Boko Haram/Islamist State of West Africa Province (ISWAP) terrorists have killed 1,249 persons in the last 11 months.
A tally by the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Abuja-based Daily Trust shows that the 1,249 includes no fewer than 657 civilians and 592 State actors.
The 592 State actors includes military and other security operatives, government officials, humanitarian workers, Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF), and others.
Boko Haram terrorists have killed tens of thousands of people in the last 11 years and like some of those that occurred this year, many killings are hardly reported by the media because of some obvious reasons.
As the year 2021 is inching closer, many families, especially in Borno and Yobe States would live to remember 2020 as an ugly one that deprived them of their loved ones.
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in its Nigeria Security Tracker shows that 657 civilians have been killed by Boko Haram between January and November 2020.
The CFR’s Nigeria Security Tracker is an effort to catalogue and map political violence based on a weekly survey of the Nigerian and international press.
CFR is a nonpartisan membership organisation, founded in 1921, that works on providing a resource for its members; government officials, journalists and other interested citizens to help them better understand the world.
The Council, which relied on press reports of violence in its report, noted that there is a dearth of accurate reporting across certain regions, death tolls are imprecise, and accounts of incidents vary.
The tracker showed that 179 civilians were killed in June – the highest in 2020, followed by November with 130, while 81 and 52 civilian deaths were recorded in January and August respectively.
March had the least with 13 deaths followed by April with 24.
However, newspaper reports compiled by Daily Trust Saturday showed that 396 people were killed by Boko Haram under the period in review.
“There is the potential for political manipulation of the media. Given these limitations, the NST makes every effort to collect information from multiple sources.
Nevertheless, NST statistics should be viewed as indicative rather than definitive,” the council said on its website, adding that the Nigeria Security Tracker was edited by Ralph Bunche Senior Fellow for Africa Studies, John Campbell.
As the Council reported, this number, however, could rise, as several cases were either unreported or exact number of causalities unknown as was the case with the farmers killed in Zabarmari, Jere Local Government Area of Borno State that fuelled calls for President Muhammadu Buhari to sack the Chief of Defence Staff and Service Chiefs.
There have also been calls in some quarters for the resignation of the president due to the growing insecurity in the country. The presidency described such calls as irresponsible.