Gunmen killed 30 people on Saturday when they attacked six villages in north-western Nigeria where gang violence was rampant, local police said on Monday.
Aboard “twenty motorcycles,” these gunmen carried out raids in Tangaza district, Sokoto state, killing “eight people in Raka, seven in Bilingawa, six in Jaba, four in Dabagi, three in Raka Dutse and two in Tsalewa. Sokoto Police spokesman Ahmad Rufai said in a statement.
The motive for the attack is unclear, but in these rural areas of Nigeria, fierce competition for resources between pastoralists and farmers is fueling the escalation of violence.
In this area, where land for cultivation and grazing is becoming increasingly scarce, conflicts have multiplied and these communities have mobilized armed groups to ensure their protection.
Some, known locally as “bandits,” have gradually evolved into a criminal group, raiding, looting villages, killing their residents, or kidnapping them for ransom.
According to police, the bandits conducted a targeted expedition against these villages after a vigilante group beat up several shepherds in a nearby village.
However, according to two district residents, who ensured that 36 people were killed in the attacks, the issue is not community tensions but an attempted extortion by an armed group.
“We buried 36 people who were killed by the bandits yesterday (Sunday),” Kasimu Musa, a resident of Raka Dutse, told AFP, confirming the death toll of a resident of the neighboring village of Gandaba, Mansur Abdullahi.
The attackers “were angry that we refused to negotiate with them and pay them money for our protection as other villages have done,” “so they attacked our villages,” Mr Musa explained.
Nigeria’s new President Bola Tinubu, who was sworn in on Monday as head of Africa’s most populous country and the continent’s largest economy, faces numerous security challenges. In his inaugural address, he pledged to make the fight against insecurity “his absolute priority.”