Jihadists kill 55 in attack on resettled Nigerian IDPs

MAIDUGURI (AFP): Jihadists killed at least 55 people in northeast Nigeria while storming a town home to residents who had been returned from a closed camp for internally displaced persons, an NGO worker and civilian militia leader told AFP Saturday.

While jihadist violence has waned since the peak of the Boko Haram insurgency, from 2013-2015, militants including rival Islamic State West African Province (ISWAP) continue to launch attacks across rural areas in the northeast.

The Friday night assault came during an attack on the town of Darul Jama, which hosts a military base on the Nigeria-Cameroon border.

A security source told AFP that five soldiers were among the dead, while a commander of a government-aligned militia, Babagana Ibrahim, put the number at six.

The latest attack raises questions about Nigeria’s push in recent years to close down IDP camps and return displaced people to the countryside.

Residents said the attack began around 8:30 pm (1930 GMT), when dozens of fighters arrived on motorbikes, firing assault rifles and torching homes.

“They came shouting, shooting everyone in sight,” Malam Bukar, who fled into the countryside with his wife and three children, told AFP. “When we returned at dawn, bodies were everywhere.”

Ibrahim said 55 people were killed, while a worker from an international NGO, who asked not to be named, told AFP that 64 people were killed.

An army spokesman did not return a request for comment.

Many of the victims were families recently relocated from the Government Secondary School displacement camp in Bama, which authorities shut down earlier this year.

“The government told us we would be safe here,” said Hajja Fati, a mother of five who lost her brother in the attack. “Now we are burying our people again.”

The area is known to be under the control of a Boko Haram commander, Ali Ngulde. A security source told AFP he led the attack.

Borno Governor Babagana Zulum was travelling to the scene of the attack.

Boko Haram has been waging a bloody insurgency to establish an Islamic caliphate in northeast Nigeria since 2009, leaving around 40,000 people dead and forcing more than two million people to flee their homes.

Rival ISWAP split from the group in 2016.

According to a tally by Good Governance Africa, a nonprofit, the first six months of 2025 saw a resurgence in jihadist activity.

There were some 300 jihadist attacks that killed some 500 civilians, mostly by ISWAP, which has gained ground in recent years over the more fractured remnants of Boko Haram.

ISWAP overran at least 17 Nigerian military bases in that time period, aided by an uptick in its use of drones, nighttime attacks and foreign fighters, according to GGA.

The resurgence in jihadist violence comes as neighbouring Niger has pulled back from a key multinational task force and the Nigerian military has become stretched by a separate banditry crisis in the northwest.

A biting economic situation under President Bola Tinubu has reinforced the grievances that many armed groups feed off in rural areas, some analysts argue.