AP
YOLA, NOVEMBER 18
A night-time suicide bombing blamed on Boko Haram extremists killed 32 people and wounded 80 Tuesday at a truck stop in north-eastern Nigeria, an emergency official said.
Tuesday night’s blast breaks a three-week hiatus in bombings after a string of suicide attacks culminated in twin explosions in mosques in two north-eastern cities that killed 42 people and wounded more than 100 on October 23.
One of the mosques attacked was in Yola, capital of Adamawa state, where the insurgents struck again. It was the third suicide bombing in as many months in a city overflowing with some of the 2.3 million refugees driven from their homes by the Islamic uprising.
At least 32 people were killed and about 80 wounded victims were evacuated to hospitals after Tuesday night’s blast, coordinator Sa’ad Bello of the National Emergency Management Agency told the AP.
Most victims were vendors and passers-by, said Deputy Superintendent Othman Abubakar, the police spokesman for Adamawa state.
Nigeria’s military has reported foiling several suicide bombers recently, and killing and capturing insurgents as it destroys Boko Haram camps in air raids and ground attacks.
“The enemies of humanity will never win. Hand in hand, we will rid our land of terrorism,” Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari said in a tweet.
Analysts say Nigeria’s military is too thin to hold ground and that as it takes one area, the extremists slip into another in the vast arid spaces dotted by forests in the northeast.
Some 20,000 people have been killed in the 6-year-old Islamic uprising that has spread to neighbouring countries.
The Nigerian-based terror group, also known as Islamic State’s West’s Africa province (ISWAP), was responsible for 6,644 deaths in 2014.
In comparison, ISIS is believed to have killed 6,073 people in the same period. Boko Haram pledged allegiance to the group, also known as the Islamic State, in March of this year.
ISIS has certainly sought - and achieved - global notoriety since it announced its creation of a caliphate across Syria and Iraq in June 2014.
It has its own media arm which pumps out propaganda videos and messages to either inspire supporters or strike fear into those it regards as enemies with graphic footage glorifying executions and torture. It has also claimed responsibility for the most recent terror attacks in Paris and Egypt, where a plane containing 229 was downed.
