Boko Haram push across border to attack Cameroon army

1/13/2015
By Richard Spencer

Boko Haram launch attack on military base in northwest Cameroon as group secures control of northeast Nigerian town of Baga

A man injured in a suicide blast is carried on a mattress by relatives at the General Hospital in northeast Nigerian town of Potiskum. Four people were killed and 46 injured when two female suicide bombers detonated their explosives outside a mobile phone market in the town Photo: AMINU ABUBAKAR/AFP

Boko Haram, the Nigerian Islamist group, has pushed on after a rampage through the north of the country that killed an estimated 2,000 people, to attack an army base in neighbouring Cameroon.

At least one Cameroonian soldier was killed in the cross-border attack, according to local journalists, though the Cameroonian authorities said the assault on the base in the town of Kolofata had been repulsed.

The assault followed another surge over the past 10 days by the Islamist rebels known for their brutality and kidnapping of young women and girls.

In a series of raids, they seized parts of Borno province on the far northern borders with Niger, Chad and Cameroon, killing hundreds of people – one report put the final total of deaths at 2,000.

"We came across many dead bodies, some in groups and others by themselves in the bush," one 25-year-old lorry driver, Ibrahim Gambo, who escaped the onslaught around the town of Baga, which lies on Lake Chad, told a local newspaper.

"I saw dead children and women – and even a pregnant woman with her stomach slit open. We saw a large boat carrying over 25 persons and all of them shot dead. Those whose bodies defy guns or bullets, would be tied up and dipped into the lake water until they died."

Boko Haram now controls an area of Borno and Yobe states the size of Belgium, with a population of 1.7 million. It is becoming a rival in size to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, with its own "Caliphate" in eastern Syria and western Iraq.

Unlike Isil, it has made no concerted effort to establish territory over the borders of its base in Nigeria.

However, it has attacked inside Cameroon before, and its leader, Abubakar Shekau, warned that it would hit back after Cameroon air force jets struck Boko Haram positions after a previous raid on Kolofata. He also demanded that Cameroon scrap its constitution and embrace Islam.

The strength and apparent resilience of Boko Haram has flummoxed Nigeria's government and army and Western leaders. They embraced the "Bring Back Our Girls" campaign of last spring, after Boko Haram kidnapped 200 teenage girls and sold them into marriage and slavery. Most of the girls remain in captivity.

Among the methods used by Boko Haram in its latest rampage was to detonate a "suicide" bomb strapped to the body of a ten-year-old girl, which killed her and 19 others.

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