Sectarian/Religious Violence

Muslims and Christians are killing each other in Nigeria. The abcnews.com article describing what's going on in Nigeria called it "sectarian violence," but it's not. It's religious violence because it's between followers of two differnet religions. The sectarian violence is, for example, in Iraq whre Muslims and Muslims are killing each other. Anyway, from the article about Nigeria:

ONITSHA, Nigeria Feb 23, 2006 (AP)- Christians in this southern Nigerian city burned Muslim corpses and defaced wrecked mosques Thursday, showing little repentance after days of sectarian violence that has killed more than 120 people across the country. Onitsha has borne the brunt, with at least 80 of the deaths. The violence followed weekend protests over the publication of cartoons of Muhammad, the Islamic prophet. "We don't want these mosques here anymore. These people are causing all the problems all over the world because they don't fear God," said 34-year Ifeanyi Ese, standing amid the concrete rubble of an Onitsha mosque. Thousands of Nigerians have died in sectarian strife since 2000, when mostly Muslim northern states began implementing Islamic Shariah law in late 1999. Nigeria's 130 million people are split between the two faiths, with Christians a majority in the south. The latest violence was touched off Saturday in the northern city of Maiduguri, when Muslim protests against cartoons caricaturing the Prophet Muhammad. The cartoons, which first appeared in a Danish newspaper in September, have set off sometimes violent protests around the world. The Maiduguri protests turned violent, and 18 people, most of them Christian, were killed. Twenty-five more died in similar violence in the northern city of Bauchi, sparking reprisals in Onitsha.

and from an AP article in the Toronto Star about Iraq:

Gunmen killed dozens of civilians today and dumped their bodies in a ditch, as the government ordered a tough daytime curfew of Baghdad and three provinces to stem the sectarian violence that has left at least 114 dead since the bombing of a Shiite shrine. Seven U.S. soldiers died in a pair of roadside bombings north of the capital, and American military units in the Baghdad area were told to halt all but essential travel to avoid getting caught up in demonstrations or roadblocks. As the country careened to the brink of civil war, Iraqi state television announced an unusual daytime curfew, ordering people off the streets Friday in Baghdad and the nearby flashpoint provinces of Diyala, Babil and Salaheddin, where the shrine bombing took place. Such a sweeping daytime curfew indicated the depth of fear within the government that the crisis could touch off a Sunni-Shiite civil war. "This is the first time that I have heard politicians say they are worried about the outbreak of civil war,'' Kurdish elder statesman Mahmoud Othman told The Associated Press.