Boko Haram members
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.
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