Twenty people were killed when the vehicle they were traveling in after attending funerals for victims of an earlier jihadist attack hit a landmine in northeastern Nigeria, paramilitaries and residents told AFP on Wednesday.

The 14-year-old jihadists have scaled back in the area and no longer control as much land as in previous years, but continue to launch attacks on rural areas and military bases and ambush cars.

People believed to be members of the Islamic State group in West Africa (ISW) killed at least 17 people on Monday night in an attack on a farming community in Yobe state, in retaliation for not paying a tax on their livestock demanded by the jihadists, according to sources in the area.

The night before yesterday, Tuesday, villagers organized funerals in Kayaya, they added.

A group of 22 people from the neighboring village of Karambiri was returning by vehicle when it hit a landmine believed to have been planted by the jihadists, killing 20 and seriously injuring two others, said Grema Bukar, a member of a paramilitary group.

“We were afraid that the terrorists would return” when the funerals were held, but residents “insisted on burying their dead”, he explained.

The two wounded were taken to Gaydam General Hospital, 30 kilometers away, according to Abubakar Adamu, another paramilitary who gave the same account, as did Gaydam resident Ari Sanda.

Yobe state, which neighbors Borno, has been hit like the latter by jihadists, with frequent deadly raids on villages, military bases, schools and markets, as well as mass kidnappings.

In April 2022, IKDA jihadists killed 11 people in attacks on a bar and a technical school in Gaidam, a few days after another six people were killed and another 16 injured in an explosion at another bar in Taraba state, also in the northeastern part of the country.

In 2021, members of the IKDA overran Gaidam for days, committing murders and looting shops before setting them on fire. The Nigerian army intervened and chased them out of there.

The action of jihadist groups and operations by security forces to suppress them since 2009 in Nigeria have claimed the lives of at least 40,000 people and forcibly displaced another two million residents in the northeast of Africa’s most populous country, according to the UN.