Nigeria’s Igbo Tribal Elders Call for Evacuation Due to Violence

VOA News

30 January 2012

Nigeria’s Igbo Tribal Elders Call for Evacuation Due to Violence

An unidentified woman walks past the ruins of a market outside the state police headquarters in Kano, Nigeria. Police said that members of the radical Islamist group Boko Haram dressed in uniforms resembling those of soldiers and police officers when they launched their attack, January 24, 2012..Nigeria’s Igbo tribes are staging a mass evacuation of women and children from the north due to violence blamed on the radical Islamist sect Boko Haram. 

Nigeria’s eastern Igbo leaders are calling for tribal families living in the north to immediately return home so avoid being killed or injured.

At a series of meetings this weekend in Enugu State, tribal elders asked women and children living in the north to travel south to minimize their risk, while the men stay to look after their businesses.

The Igbo community is setting up shelters in the southeast to house the evacuees returning from the north.