Gang violence: 13 vigilantes, police killed in northwest Nigeria

KANO: Criminal gangs have killed 13 security personnel, including two policemen and 11 vigilantes, in Nigeria’s northwestern Zamfara state in the latest violence in the region, a lawmaker and residents told AFP Sunday.

Criminal gangs called bandits by locals have for years been terrorising communities in northwest and central Nigeria, raiding villages, kidnapping residents and burning homes after looting them.

Bandits in large numbers stormed Adabka village in Bukkuyum district late on Friday and kidnapped some residents, the sources said.

Read more: Over 50 taken in Nigeria where organised crime, jihad intertwine

They laid ambush and opened fire on a team of policemen and vigilantes pursuing them to free the abductees.

Hamisu Faru, a lawmaker from the area said, “The bandits killed 13 people in the ambush, including 11 vigilantes and two policemen.”

“We are still unable to retrieve the bodies because the bandits are staying put in the bush,” Faru said.

Aminu Adace, a resident of Adabka who gave the same toll, said many residents fled the village for fear of renewed attacks.

MUSLIM CLERICS-LED FRAGILE TRUCE

On the other hand, Faru also said that Adabka and nearby communities have been repeatedly raided by bandits who maintain camps in nearby forests, forcing residents of several villages to desert their homes.

“These forests harbour more than 5,000 bandits who continue to terrorise our communities,” Faru said, insisting that aerial bombardment was the only effective way of smoking out the bandits.

Despite military deployment to fight the criminal gangs since 2015 and the creation of a militia force by the Zamfara state government two years ago, the violence has persisted.

Federal and state authorities have over the years signed several peace deals with the gangs only for the bandits to renege and resume attacks.

Last month, a group of Muslims clerics brokered a government-backed truce with a notorious bandit leader in Zamfara’s Shinkafi district, which some residents doubted would hold.

JIHADIZATION OR BANDITIZATION

A 2022 report “Northwestern Nigeria: A Jihadization of Banditry, or a “Banditization” of Jihad?” prepared by Combating Terrorism Center looks into the challenge faced by Nigeria in detail.

It says, “Northern Nigeria is presently suffering from two devastating conflicts. In the Lake Chad basin in the country’s northeast, a 13-year jihadi insurgency that has killed nearly 350,0001 and displaced several million rages with no end in sight.”

“The faction of “Boko Haram” known as Jama‘at Ahl al-Sunna li-Da‘wa wal-Jihad (JAS) is in disarray after the killing of its longtime leader Abubakar Shekau in May 2021, but it is not yet a totally spent force.”

At the same time, it also mentions, “The rival Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) faction, meanwhile, remains strong and controls large swathes of rural Borno on all sides of the capital, Maiduguri.”

About northwestern Nigeria, the report says “a complex and volatile insurgency is roiling a region the size of the United Kingdom, leading, shockingly, to more civilian deaths in 2021 than the conflict in the northeast.”

“Well-armed bandits are terrorizing communities and wearing down overstretched security forces, getting rich through criminal activity such as kidnapping for ransom, and assuming de facto sovereignty over swathes of the region.”

“Most of the militants are Fulani herdsmen who claim to be fighting to redress the government’s neglect of pastoralist communities.5 But their insurgency, to the extent the violence can be classified as such, is fractured into dozens of competing bandit groups loosely organized around warlords of varying power.

CRIME-TERROR NEXUS

Are they interlinked? In this connection, the authors say the “crime-terror nexus” is a possibility.

“Though these two conflicts are distinct, Nigerians fear that the insurgencies will overlap and jihadis will cooperate with bandits in a classic example of a “crime-terror nexus” or possibly convert the bandits (who are mostly Sunni Muslim) into jihadis themselves.”