Hundreds slaughtered in Nigerian religious violence

The Nigerian city of Jos and surrounding areas have once again been witness to religious bloodshed on a horrific scale.

In January, hundreds of Nigerians in the city of Jos and surrounding areas died in violence between Muslims and Christians. Most of the dead were Muslims, many of them women and children, massacred by Christian mobs, who then stuffed many of the bodies down wells.

And now a wave of reprisal attacks, on at least as murderous a scale as those in January, has occurred. Preliminary reports are that predominantly Christian areas of Jos and nearby villages were the target. One Christian village, Zot, has been nearly wiped out, according to eye-witnesses.

One report out of Nigeria puts the number killed at "more than 500."

Sadly, this is just the latest chapter in the ongoing story of deadly violence between Christians and Muslims that has taken thousands of lives over the last two decades in Nigeria, the most populous (and one of the wealthiest and most "developed") nations on the African continent.