This has raised doubts about military
claims that they have the upper hand in Nigeria’s fight to halt an
Islamic uprising in the northeast.
AFP reported the stench of
rotting corpses from the morgue hung over Damaturu Specialist Hospital
on Tuesday, where a reporter counted 31 bodies identified as those of
extremists.
Details still are trickling in about the
attack, which militants began at dusk Thursday on an army barracks 20
kilometres (12 miles) outside Damaturu, the state capital, where they
overpowered the soldiers, seized an armoured car, looted the armoury and
set the barracks ablaze with improvised explosive devices.
The reports were given to Yobe State
Governor Ibrahim Gaidam by military officers as he toured the destroyed
sites with a heavily armed escort on Monday. Journalists accompanying
the tour heard the reports.
The attackers then moved down the main
road into the city where they rammed the armoured car through the gates
to the headquarters of the Police Anti-Terrorist Squad. There, they
burned down three buildings.
While some of the extremists exchanged
fire with the police, the armored car and others in all-terrain pickup
trucks and on foot went on to shoot up and set fire to the police
Criminal Investigation Department offices and four other police offices
scattered across the city until they arrived at the Mobile Police Base,
where the armored car caught fire and was abandoned.
The militants went to the hospital where
they looted drugs and bandages as the medical staff fled in terror,
according to doctors at the hospital.
This account differs from the official
version of events that extremists attacked an army checkpoint along the
road from Damaturu to Benisheikh — where militants have killed hundreds
of civilians in recent weeks — at around 3 a.m. on Friday. A “firefight
ensued and the insurgents were effectively neutralised,” according to a
statement Monday from the army spokesman in Damaturu, Ibrahim Attahiru.
He said 70 militants were killed there.
“Fleeing insurgents” then “regrouped to
carry out attacks on Damaturu town,” Attahiru said. Security forces
killed another 25 insurgents in the city, he said.
Col. A. O. Abdullahi told the governor that 22 soldiers were killed in the attacks.
A police officer who spoke on condition
of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak about the incident
said eight police officers were killed in the shootout at the mobile
base. A reporter who visited the hospital mortuary on Sunday saw 17
bodies in police uniform.
On Monday, the morgue held only the
bodies of 31 suspected insurgents. Nigeria’s military regularly inflates
the numbers of militants killed and downplays its own toll.
The number of civilians caught up in the
fighting also is uncertain, with local newspapers reporting that dozens
of travelers were caught in crossfire. A civil servant was shot
Saturday by soldiers who accused him of breaking the hastily announced
curfew. He died in the hospital on Monday, according to witnesses.
Another man whose car broke down at the side of the road was shot and
killed, apparently by the insurgents, according to reporters who knew
him.
The Damaturu attack — on a city that had
been free from assault for months — overshadowed a military success in
neighbouring Borno State.
Aerial bombardments and a ground assault
on two “terrorist camps” killed 74 insurgents and wounded several
others who fled, according to spokesman Lt. Col. Muhammed Dole. He said
two soldiers were wounded in the attacks.
Culled: PUNCH
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