Tag Archives: Nigeria

French, Nigerien forces operating where three U.S. soldiers killed

By Boureima Balima

NIAMEY (Reuters) – French and Nigerien troops were conducting operations on Thursday in a region of Niger where three U.S. Army Special Forces members were killed the day before, becoming the first American soldiers to die in West Africa in decades.

At least one Nigerien soldier was also killed and two U.S. soldiers wounded in the attack, which took place in a southwestern Niger region where insurgents are active, U.S. Africa Command spokeswoman Robyn Mack said .

France’s regional Barkhane force was asked to support a counterattack after the Niger and U.S. troops were ambushed, French army spokesman Colonel Patrick Steiger told a news conference in Paris.

“It’s not clear if the attackers knew the Americans were present,” said a Western security source. “Initial information suggests there was a trap that appeared designed to get them out of their vehicles and then they opened fire.”

Insurgents in the area include militants from al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb and a local branch of Islamic State, Mack said. The Western security source said al Qaeda and a relatively new group called Islamic State in the Greater Sahara were the main suspects, although no one had yet claimed responsibility.

Two other Niger security sources said four military helicopters had been sent to the region and that reinforcements arrived on Thursday morning in the Tillaberi area, where the attack took place.

A Nigerien regional official said on Wednesday five Niger soldiers were killed in the attack, but a statement by U.S. Africa Command on Thursday said only one “partner nation member” had died.

“U.S. service members were providing advice and assistance to Nigerien security force counter-terror operations when they came under fire from hostile fighters,” Mack told Reuters.

In a speech on Thursday, Niger President Mahamadou Issoufou condemned the attack. “Our country has just been the victim of a terrorist attack that claimed a large number of victims,” he said.

Islamist militants form part of a regional insurgency in the poor, sparsely populated deserts of West Africa’s Sahel. Jihadists have stepped up attacks on U.N. peacekeepers, Malian soldiers and civilian targets since being driven back in northern Mali by a French-led military intervention in 2013.

Malian militant groups have expanded their reach into neighboring countries, including Niger, where a series of attacks by armed groups led the government in March to declare a state of emergency in the southwest.

The European Union has pledged tens of millions of euros to a new regional force of five Sahelian countries – Niger, Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso and Mauritania – in a bid to contain Islamist militant groups. The United States also views the region as a growing priority.

Rinaldo Depagne, West Africa project director at International Crisis Group, said the borderlands between Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso were “becoming a new permanent hotbed of violence”, threatened by increasingly organized militant groups.

“This shows the level of organization of these groups and also their confidence,” Depagne said.

Andrew Lebovich, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said Wednesday’s attack revealed how U.S. training of Nigerien forces “has accelerated and also verged into ongoing military operations”.

The United States has about 800 service members in Niger, where it operates surveillance drones out of a $100 million base in the central city of Agadez to support the country’s efforts to combat jihadists and protect its porous borders.

It has also sent troops to supply intelligence and other assistance to a multinational force battling the Nigerian Boko Haram militants near Niger’s border with Nigeria.

(Additional reporting by Adama Diarra and Cheick Diouara in Bamako, David Lewis in Nairobi, Emma Farge in Dakar and Joe Bavier in Abidjan; Writing by Aaron Ross; Editing by Joe Bavier and Larry King)

More than half of schools in Boko Haram’s region are shut, UNICEF says

ABUJA (Reuters) – More than half the schools in the state at the epicenter of Nigeria’s conflict with Boko Haram are still closed, the United Nations’ children agency said on Friday, as the insurgency drags into its ninth year.

The lack of schools could continue to fuel Boko Haram or similar movements in the future. Poor education for Nigeria’s restive northeastern youth left them with few prospects, driving them to join the Islamist insurgency, experts say.

The conflict has killed more than 20,000 people since 2009 and embroiled the region in one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with at least 10.7 million people in need of assistance, according to the United Nations.

“In addition to devastating malnutrition, violence and an outbreak of cholera, the attacks on schools is in danger of creating a lost generation of children, threatening their and the countries future,” Justin Forsyth, a deputy director for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said in a statement.

Over 57 percent of schools are shut in Borno state, where most of the conflict and resulting crisis have taken place, as the new school year begins, the statement said. More than 2,295 teachers have been killed, at least 19,000 displaced and almost 1,400 schools destroyed, UNICEF said.

Despite aid agencies’ efforts to set up schools for children in the northeast, particularly those displaced by the insurgency, UNICEF said it has only received three-fifths of the total funding it needs for 2017.

Combined with climate change taking its toll in recent years on farming, a mainstay of the region, the lack of schooling has left many without job opportunities.

Nigeria’s northeast has been plagued by poor education for decades.

British colonialization in the 19th and first half of the 20th century ushered in priests who set up schools in the country’s south, which came to be religiously dominated by Christianity.

The partly autonomous northern regions, governed by Muslim rulers under Britain, saw fewer similar attempts, and, by 1950, northern Nigeria had produced one university graduate.

(Reporting by Paul Carsten, editing by Larry King)

Girl strapped with bomb kills five in Cameroon mosque

By Josiane Kouagheu

YAOUNDE (Reuters) – A girl with a bomb strapped to her walked into a mosque in northern Cameroon where it exploded, killing five worshippers in an attack bearing the hallmarks of Islamist militant group Boko Haram, authorities said.

The girl of 12 or 13 years old arrived at the Sanda-Wadjiri mosque in remote Kolofata at the first call to prayer at between five and six a.m., the governor of Cameroon’s Far North region Midjiyawa Bakary told Reuters by telephone.

“The men were bowed in prayer when she came,” Bakary said. “Five of the worshippers were killed and the bomber also.”

He did not name any suspects, but Boko Haram has repeatedly used suicide bombers as well as strapping children with explosives to strike at civilian and military targets.

The Nigerian jihadist group, which is now split into at least two factions, has been fighting for almost a decade to revive a medieval Islamic caliphate in the Lake Chad region, where Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger and Chad meet.

Allied forces from the four countries have routed it in much of the territory it once controlled, but the group has responded by scattering and stepping up attacks on civilians.

Amnesty International said last week that Boko Haram had killed 381 civilians in Nigeria and Cameroon since the beginning of April, more than double that for the preceding five months.

Of those, 158 of the deaths were in Cameroon, which the rights group linked to a rise in suicide bombings, the deadliest of which killed 16 people in Waza in July.

(Writing by Tim Cocks; editing by Ralph Boulton)

Boko Haram resurgence kills 381 civilians since April: Amnesty

ABUJA (Reuters) – The Islamist militant group Boko Haram has killed 381 civilians in Nigeria and Cameroon since the beginning of April, rights group Amnesty International said on Tuesday, a testament to the militant group’s deadly resurgence.

The Nigerian military has repeatedly said Boko Haram has been “defeated”. But in recent months, it has carried out a string of lethal suicide bombings and other high-profile attacks on towns and an oil exploration team.

The number of deaths since April 1 is more than double that for the preceding five months, Amnesty said.

Boko Haram has killed 223 civilians in Nigeria since April. The forcing of women and girls to act as suicide bombers has driven the sharp rise in deaths in northeast Nigeria and northern Cameroon, said Amnesty.

“Boko Haram is once again committing war crimes on a huge scale, exemplified by the depravity of forcing young girls to carry explosives with the sole intention of killing as many people as they possibly can,” said Alioune Tine, Amnesty’s director for West and Central Africa.

In Nigeria, the deadliest attack was in July, when the militants abducted an oil exploration team with staff of the state oil firm and a university while they were traveling in a military convoy. Boko Haram killed 40 people and kidnapped three others, Amnesty said.

Boko Haram suicide bombers have killed 81 people in Nigeria since the start of April, said Amnesty.

In Cameroon, the Islamist insurgency has killed at least 158 people in the same period. That is also linked to a rise in suicide bombings, the deadliest of which killed 16 people in Waza in July, the rights group said.

More than 2.5 million people have been displaced or become refugees in the Lake Chad region – which includes Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger and Chad – while 7.2 million people lack secure access to food because of the conflict with Boko Haram, according to the United Nations.

The insurgency has left more than 20,000 people dead since it began in 2009.

(Reporting by Paul Carsten; editing by Andrew Roche)

Suspected Boko Haram members kill 18 people in northeast Nigeria

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) – Suspected Boko Haram militants killed 18 people in northeast Nigeria on Friday, according to local witnesses and officials, the latest in an escalating number of lethal attacks in the region.

The knife-wielding attackers, moving under cover of night, targeted people in the town of Banki, 80 miles (130 km) southeast of the city of Maiduguri in Borno state, the epicenter of the eight-year conflict with Boko Haram, said a community leader and a local member of a vigilante group.

The attack on the town, which sits on the border with Cameroon, is the latest in a string of deadly Boko Haram raids and bombings that have undermined the Nigerian military’s statements that the insurgency is all but defeated.

The frequency of attacks in northeastern Nigeria has increased in the last few months, killing at least 172 people since June 1 before Friday’s attack, according to a Reuters tally.

The attack on Banki left 18 dead, according to Modu Perobe, a member of the Civilian Joint Task Force, a regional vigilante group. Abor Ali, a local ruler, confirmed the death toll.

Boko Haram’s eight-year insurgency has left at least 20,000 dead and sparked one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world, with tens of thousands already in famine-like conditions, according to the United Nations.

Some 8.5 million people in the worst affected parts of northeast Nigeria are now in need of some form of humanitarian assistance, with 5.2 million people lacking secure access to food, the U.N. has said.

(Reporting by Ahmed Kingimi in Maiduguri; Writing by Paul Carsten; Editing by Tom Brown)

Suspected Boko Haram militants kill 15 in Cameroon

DOUALA, Cameroon (Reuters) – Suspected Boko Haram militants sprayed a village in remote Cameroon with automatic fire, killing 15 people and kidnapping eight others in an overnight raid near the Nigerian border, several officials said on Friday.

The attackers burned down around 30 houses in Gakara village, just outside the town of Kolofata, which has been a frequent target of suicide bombings by the Islamist group.

A government source on the ground said that 15 people had been killed, all shot dead except one who was burned alive, while another 30 had suffered bullet wounds. The mayor of Kolofata and a senior military source confirmed that an attack had taken place but did not know the death toll.

Boko Haram attacks have killed more than 20,000 people and displaced 2.7 million during the group’s eight-year insurgency to carve out an Islamic caliphate in the Lake Chad region.

“The attack happened around midnight. The Boko Haram assailants arrived. They set 32 houses on fire … killed, pillaged, and traumatized the population,” said a district official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak.

Many people fled the village for a camp near Kolofata that houses thousands displaced by Boko Haram violence, he said.

(Reporting by Josiane Kouagheu; Writing by Nellie Peyton; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg)

Boko Haram Nigerian child bombings this year are quadruple 2016’s: UNICEF

Nigeria to release $1 billion from excess oil account to fight Boko Haram

By Stephanie Nebehay and Alexis Akwagyiram

GENEVA/LAGOS (Reuters) – Boko Haram militants in northeast Nigeria have sent out four times as many child suicide bombers this year as they used in all of 2016, the United Nations Children’s Fund said on Tuesday.

Eighty-three children had been used as bombers since Jan. 1, 2017, UNICEF said. Of those, 55 were girls, mostly under 15 years old and 27 were boys. One was a baby strapped to a girl. Nineteen children were used last year, UNICEF said.

The Boko Haram insurgency, now in its eighth year, has claimed over 20,000 lives and forced more than two million people to flee their homes over eight years.

The frequency of suicide bomb attacks in northeastern Nigeria has increased in the past few weeks, killing at least 170 people since June 1, according to a Reuters tally.

UNICEF, in a statement released on Tuesday, said it was “extremely concerned about an appalling increase in the cruel and calculated use of children, especially girls, as ‘human bombs’ in northeast Nigeria. The use of children in this way is an atrocity”.

Boko Haram is trying to create an Islamic state in the Lake Chad region, which spans parts of Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Chad. It gained notoriety by abducting more than 200 girls from the northeast Nigerian town of Chibok in April 2014. Aid groups say it has kidnapped thousands more adults and children.

Children who escape are often held by authorities or ostracized by their communities and families. Nigerian aid worker Rebecca Dali, who runs an agency that offers counseling for those who were abducted, said children as young as four were among the 209 escapees her organization had helped since 2015.

“They (former abductees) are highly traumatized,” Dali told Reuters on Monday at the United Nations in Geneva, where she received an award from the Sergio Vieira de Mello Foundation for her humanitarian work.

Her team, which includes former police officers, identified some returnees as having been trained as suicide bombers.

“There were two girls taught by Boko Haram to be suicide bombers … The girls confirmed that they were taught that their life was not worth living, that if they die detonating the bomb and killing a lot of people, then their lives will be profitable,” Dali said.

Some 450,000 children are also at risk of life-threatening malnutrition in 2017 by the end of the year in northeast Nigeria, UNICEF said.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari said on Monday the country would “reinforce and reinvigorate” its fight against the group following the latest wave of attacks.

Analysts say the Boko Haram faction led by Abubakar Shekau may have been paid ransom by the government to gain the release of 82 of the Chibok girls in May, which then was used to buy weapons and recruit fighters. The government did not disclose details of the negotiations.

(Additional reporting by Kieran Guilbert in Dakar)

Nigeria’s freed Chibok girls to return home ‘fully recovered’

Nigeria's freed Chibok girls to return home 'fully recovered'

By Paul Carsten

ABUJA (Reuters) – More than 100 girls who were kidnapped by Boko Haram militants in the Nigerian town of Chibok in 2014 are ready to return to normal life after being released and receiving psychological and medical treatment, the government said on Friday.

Some 270 girls were originally abducted by the Islamist group but 82 were freed in May this year after mediation, adding to 24 who were released or found last year. The girls have been receiving psychological and medical care in the capital, Abuja, as part of a government rehabilitation program.

“All the 106 girls are now fully recovered, ready for re-integration with their families and the larger society, and to go back to school,” Aisha Jummai Alhassan, minister of women affairs, told a news conference.

“They are now stabilized and most of their traumatic stress disorder symptoms have been overcome and previously frequent incidents of flashbacks, insomnia and nightmares have now been successfully brought under control,” she said.

Some of them underwent surgery, and a prosthetic limb was provided for a girl who lost a leg while in captivity. Four babies were also said to be in good health.

Of the 270 girls who were originally taken, about 60 escaped soon afterwards but around 100 are still believed to be in captivity. Alhassan said negotiations to secure their release were ongoing.

Boko Haram has killed more than 20,000 people and displaced more than two million during an eight-year insurgency aimed at creating an Islamic caliphate in northeast Nigeria.

The Chibok case provoked global outrage and a celebrity-backed campaign to raise awareness of the girls’ plight, but aid groups say Boko Haram has kidnapped thousands more adults and children, many of whose cases are neglected.

A United Nations human rights committee called in July for Nigeria’s government to step up efforts to rescue all women and girls abducted by Boko Haram and ensure they returned to school without stigma.

(Reporting by Paul Carsten; Writing by Alexis Akwagyiram; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

Suicide bombers kill 27, wound 83 in northeast Nigeria

By Ahmed Kingimi

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) – A woman suicide bomber blew herself up and killed 27 others at a market in northeast Nigeria on Tuesday, two local officials said, in an attack bearing the hallmark of Boko Haram militants.

Two more suicide bombers detonated their devices at the gates to a nearby refugee camp, wounding many people, an emergency services official said.

In all, 83 people were wounded in the three explosions near the city of Maiduguri, epicenter of the long-running conflict between government forces and Boko Haram.

Nigeria’s military last year wrested back large swathes of territory from the Islamist insurgents. But they have struck back with renewed zeal since June, killing at least 143 people before Tuesday’s bombings and weakening the army’s control.

The group has waged an eight-year war to create an Islamic state in northeast Nigeria, and provoked international outrage by kidnapping more than 200 schoolgirls known as the Chibok Girls in April 2014.

Its better-known faction, led by Abubakar Shekau, has mainly based itself in the sprawling Sambisa forest, and been characterized by its use of women and children as suicide bombers targeting mosques and markets.

A rival faction – based in the Lake Chad region, led by Abu Musab al-Barnawi and boasting ties to Islamic State – has in the meantime quietly become a deadly force capable of carrying out highly-organised attacks.

Last month, an oil prospecting team was captured by al-Barnawi’s group. At least 37 people, including members of the team, died when rescuers from the military and vigilantes attempted to free them.

The Boko Haram insurgency has killed 20,000 people and forced some 2.7 million to flee their homes in the last eight years.

(Reporting by Ahmed Kingimi in Maiduguri; Writing by Paul Carsten; Editing by Mark Trevelyan; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

Boko Haram militants kill at least 30 fishermen in northeast Nigeria: governor

Nigeria to release $1 billion from excess oil account to fight Boko Haram

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) – Boko Haram militants killed at least 30 fishermen in raids on communities around Lake Chad in northeastern Nigeria, the governor of Borno state, residents and military sources said on Tuesday.

The raids are part of renewed attacks by the militant Islamist group which, prior to the latest attacks, have led to at least 113 people being killed by insurgents since June 1.

Last month members of an oil prospecting team were kidnapped in the restive Lake Chad Basin region, prompting a rescue bid that left at least 37 dead including members of the team.

It was carried out by a Boko Haram faction allied to Islamic State which has been active around Lake Chad.

Kashim Shettima, governor of Borno state which is at the epicenter of the insurgency, told journalists that Boko Haram militants had attacked and killed over 30 people in different villages in the latest attacks.

Residents and military sources said the militants ambushed fishermen in a series of raids between Saturday and Monday at villages near the northeast Nigerian border town of Baga.

Baga is at Nigeria’s border with Chad, Niger and Cameroon and in 2015 was the site of fierce fighting between the insurgents and Nigerian troops.

The Boko Haram insurgency, aimed at creating an Islamic state in northeast Nigeria, has killed 20,000 people and forced some 2.7 million to flee their homes in the last eight years.

(Reporting by Lanre Ola, Ahmed Kingimi, Kolowale Adewale and Ardo Abdullahi in Bauchi; Writing by Alexis Akwagyiram; Editing by Richard Balmforth)