عاجل: قتل أكثر من 850 مسيحيى فى نيجيريا..منهم 100 فى شهر ابريل..واكثر من 6000 قتلواالعام الماضى

نشرت صحيفة ” مترو فويس” احصائيات عن اعداد قتل المسيحيين فى نيجيريا , حيث رصدت قتل 6000 خلال العام الماضى , وفى هذا العام 850 منذ اول يناير , وفى شهر ابريل وحده 100 قتيل , ونشرت الصحيفة الاحصائيات عن جمعيات مسيحية عالمية لرصد الانتهاكات ضد المسيحيين

Mr. President, the North (of Nigeria) is at war,”   Zamfara State Senator Kabir Garba Marafa growled. “Let no one be deceived about this. In two or three years, this situation may be out of control,” he said. Marafa painted a grim picture of a population on the edge from the arid plateaus of the Northwest to the forests of the Northeast. In Zamfara State [on the border with neighboring Niger] , I tell you 75 percent of the men cannot sleep with their wives at night, because they have to stay on guard all night to watch over their communities,” he said. In the state of Kaduna, in north central Nigeria, so many farmers have been forced into internally displaced persons camps, that there is danger of a famine, he warned. “In Kaduna people have abandoned their farms. You either go to your farms with [armed] security or you don’t farm,” Marafa said.

Many Christians in the conflict zones are alarmed now that the Nigerian Federal Government is pledging to pay national leaders of the Fulani ethnicity, the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria, the equivalent of $276 million over two years to stop the rampant kidnapping along highways in northern states, according to Dede Laugesen, executive director of Save The Persecuted Christians (STPC).

“Since 2015, Kaduna Gov. Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State has said he has been giving similar bribes to Fulani from 14 nations to stop attacking the people of Kaduna. El-Rufai provides no transparency or accountability for the use of state funds for this purpose. And, the violence has only gotten worse,” Laugesen wrote in an email Saturday.

The United States has plenty of skin in the game financially. “In 2017, US aid to Nigeria was USD $121M, in 2018 USD $419M was budgeted, and the UNHCR has recommended USD $587M for 2019. Nonetheless, recent accounts tell of internally displaced people eating twigs, dying of starvation and disease, and living without shelter or security,”  Laugesen writes.

Her prescription: “It’s time for the U.S. Congress to investigate the genocidal, religious-based nature of these Muslim Fulani attacks on mostly Christian farmers and the ties between the terrorists and their political allies in Nigeria’s federal and state governments. Nigeria should arrest and prosecute the kidnappers. They certainly shouldn’t hand over money to this group of herdsmen terrorists.
Paying the kidnappers vast sums of money is not a deterrent but an encouragement to continue these evil deeds.”

For American believers Thursday was a worshipful occasion: The National Day of Prayer. President Trump marked it with prayer at the Rose Garden and on his own initiative brought to the podium Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, head of the California synagogue recently attacked by a gunman driven by bigotry. But for some Christians in Nigeria, including kidnap victims who couldn’t pay a ransom, sleeping farmers in Kaduna and for shop keepers in northern states fighting bandits, Thursday was their very last day.

– By Douglas Burton

Douglas Burton is an independent reporter who specializes in ISIS-related terrorism and is a former State Department official who served in Baghdad and Iraq during the U.S. occupation of that country.

Contact him with news tips about terrorism: burtonnewsandviews AT gmail.com. Snailmail: 3600 New York Ave. NE, third floor, Washington, D.C. 20003