A drone strike by the Nigerian army accidentally killed 85 civilians on Monday. This tragedy joins a long list of bombings carried out as part of the conflict between the government and Boko Haram armed groups.
The attack took place on Sunday night in the village of Tudun Biri, in the Kaduna region in the north of the country, as worshippers were celebrating Maulud, a religious celebration commemorating the birthday of the prophet Mohammed.
The governor of Kaduna, Uba Sani, said via the social network X that civilians had been “killed by mistake and many others injured” by a drone “targeting terrorists and bandits.”
“Search and rescue operations are underway in the region,” he added before explaining that an investigation was underway and that the injured were being evacuated to the Barau Dikko Teaching Hospital for emergency medical treatment.
Nigerian President Bola Tinubu described the incident as “very unfortunate, worrying and painful, and expresses his indignation and sorrow at the tragic loss of Nigerian lives.”
The Nigerian Air Force issued a statement saying that it had not carried out any operations in Kaduna on Sunday night, but that it was not alone in “operating armed combat drones” in the region.
120 people killed
The Nigerian office of Amnesty International said that 120 people had been killed in the attack, citing reports from its workers and volunteers in the region. A few days earlier, the NGO had issued a statement calling for justice for the victims of enforced disappearances in the northeast of the country.
“By allowing the army to carry out thousands of enforced disappearances in the north-east of the country and then failing to genuinely and effectively investigate and prosecute those responsible, the Nigerian government has violated its international and regional human rights obligations and failed to meet the expectations of the victims,” said Isa Sinusi, Director of Amnesty International Nigeria.
Several bombings
The Tudun Biri incident is just one in a long list of recent bomb attacks against residents of northern Nigeria. Since 2009, the conflict between armed groups, including the Sunni Group for Preaching and Jihad — commonly known as Boko Haram — and the armies of Nigeria and the sub-region has caused the death of a considerable number of civilians. According to Doctors without Borders, the 2.9 million or so displaced persons and refugees in the Lake Chad region (UN 2020), and particularly in northeast Nigeria (more than 2 million displaced), live in towns, camps or enclaves controlled by the military, in extremely precarious conditions.
The war between Boko Haram and the government intensified in 2015 with the Nigerian army’s offensive and the help of neighboring countries to drive Boko Haram out of the main towns in Borno State. While the Nigerian army continues its operations against the insurgents, armed groups affiliated to Boko Haram are pursuing their strategy of terror, multiplying attacks and massacres in the Lake Chad region.
Between February 2014, when a Nigerian military aircraft dropped a bomb on Daglun, in Borno State, killing 20 civilians, and September 2022, more than 14 documented cases of this type of bombing have been recorded in residential areas by various NGOs.
In a statement published last June, Human Rights Watch called for greater transparency on the part of the Nigerian authorities, who had “provided little information and failed to do justice for a military air strike that killed 39 civilians and injured at least six others on 24 January 2023.”
