Boko Haram Intensifies Attacks on Civilians in Nigeria

 

DAKAR, Senegal — The violent campaign by the Boko Haram militant group against Nigerian civilians appeared to intensify late on Sunday with two deadly attacks in Jos, a city in central Nigeria, underscoring the challenge the country’s new president faces in trying to suppress the group.

The two attacks killed at least 44 people, and possibly many more. Gunmen and suicide bombers struck a popular restaurant and a mosque, shooting worshipers who had gathered for Quranic readings during Ramadan. The attacks brought the death toll from Boko Haram attacks in the last week to more than 200.

The carnage in Jos was devastating. There was an explosion at the Yantaya mosque, and worshipers began to flee. “A bomb exploded, and people were running for their dear life,” said Umar Farouk Musa, a spokesman for J.N.I., or Jama’atu Nasril Islam, the country’s main Muslim organization. After the explosion, he said, “people emerged from nowhere, five of them, holding sophisticated arms, shooting sporadically into the crowd.”

Mr. Musa said he witnessed the mosque attack. “We saw these people emerging from nowhere, covered with blankets,” he said in a telephone interview from Jos, referring to the gunmen. “Before we knew it, they disappeared into thin air. There were victims beyond what we could count. After they had done their work, they disappeared into the crowd.”

Mr. Musa said he had counted “more than 100 dead bodies,” though Nigerian media put the total death toll for the two attacks in Jos on Sunday night at half that figure. “Blood, blood everywhere,” Mr. Musa said.

The other attack, at a nearby site opposite the university in Jos, happened a few minutes earlier, when a suicide bomber walked into a restaurant and detonated his charge. Mr. Musa and colleagues arrived on the scene shortly afterward and “counted 15 dead bodies,” he said.

There have been deadly attacks in Nigeria almost daily over the last week, including several that struck villages in the north. Each attack has generally involved a bombing and indiscriminate shooting into crowds of unarmed civilians. A suicide bomber killed six people at a church in the northeast on Sunday, and suicide bombers killed many civilians on Friday in Maiduguri, the main city of the northeast.

The new Nigerian president, Muhammadu Buhari, is a former army general who has vowed to pursue a military campaign against Boko Haram more vigorously than his lackluster predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan. Mr. Buhari has already taken some measures, including moving the campaign’s nerve center to Borno State, where Boko Haram is strongest, and coordinating Nigeria’s efforts more closely with those of its neighbors Niger, Chad and Cameroon.

Analysts say that Boko Haram is responding by stepping up its attacks against civilian targets. “It’s a fallout from the pressure the federal government is mounting against the Boko Haram in the northeast,” said Muhammad Lawal Ishaq, the legal adviser at the central mosque in Jos. “They want to create diversionary tactics by attacking other soft spots,” he said.

Mr. Buhari’s spokesman indicated after the church bombing on Sunday that the government would not back down, and spoke of its “total commitment to doing everything possible to eradicate Boko Haram, terrorism and mindless extremism from Nigeria in the shortest possible time.”