At least 20 people were killed when
Islamist group Boko Haram attacked a
town in northeast Nigeria, triggering
clashes with troops stationed there, the
military said on Sunday.
Reuters reported that a spokesman for
Nigerian forces in northeastern Borno
State, which lies at the heart of a four-
year-old Islamist insurgency, said the
Islamists crept into the town of Damboa
in the early hours of Saturday.
They killed five worshippers at a
mosque as they said their morning
prayers, he said.
“While they were unleashing their
mayhem, troops … engaged the
terrorists, killing 15 in the process while
others fled,” the military spokesman,
Captain Aliyu Danja, said in a statement
obtained by Reuters.
The military often gives significantly
higher casualty figures for insurgents
than for its own men, and it is usually
not possible to verify them
independently.
Despite a concerted military offensive
meant to crush Boko Haram since May,
it remains the biggest security threat to
Africa’s top energy producer.
Its targets have traditionally been
security forces, Christians or Muslim
clerics who speak out against it, but its
fighters have increasingly turned their
sights on civilians in the past few
months – massacring hundreds in
roadside attacks or assaults on Western-
style schools they consider sacrilegious.
Nigerian fighter jets last week bombed
camps belonging to suspected Islamist
militants in northeast Nigeria in
response to a massacre of students at
an agricultural college that killed at least
41.
No comments:
Post a Comment