A major humanitarian operation is needed to save lives in northeastern Nigeria’s Borno state, where more than 500,000 people are living in catastrophic conditions in villages and towns affected by the conflict between the military and Boko Haram, the global medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) warned today, after finding extremely high levels of malnutrition in another town where MSF teams recently gained access.
Advertisement
UNICEF said in a statement that unknown assailants attacked the convoy on Thursday as it returned to Maiduguri from delivering aid in Bama, injuring a UNICEF employee and an International Organization for Migration contractor.
“UNICEF’s top priority is to reach the children”, he underscored, adding that the agency is not in a position to say who was responsible for the attack, only that a security assessment would be under way.
UNICEF’s pledge comes amid warnings of a growing humanitarian crisis in the region, where Boko Haram, seeking to create a state adhering to strict sharia law, took control of a swathe of land around the size of Belgium in late 2014.
“Defeating Boko Haram requires not only denying them the opportunity to carry attacks which only deals with their attack strategy”.
The spokesperson pointed out that two million people remained inaccessible in Borno state, emphasizing the need to scale up assistance.
Many areas can only be accessed under escort from the Nigerian army.
Banki is now hosting around 15,000 people, who had gone up to 18 months without any humanitarian relief before aid agencies and the United Nations arrived in June.
The people of northeast Nigeria are about as tough as they come.
In it, the newspaper had alleged that Nigeria was diverting United Kingdom aid monies away from defeating the Islamist terror group Boko Haram towards those it identified as political opponents of the Administration, and the government dismissed it as being “as incorrect as it is unhelpful”.
The 1.7 million children who have been displaced across the Lake Chad Basin are especially vulnerable and risk abduction and recruitment by Boko Haram including for suicide bombings, he said.
Advertisement
The medical charity Doctors Without Borders this week also raised the alarm, saying its teams had recently found extremely high levels of malnutrition in northeastern Borno state.
