Conflict and Settlement Destruction: North-Eastern Nigeria

Hello guys,

I want to share some research I did over the past couple of month using the historical layer of Google Earth. The area of research is Borno State - the second largest Nigerian State - which has been impacted by the ongoing Boko Haram Insurgency. The islamist movement Boko Haram and the Nigerian government (with the help of regional allies) have been clashing since 2009 in this area. In 2013/2014 the conflict turn very violent with many raids and bombing that led to Boko Haram conquering large parts of the surveyed area. In the following years many people have left the rural areas and relocated to IDP camps in the major towns as many settlements were destroyed and severely damaged.

The following file was compiled by me and covers around 3000 villages categorized by their current status. I sorted them into:

1) undamaged

2) damaged (less than 90% of settlement destroyed)

3) destroyed (more than 90% of location destroyed)

When opening the file you will see that the vast majority of villages are destroyed and that there are local differences between regions. Furthermore, in some areas new villages have started growing as they were accessible again (mainly in Bama LGA). Understand that I only systematically scanned for new villages in the selected area seen in the file. There are occasional new villages I marked outside that area, but it seems that the construction of new settlements is relatively rare /unheard of in the southern and western part of the surveyed area.

Below you find three attachments:

Impact of Armed Conflict on Human Settlements.kmz (249.88 KB)

Full data set about village destruction

pdf overview of the same area using QGIS
(the pdf attachment is removed and the image contained therein is inserted above -tek )

Befestigungen Borno.kmz (54.02 KB)

This layer shows the large extent of trench-building in the area. The Nigerian and Cameroonian military has constructed hundreds of kilometer of trenches in the conflict area to protect its military bases, the cities and the borders. Select this layer and you will see that especially around the large city of Maiduguri the trench seperates destroyed and undamaged villages and encircles IDP camps.

I am very happy to get your opinion or any suggestions.

Great piece of work, a great effort to show the level of destruction of probably the most bloody and dreadful, never ending and mindless civil war of mankind.

Might the Lord have mercy on poor, old Africa and on hundreds of millions of its innocent people!

A great piece of work indeed.  I had a look around outside the area of your white boundary and within a few minutes found several more villages destroyed within the last decade.  Truly awful that so many innocent people should be killed or displaced in the name of faith.