Nigeria’s government is sending new troops to tackle violence in the central city of Jos, with the first batch of more than 500 soldiers reaching the area yesterday, Brigadier-General Umaru Hassan said.
The troops will replace members of a special task force that has served for more than a year in the central Plateau State where Muslim-Christian fighting has claimed hundreds of lives, Hassan, who is commander of the military task force in the area, said by phone from Jos, the state capital today.
“We’re expecting more soldiers today and others will arrive tomorrow,” he said.
More than 200 people have died in sectarian violence in Plateau since multiple bomb blasts in Jos on Christmas Eve killed 80 people, according to New York-based Human Rights Watch. A radical Islamic sect claimed responsibility for the explosions.
About 14,000 people died in ethnic and religious clashes in Nigeria, Africa’s top oil producer, between 1999 and 2009, according to the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.