Protests against anti-Islam film spread to another Nigeria town

AFP/Kaduna

Protesters burn a US flag during a demonstration yesterday in the city of Kaduna

Thousands of people marched yesterday through the Nigerian city of Kaduna in the latest protest in the country’s mainly Muslim north against a US-made anti-Islam film. The protests over the film in Africa’s most populous nation have so far been peaceful - apart from soldiers shooting into the air to disperse a crowd earlier this month - and no incidents were reported at yesterday’s protest. “I am on the street and it is just a sea of people. You actually can’t count. It is men, women and children denouncing the US and Israel,” said Shehu Sani a Kaduna-based activist. The crudely-made film has stirred outrage across the Islamic world, with protests reported in more than 20 countries and over 50 people killed in attacks or demonstrations. In Nigeria, where roughly half of the country’s 160mn people are Muslim, a pro-Iranian Shiite group called the Islamic Movement of Nigeria has organised major demonstrations in three key cities. “We are holding this protest to express our outrage over the movie that blasphemed Islam,” said Mukhtar Sahabi, a protest organiser and member of the Islamic Movement, which was established in Nigeria in the late 1970s. Some protesters dragged British, US and Israeli flags along the dusty streets as they marched through the northern, Muslim-dominated half of the city. Tens of thousands of people demonstrated in Kano on Saturday, Nigeria’s second city, stomping on American flags and burning pictures of US President Barack Obama.  Last week several thousand people protested in the city of Zaria, which is near Kaduna. Kaduna and Zaria were hit by a series of suicide bombings at churches in June that sparked reprisal violence by Christian youth mobs, who killed dozens of their Muslim neighbours and burned some of their corpses. Muslim mobs later launched further revenge attacks. The church bombings were blamed on the radical Islamist group Boko Haram, which has carried out scores of attacks across northern and central Nigeria since 2010.35 Islamists killed in crackdown, claims Nigerian militaryNigeria’s military said yesterday it has killed 35 suspected Boko Haram Islamists in a crackdown on the insurgent group in the northeastern city of Damaturu. “The joint task force has succeeded in killing 35 Boko Haram terrorists in shootouts between Sunday evening through Monday,” said Lieutenant Lazarus Eli, a military spokesman in Yobe state, of which Damaturu is the capital. A round-the-clock curfew was imposed in the city on Saturday, ahead of the operation that also led to the arrest of 60 suspected Boko Haram members. Military forces went door-to-door through three Damaturu neighbourhoods beginning late on Sunday and engaged militants “in a fierce exchange of gunfire” through to the early hours yesterday morning, the spokesman added in a statement. Two soldiers were injured in the fighting. Damaturu has been hit hard by the radical Islamist group which is blamed for more than 1,400 deaths in Africa’s most populous nation since 2010. Running gun battles between suspected Boko Haram members and the security forces in June put the city under lockdown, with some stranded in their places of work for several days unable to access food and water. Violence blamed on Boko Haram had ebbed in recent weeks, but a suicide blast at a church in the northern city of Bauchi on Sunday which killed a woman and a child resembled attacks previously claimed by the group.