JOS, Nigeria, (Morning Star News) – Ten years after Boko Haram started a bloody campaign to carry out sharia (Islamic law) on all of Nigeria, Christian leaders say some areas are still under the regulator of the terrorists.
The Rev. Mohammed Abubakar Naga, chairman of the Borno state chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), told Morning Star News that the guerillas are still dynamic in the northeastern part of the nation where the group originated and has displaced thousands of people, successfully closing many churches.
“Gwoza East, particularly the mountains, has been taken over by Boko Haram,” Pastor Naga said by phone. “The terrorists still attack Christian communities there. This is even with the presence of personnel of the Nigerian army in the area.”
After beginning a forceful movement to establish an Islamic caliphate in northern Nigeria 10 years ago, Boko Haram has slain an estimated 35,000 civilians, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The agency said 37 aid employees lost their lives in the course of helping those displaced by the attacks.
Two of the many pastors Boko Haram murdered in northeast Nigeria’s Borno state include the Rev. Faye Musa, then secretary of the CAN’s Borno state chapter, slain on May 14, 2013, after the terrorists tracked him from his church building to his community and shot him to death; Pentecostal Pastor George Ojih, captured in 2009 and beheaded for rejecting to renounce his Christian faith.
Originally targeting government and police officials as part of its campaign against corruption, the insurgency that began in Maiduguri, Borno state progressively struck Christian educational institutions, health facilities, and worship sites, sometimes terminating entire Christian communities.
The CAN’s Naga, who has pastored Pentecostal Believers Covenant Church in Maiduguri for 35 years, said the Boko Haram uprising has been the highest challenge to Christians in northern Nigeria. Christians were either slaughtered or enforced to flee to other parts of the country or to countries like Cameroon and Niger.
In 2014, Boko Haram argued congregations of prominent denominations such as the Church of Christ in Nations (COCIN), the Church of the Brethren (EYN), Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion), Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA), and Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, and Pentecostal churches, Pastor Naga said.
Commonly referred to as Boko Haram, roughly translated as “[Western] education is forbidden,” the group is now officially part of the Islamic State as ISWAP, the Islamic State in West Africa Province.
Genesis
In 2002, Mohammed Yusuf, a public servant with the Borno state government and an ardent Islamic student under the tutelage of Sheik Ja’afar Mahmud Adam in Maiduguri, broke ties with the Islamic cleric and founded his sect.
Based in Maiduguri, Yusuf’s pearls of wisdom included opposition to Christianity and Western democracy, which he said had their origins in the Bible and Western political philosophy. He labeled them “haram,” or forbidden.
In 2009, soon after Yusuf executed Pastor Ojih as an example to others of what happens to those who refuse to convert to Islam, he and other Boko Haram members were taken and extrajudicially killed.
Abubakar Shekau took over as leader after Yusuf’s death on July 2009. Progressively sophisticated attacks followed, and in 2015 the group aligned with the Islamic State. Its suicide bombings and other outbreaks have displaced an estimated 2.3 million people from their homes, and in 2015 the Global Terrorism Index ranked it the deadliest terror group in the world.
Nigeria’s military has recaptured most of the 20,000 square miles that Boko Haram had detained in Borno state, but the group continues to carry out abductions and guerrilla attacks. In April 2014 the group kidnapped 276 students from the Government Secondary Girls School in Chibok, Borno state, and on Feb. 19, 2018, kidnapped more than 100 high school girls in Dapchi, Yobe state.
About 100 of the 276 girls abducted from Chibok are still missing. Nearly all of the Dapchi girls were released on March 21, 2018, after the government exchanged their freedom, but Boko Haram retained Leah Sharibu, now 16, because she refused to renounce Christ.
Nigeria ranked 12th on Open Doors’ 2019 World Watch List of countries where Christians suffer the most persecution.
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Article originally published by Morning Star News.
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Thank you AG News and Morning Star News for sharing this.
