ICC Note:
According to Jubilee Campaign, a international non-profit that “promotes the human rights and religious liberty of ethnic and religious minorities around the world,” 1,631 Christians were killed by Boko Haram in Nigeria from January to June of this year. According to the group, that constitutes more than 90% of the total number of Christians murdered by Boko Haram all of last year, Meaning, Boko Haram is on its way to massacring twice as many Christians in 2014, as it did in 2013.
07/28/2014 Nigeria (Morning Star News) – Islamist extremist group Boko Haram and others killed 1,631 Christians in Nigeria for their faith in the first six months of 2014–a figure that is 91 percent of the total Christians killed in the country in all of last year, according to advocacy group Jubilee Campaign.
Last year 1,783 Nigerian Christians were killed for their faith, according to Jubilee Campaign. The increase in Christian deaths so far this year accompanies an increase in the total number of people killed during the period, mainly by Boko Haram–4,099, which is 975 more than the total deaths from attacks by religious extremists for all of last year, 3,124, according to Jubilee.
Boko Haram, which seeks to impose sharia (Islamic law) throughout Nigeria, has reportedly increased attacks with a large injection of funding from foreign terrorist groups. Emmanuel Ogebe, manager of Jubilee Campaign’s Justice for Jos Project, told Morning Star News that he has noted a trend this year of Boko Haram targeting some Muslims primarily because they cooperate with the Nigerian military.
“The pattern therefore is that if you do not do what they demand, even if you are Muslim, you become an ‘apostate’ deserving of death,” he said. “Therefore the difference between Boko Haram’s approach to Christian ‘infidels’ and Muslim apostates is you are killed as a Christian ‘just because’ your name is Christian–you go to church, etc.–whereas Muslims are generally killed ‘for cause,’ for example working for the government or refusing to pay extortion taxes to Boko Haram.”
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