U.N.: Boko Haram Mayhem Has Displaced 1.4 Million Children
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Version 0 of 1. Fear of attacks by Boko Haram, the Islamist extremist group of northern Nigeria known for its deadly marauding and kidnappings, has uprooted a half-million children in the past five months, Unicef said in a report released Thursday. The newly displaced bring the total number of children who have fled from Boko Haram militants in Nigeria and neighboring countries to 1.4 million, said the report by Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund. The report’s findings suggested that efforts by Nigeria’s new president, Muhammadu Buhari, who was elected partly on a pledge to eradicate Boko Haram, were not going as well as he has asserted. Mr. Buhari said last week that military forces were gaining the advantage on Boko Haram, which has been waging a campaign of bombings, burnings, abductions and plundering for years through swaths of northern Nigeria, and more recently in Cameroon, Chad and Niger. The group is perhaps best known for its abduction of more than 270 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok in Nigeria’s Borno State in April of last year. “It’s truly alarming to see that children and women continue to be killed, abducted and used to carry bombs,” Manuel Fontaine, the Unicef regional director for west and central Africa, said in the report. In northern Nigeria alone, the report said, 1.2 million children, more than half of them younger than 5, have been forced to flee their homes, while an additional 265,000 have been uprooted in Cameroon, Chad and Niger. The report was issued less than a week after what appeared to be the first Boko Haram bombing of a Nigeria camp for people displaced by the group. The bombing, in Yola, capital of eastern Nigeria’s Adamawa State, an area that had been considered secure, raised new concerns about Boko Haram’s reach. In another indication of worsening conditions for victims of the insurgency, Doctors Without Borders, the international medical aid charity, reported a deadly cholera outbreak in camps for displaced people in Borno State. It said more than 1.6 million people were now displaced in Borno State, most of them in the capital, Maiduguri, the birthplace of Boko Haram. The charity’s report said the first cholera cases appeared about a month ago at one Maiduguri camp and spread to two others. As of Wednesday, it said, at least 16 people had died of the disease, which can spread quickly. United Nations officials also have expressed alarm about the conditions confronting displaced people in Niger who have fled from Boko Haram. Toby Lanzer, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for the Sahel region, said on Wednesday after visiting a camp in southeast Niger that its residents were traumatized and destitute. “It’s an atrocious situation,” he told Agence France-Presse. |