More than a hundred people may have been killed in northeastern Nigeria on Saturday evening after Nigerian fighter jets bombed a local market. International news agencies report this based on eyewitnesses and local administrators. The warplanes pursued the jihadist group Boko Haram near Jilli village, on the border between Yobe and Borno state. Northern Nigeria has been suffering from violence from Boko Haram for years.
Sources report varying numbers of casualties and deaths from the military attack. A local director speaks to the AFP news agency of “approximately two hundred dead and injured.” In one message On social media, Amnesty International talks about “more than a hundred deaths”, and 35 people are said to have been admitted to the emergency department of the nearby hospital with serious injuries.
The Nigerian Armed Forces confirmed in a statement on X that they carried out an attack on Islamic militants in Jilli, without any mention of civilian deaths or casualties. “Dozens” of militants on motorcycles are said to have been killed in the attack. According to the Nigerian army, the area is known as an important “transit” and “gathering point” for “terrorists and their accomplices.”
According to eyewitnesses interviewed by Amnesty International, three military aircraft fired on the market. The human rights organization “strongly condemns” the airstrike, it wrote on
Airstrikes by the Nigerian Armed Forces regularly hit civilians. In June 2025, at least twenty people were killed in an attack in Zamfara, in the northwest of the country, where the army is fighting bandits who attack and plunder villages and kill or kidnap residents. According to a count by the AP news agency, at least five hundred civilians have been killed in airstrikes by the Nigerian army since 2017.
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