by Madeleine Kearns, The Free Press
Islamists massacred over 200 people in Yelwata, Nigeria—many of them women and children. The media barely mentioned it.
It was a night of heavy rainfall in Yelwata, a town in central Nigeria. On Friday June 13, over 500 Christians—many of them women and children—gathered together in temporary shelters in the town’s Market Square. Most of them had fled their homes across the region, hoping to find greater protection in Yelwata from a spate of recent attacks in which Islamist terrorists have massacred Christians.
Earlier in the day, the town’s armed vigilantes and a few policemen had set off to investigate reports of terrorist activity nearby. But this turned out to be a diversion, according to Steven Kefas, a Nigerian journalist.
At around 10:30 p.m., he told me, a “killer squad” of Islamists descended on the town in a three-hour murderous rampage.
Father Ukuma Jonathan, the local parish priest, was in the presbytery with displaced Christians when they heard yells of “Allahu Akbar,” gunfire, and screams. Everyone immediately dropped to the floor, fearing for their lives, according to John Pontifex, head of press and public affairs at Aid to the Church in Need UK, who spoke to Father Jonathan the day after the attack.
The jihadists broke into homes and shelters, murdering people with machetes. They were “cutting them like they were cutting a cow or an animal to be eaten,” said Kefas, who visited Yelwata and interviewed around 30 survivors the week after the massacre. The terrorists then doused their victims’ bodies and homes in petrol and set them ablaze.