Following the attack on Dumba, a farming village in Kukawa local government area of Borno State, by Boko Haram/Islamic State of West African Province (ISWAP) militants, approximately 40 farmers were killed and the locations of numerous more were unknown at the time of publication.
An eyewitness who was among the farmers who managed to flee the attack, speaking on condition of anonymity, claimed that the terrorists used advanced weapons to storm the region at around 3 p.m. on Sunday afternoon and rounded them up.
According to him, the terrorists informed them that farming, which they said was prohibited, had not been stopped in the region before going on a shooting rampage. As a result, they threatened to kill everyone seen farming there going forward.
“We are the people farming at Dumba. Today (Sunday), the terrorists came and met us in the area. They chased us out of the farm and said that they had not lifted the ban on farming in the area. They said any farmer found in the area henceforth would be killed.
“They killed many of our farmers. It was in the night that we ran to soldiers and Civilian Joint Taskforce (CJTF) members who assisted in taking us to a safer place.
“We were farming together with those killed, God saved me. The dead bodies that I counted were about 40 of them. The rest that were shot in the bush and those that escaped with gunshot wounds could not be accounted for,” he narrated.
Also, requesting anonymity, a CJTF member who helped rescue the survivors stated that terrorist attacks on farmers have been a persistent problem. He added that occasionally, the terrorists would kill up to ten farmers, and that these killings typically go unreported. However, the alarming number of current killings prompted them to speak out about the difficulties faced by farmers, particularly fishermen, in the State’s Kukawa local government area.
“It was around 3pm that the attack occured, and it was around 5pm that the survivors reached us. We used boat to ferry them to a safer place together with the help from the military. About 200 of them that escaped were rescued. They told us that over 40 of them were killed. They are mostly fishermen and crop farmers,” said the CJTF member.
The research states that the Dumba community is roughly 7 km from the well-known Baga fishing community, where a lot of fishing occurs because the local government region is riverine and borders the Republic of Chad.
As fish vendors from all over the nation flocked to Maidiguri to conduct business, the smoked fish that was transported to the city from the Baga fishing village became a significant source of income for the Borno State government.
The movement of smoked fish from the Baga axis was once prohibited by the Nigerian military after they learned that the terrorists had taken over local fishermen’s operations and were using the money they made to strengthen their faltering economy after the Nigerian troops had attacked their logistics. The relevant authorities have not yet released a comment regarding the attack as of the time of this report.