ISLAMABAD: Jihadist-infested Niger killed about 30 members of the Boko Haram group last week and detained 960 followers, most of whom were women and children fleeing neighboring Nigeria, according to official sources.
On March 7, aerial surveillance detected a “massive movement of people” along the Kamadougou Yoge River, which traces the border between the two countries, heading towards Lake Chad, according to state TV channel Tele Sahel.
Members of Boko Haram fleeing
According to the report, they were members of the Boko Haram jihadist group fleeing their hideout in the Sambisa forest in northeast Nigeria after being pressured by their rivals, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP). ISWAP broke away from Boko Haram in 2016 and became the dominant force in the region’s long-running conflict jihadist turmoil.
After Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau was killed in clashes with ISWAP in May 2021, it seized large swaths of territory. The army used envoys and leaflets to negotiate a surrender to prevent the group from approaching Lake Chad and using its marshlands as a haven. Eventually, it launched a dawn attack on March 11, according to Tele Sahel. It said that around 30 terrorists were neutralized, and 960 other people, most of whom were children and women, were detained, taken to the town of Diffa, and given over to the Nigerian military authorities.
An elected official in Toumour, a village near Bosso on the Lake Chad border, confirmed Wednesday that a large number of members of Boko Haram that were fleeing Sambisa were apprehended on Niger’s border and handed over to Nigerian authorities.
Many others, according to another official, are heading toward (the islands) on the lake, especially children and women, in terrible conditions.
Niger, one of the world’s poorest countries, is attacked by two jihadist insurgencies. One, in the southwest, arrived in 2015 from neighboring Mali, while the other, in the southeast, is a long-running byproduct of Boko Haram’s campaign in Nigeria. According to the United Nations, the group’s violence has killed over 40,000 people and displaced approximately two million since 2009.
The vast Lake Chad region, shared by Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, and Chad, is a well-known safe haven for Boko Haram and ISWAP, who set up camps on islands in its marshlands. In 2015, the four countries formed a Multinational Joint Task Force of 8,500 people to combat armed groups.
