Rival militant factions in Nigeria’s oil-producing Niger Delta have clashed in an apparent turf war, killing at least four people, security officials said on Wednesday.
The fighting started late on Tuesday at Abonnema, 14km west of the main oil-industry city of Port Harcourt, military spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Sagir Musa said.
”We deployed our men to the area. Unfortunately our men were ambushed by the militants and there was heavy exchange of gunfire … We lost one soldier and killed two militants in the ensuing battle,” he said.
”My understanding is that it is a battle for territorial control and sea routes where they [the militants] can control the movement of ships and collect money,” Musa said.
One civilian was killed by a stray bullet and another wounded during the fighting, according to Rita Inoma-Abbey, a spokesperson for the police in Rivers state, of which Port Harcourt is the capital.
The fighting underscores the deteriorating security situation in the delta, the hub of Nigeria’s two million barrels per day oil industry. The unrest has shut down about a fifth of output and helped push global energy prices to record highs.
Violence in the vast wetlands region surged in early 2006 when militants complaining of poverty launched a campaign of violent sabotage against the oil industry, blowing up pipelines and kidnapping foreign oil workers.
Criminal gangs have taken advantage of the breakdown in law and order and the instability has become as much about control of a lucrative trade in stolen oil and abductions for ransom as about a political struggle.
”It is just getting messier. It looks like there is a rupture developing between the main protagonists,” one private security contractor working in the world’s eighth biggest crude oil exporter said.
Security sources said they believed the clash was between fighters loyal to two rival factional leaders — Farah and Soboma George — with links to the main militant group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend).
Mend blew up parts of a major pipeline belonging to Royal Dutch Shell on Monday, forcing the Anglo-Dutch giant to shut down some production and warn that it may not be able to meet all of its export obligations in the coming months. — Reuters