Niger Officer Killed While Nigeria Carries Out Air Strikes on Boko Haram Camp
October 4, 2013 in Nigeria
A high-ranking Niger security official has confirmed that armed bandits have killed a Niger soldier and seriously wounded three others in Nigeria’s volatile north-eastern region. Meanwhile officials in Nigeria have confirmed that the military carried out air strikes on a Boko Haram camp just days after the militant group’s insurgents killed forty students at a school in northern Nigeria.
In new violence that has hit Nigeria’s northern region, which is considered as the home base of Boko Haram, officials have indicated that “a soldier from Niger was killed yesterday (Wednesday) around 7:00pm (1800 GMT) and three others were wounded in an attack by eight armed bandits on Nigerian territory.” The three wounded soldiers were taken to a hospital in eastern Nigeria’s Diffa region, which is located near the border with Niger. According to reports, the soldiers were part of a West African force that is based in Baga, a town that is located in Nigeria’s Borno state. Sources have claimed that the soldiers were “ambushed by Boko Haram, 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the border with Niger.”
Meanwhile Nigeria’s military has launched air strikes on a Boko Haram camp, killing several Islamist militants, near a northeastern college campus where insurgents killed forty students over the past weekend. According to a military spokesman in Yobe, Lazarus Eli, the operation, which was carried out on Tuesday, involved troops tracking “…Boko Haram terrorists to their camp in the forest outside Gujba,” adding that fighters jets bombarded the camp while troops launched a ground offensive, which left several terrorists dead.” The latest military operation comes just after heavily armed Boko Haram gunmen attacked an agricultural college in Gujba on Sunday, killing forty students as they slept in their dorms. Gujba is located roughly 30 kilometers (18 miles) from Yobe’s capital city of Damaturu. The weekend school massacre cast further doubts on the success of the ongoing military campaign, which was launched in May of this year. Since June, more than one hundred people have been killed as a result of a number of school attacks that have been carried out by Boko Haram militants. Dozens of others have also been killed in violence that has occurred across the northeast, which is Boko Haram’s historic stronghold. According to an estimate made earlier this year, the four-year insurgency has cost more than 3,600 lives, however the current figure is likely much higher. Boko Haram’s insurgents have stated that they are fighting in order to create an Islamic state in Nigeria’s mainly Muslim north.
