously injured were dragged out in wheelbarrows to meet the Red Cross team, but most stood about in varying degrees of shock and pain, holding out their hacked-up limbs or showing their still weeping entry wounds.

Ethnic violence has become almost a way of life in this remote part of central Nigeria's Plateau State, but the savagery of Sunday's assault — when a large gang of militants from the Tarok community of Christian farmers swept into the mainly Muslim town — has stunned even Yelwa's war-weary population.

"This attack is far above our level of thinking. We are under shock. We are not even able to describe what has happened," Adilu Yinuss, a young Yelwa man, told an AFP reporter who visited the town in the aftermath of the attack.