Gunmen killed approximately 100 people in a nighttime assault on the central Nigerian village of Yelwata, reducing homes and market stalls to ashes and leaving families shattered. The attack, which began late Friday and continued into Saturday, marks one of the deadliest episodes in a surge of violence gripping Benue State.
Farmer Fidelis Adidi, 37, returned at dawn to find his wife and four children burned beyond recognition in a rented market-room he believed would shield them from ongoing clashes. His second wife and another child survived with severe injuries. “My body is weak and my heart keeps racing,” Adidi told Reuters, surveying the charred remnants of his family 159. Nearby, bodies lay beside blackened farming tools and food stores, underscoring the attack’s brutality.
Market trader Talatu Agauta, pregnant with her second child, fled to the state capital Makurdi but returned to find her livelihood destroyed: 40 bags of rice reduced to ash. Defiant, she declared: “Even if I die here, I don’t mind”.
While Amnesty International confirmed roughly 100 deaths, local groups and the Catholic Diocese of Makurdi reported over 200 fatalities, with bodies still being recovered from nearby bushes. The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) estimates 3,000 displaced, including 252 breastfeeding mothers and 91 elderly persons, now sheltering in camps with urgent needs for blood donations and medical aid.
President Bola Tinubu labeled the violence “depressing” and will visit Benue on Wednesday—his first trip since taking office two years ago. Governors Hyacinth Alia (Benue) and Caleb Mutfwang (Plateau) rejected framing the attacks as mere farmer-herder clashes, instead calling them “acts of terrorism” and “genocide” aimed at displacing Christian communities from ancestral lands.