According to the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), a Nigerian Army drone accidentally killed at least 85 civilians in an attack on Sunday, December 3, in Tudun Biri, a village in northern Kaduna state in western Nigeria. Residents there celebrated the Muslim Mawlid festival, which commemorates the birth of the Prophet Mohammed. It was one of the deadliest military bombings in the country.
The military said its drone was on a routine mission, targeting armed groups and “inadvertently hitting members of the community.” “Terrorists deliberately settle in areas where civilians live so that they suffer the consequences of their atrocities,” the army said in a press release, adding: “ [considérer] Any civilian death during operations is a tragedy.” She also expressed that the villagers had been mistaken for an armed group present in the area.
President Bola Tinubu on Tuesday, December 5, ordered the opening of an investigation. She later said the villagers were mistaken for an armed group in the area. “President Tinubu describes the incident as very unfortunate, disturbing and painful and expresses his outrage and sadness at the tragic loss of Nigerian lives,” a presidential statement said.
NEMA said another 66 people were being treated in hospital, but emergency officials were still negotiating with community leaders to ease tensions so they could travel to the village. Nigeria’s armed forces often resort to airstrikes to combat bandit militias in the northwest and northeast of the country, where jihadists have been fighting for more than a decade. This conflict has left more than 40,000 dead and two million displaced since 2009.
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The Nigerian army has already accidentally killed civilians
“I was in the house when the first bomb was dropped… We rushed to the scene to help those affected, then a second bomb was dropped,” he told Agence France-Presse, a resident of the neighborhood. “My aunt, my brother’s wife and her six children, the wives of my four brothers are among the dead. My elder brother’s family died except for his toddler who survived,” he added.
Militias have long terrorized parts of northwestern Nigeria, operating from camps deep in the forests and launching raids on villages to loot and kidnap residents for ransom. In the northeast, jihadists have been driven out of areas they occupied at the height of the conflict, although they continue to fight in rural areas.
Nigerian army bombings have already accidentally hit civilians. In September 2021, at least 20 fishermen were killed and several injured in an attack in Kwatar Daban Masara on Lake Chad in the northeast of the country when the army mistook them for militants.
In January 2017, at least 112 people were killed when a warplane hit a camp housing 40,000 people displaced by jihadist violence in the town of Rann, near the border with Cameroon. In a report released six months later, the Nigerian army blamed “the lack of proper marking of the area.”
Read the report: Article reserved for our subscribers. Entire areas of Nigeria under the control of “bandits” and warlords