Nigerian activists are accusing the government of massacring hundreds of
Shia Muslims in Zaria, a city in Nigeria’s north, over the course of
three days from Sunday through Tuesday.
The alleged catalyst was a
Saturday protest by the radical Shia group Islamic Movement. It
devolved into conflict after a Nigerian general’s car was hit by a
projectile. The Nigerian government interpreted this as an assassination
attempt and launched an offensive targeting the group.
The leader of the Islamic Movement, Ibrahim Zakzaky, was wounded in the fighting — and his wife and son were reportedly killed.
Regional analysts worry that conflict between the government and the movement could spiral out of control.
Nigeria’s Shias, the Islamic Movement, and the recent massacre
Nigeria
is a heavily Muslim country, and the overwhelming majority of Nigerian
Muslims are Sunni. By most accounts, Shia Islam had little presence in
Nigeria until the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
“The Iranian
revolution of 1979, which led to the emergence of an Islamic government,
inspired many northern Nigerian Muslims,” Michael Olufemi Sodipo, the
founder of Nigeria’s Peace Initiative Network, writes. “The puritanical
tendency among [Muslims and Christians] in northern Nigeria gave rise to
increasingly zealous political actors.”
This movement was led by
Ibrahim Zakzaky, who had been trained in Shia theology in Iran. In the
early ’80s, Zakzaky founded the Islamic Movement, which spread among
Shias in northern Nigeria. “Its stated mission is to establish an Iran
type of Islamic state in Nigeria, which has kept it in intermittent
skirmishes with government security forces,” Ibrahim Haruna Hassan, a
professor at Nigeria’s University of Jos, explains.
Though the
group acquired weapons, it had not taken up arms against Nigeria’s
secular government. “While the group still strongly rejects secularism,”
Hassan writes, “they believe that the time to take up arms is not ripe
(yet) in Nigeria.”
The government’s official story of this
weekend’s events is that the Shia group planned to assassinate a
general, Tukur Buratai, but it’s not clear that’s what happened. “There
are inconsistencies in the initial reports,” according to the private
firm SBM Intelligence.
What we know for sure is that a large Shia
demonstration, led by the Islamic Movement, took place on the Sokoto
road, near Zaria, where the Islamic Movement has a large presence. Mass
actions alongside this road are, according to one local source, not
uncommon.
Around this time, Buratai’s convoy was driving through.
The military demanded that the demonstrators disperse, and they
refused. Some sort of projectile then struck Buratai’s car (reports
conflict as to what it was), and the soldiers fired into the air as a
warning. When that didn’t work, according to SBM, “the military opened
fire to cover their principal, after which they left the location.”
This
crackdown, at Zaria over the course of the past three days, is when the
military allegedly killed a large number of Shia civilians —
“hundreds,” according to activists. (The activists initially said about
1,000 had been killed, but media agencies are being careful with this
figure — it’s not clear how literally the activists meant it.) Zakzaky
was reportedly wounding in fighting with the Nigerian military, and his
son and wife were reportedly killed.
The death toll has not yet
been confirmed by independent investigation or human rights groups.
Still, the Nigerian military has a long and terrible history of human
rights abuses, including killing civilians, during its campaigns against
insurgent groups.
There are worrying precedents here. The Sunni
extremist group Boko Haram began seriously escalating its militant
activities in 2009 as a result of clashes with the Nigerian military.
“A
lot of observers are raising red flags over the similarities between
the 2009 capture and execution of then Boko Haram leader Mohammed Yusuf
in police custody,” the intelligence group SBM writes. “Nigeria cannot
afford to repeat the errors of 2009 now.”