Ten people in Plateau state, Nigeria were killed over two days in violence linked to cattle grazing, part of a months-long crisis that has heightened religious tensions, sources said late Thursday.
In central Plateau state, military taskforce spokesman Major Adam Umar said eight deaths were recorded from tit-for-tat attacks in the rural districts of Bokkos and Bassa on Tuesday and Wednesday.
A Fulani nomadic herder was attacked and killed by sedentary farmers from the Ropp tribe while he was digging out sand to make mud bricks for a home.
“In retaliation members of the Fulani community attacked and killed two persons, including a woman, from the Ropp community,” Umar said.
In a separate incident on Tuesday, Umar said, five people were killed in violence between Fulani herders and ethnic Irigwe farmers in Gero village in Bassa district, 80 kilometres (50 miles) away.
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In another incident overnight Wednesday, a policeman and a farmer were killed in the eastern-central state of Benue, in an attack on Guma district that was blamed on Fulani herdsmen.
The clashes occurred a day after livestock belonging to the herders were stolen which they blamed on the farmers.
Plateau and Benue state lie in Nigeria’s so-called Middle Belt that separates the predominantly Muslim north from the largely Christian south.
It has long been a hotbed of ethnic, sectarian and religious tensions between indigenous farming communities, who are mainly Christian, and the nomadic Hausa/Fulani cattle herders, who are Muslim.
Tensions have boiled over access to land and resources, escalating into a rift that has deepened along nominally religious lines.
The violence has left approximately 100 dead this year in a conflict now more bloody than the Boko Haram jihadist insurgency that President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration is increasingly being criticised for failing to contain.
