Over 90 per cent Boko Haram victims are Muslims, Buhari declares

President Mohammadu Buhari yesterday declared that 90 per cent of all Boko Haram victims over the years are Muslims. The terrorist group began its activities in 2009 after the killing of the leader, Mohammed Yusuf.

The Global Terrorism Index (GTI) indicated that the group has executed several thousands of Nigerians and displaced over 2.3 million persons.

President Buhari in an article published in Speaking Out; a guest opinion column for “Christianity Today,” said the perception that members of the sect were always targeting Christians in Nigeria was not completely true.

While reacting to the killing of Chairman, Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) in Michika Council Area of Adamawa State, Reverend Lawan Andimi, after Boko Haram insurgents who kidnapped him rejected N50m ransom, he noted that the terrorists have targeted the vulnerable without discrimination.

His words: “it is the reality that some 90 per cent of all Boko Haram’s victims have been Muslims. They include a copycat abduction of over 100 Muslim schoolgirls, along with their single Christian classmate; shootings inside mosques; and the murder of two prominent imams.

“It is a simple fact that these now-failing terrorists have targeted the vulnerable, the religious, the non-religious, the young, and the old without discrimination.”

The President assured that his government was committed to ending the activities of the insurgents for the country to experience peace again.

“Just as my government and our international partners, quicken our campaign to defeat Boko Haram within and without our borders, we must turn our minds to the future,” he said.

Buhari warned those seeking to divide the country through religion to have a rethink, adding, “There is no place in Nigeria for those who seek to divide us, who compel others to change their faith forcibly or try to convince others that by so doing, they are doing good.

“We may not yet be completely winning the battle for the truth. Christianity in Nigeria is not—as some seem intent on believing—contracting under pressure, but expanding and growing in numbers approaching half of our population.”

President Buhari stated that the terrorists only attempt to build invisible walls between the adherents of the two major religions in the country, insisting that they have failed in their territorial ambitions, so they now seek to divide our state of mind instead, by prying us from one from another—to set one religion seemingly implacably against the other.