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Boko Haram seizes key military base on Nigeria border Boko Haram seizes military base on Nigeria border
(about 2 hours later)
Boko Haram extremists have overpowered a multinational military force and seized its key base on Nigeria’s border with Chad, according to residents who escaped in canoes. Boko Haram have seized an army camp in the remote Nigerian border village of Baga, the second time the militants have overrun a military base in a week.
Scores of soldiers and civilians were killed, while others drowned in Lake Chad, Nigerians taking refuge in a Chadian village said in phone calls on Sunday night. They said insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades and automatic assault rifles and threw explosives. Fleeing residents said the village on the shores of Lake Chad – where a previous massacre left up to 185 dead – was a smouldering wreck after several hours of fierce fighting. News of the attack on Sunday only began to trickle out after survivors reached the state’s capital, Maiduguri, or neighbouring Cameroon and Chad.
“They came in their hundreds driving several Hilux patrol vehicles, trucks and some were on motorcycles and immediately began to throw explosives and bombs,” fisherman Audu Labbo said. “They came, many hundreds of them, with guns, trucks and grenades,” said a Baga resident who gave only his first name, Amosun. “They burnt all the houses they could reach and set the military base on fire.”
He and others reached by phone Sunday night said the troops from Nigeria and neighbouring Chad, Cameroon and Niger fought on Saturday until they ran out of ammunition. Details on the attack were slow getting out of the remote area. Fisherman Kumsuri Gaborou said up to 300 residents were unaccounted for, although some may have simply been lost in the chaos. Telephone lines are notoriously patchy along the porous border region, which connects Nigeria with Chad and Cameroon, allowing ordinary citizens and the militants to move freely between all three countries. Dozens of residents drowned while trying to flee to safety across Lake Chad, Gaborou added.
Some soldiers removed their uniforms and threw away their rifles, Labbo said. “We don’t know exactly how many lives are lost, but it was many. Some ran away into the bush and others drowned. The canoes were completely overloaded and turned upside down. I saw at least three boats of women and children all dead that way,” Garborou said by phone from Chad, where he had fled.
A senior security officer in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, confirmed that the military base at Baga was under the control of the insurgents. He said the multinational force fled because it received no reinforcements despite holding out for several hours. Baga is notionally the headquarters of a multinational task force comprising troops from Niger, Chad, Nigeria and Cameroon, although only Nigerian troops are based there.
There are fears the extremists could use Baga as a base to attack Maiduguri, 125 miles to the south-west. A Nigerian security source told the Guardian troops had held back the militants for several hours until they ran out of ammunition. Some threw away their guns and fled after repeated requests for reinforcements went unheeded, he added. A military spokesperson said the troops had fought “valiantly” but did not comment on whether reinforcements had arrived.
Labbo said the insurgents’ bombs and grenades set alight buildings. Businesses, government offices, homes and part of the military base were burned to the ground. Up to 185 were killed in Baga last year, making the village an early portent of Boko Haram’s new tactics of striking remote settlements before melting into the vast semi-desert surroundings. Since being squeezed out of their urban strongholds by a renewed military push, the militants’ attacks have also spilled over into neighbouring Cameroon’s far north.
Boko Haram has been regionalising the conflict with recent attacks on Chadian villages and a military base. Last week, the militants also briefly occupied an army camp in Cameroon’s Achigachia, prompting authorities there to launch their first-ever air strikes against the sect. At least 15 people were gunned down in a bus shortly after New Year, while a wave of recent attacks has forced many living along the porous borders to abandon their farms, raising the spectre of food shortages.
Thousands of people have died and 1.6 million have been driven from their homes in the five-year-old uprising. Attacks have also continued in Nigeria, underlining security challenges ahead of upcoming elections in February. Last month, at least 100 women and children were reportedly kidnapped and 35 people killed in Gumsuri, some 30 miles (48km) from Chibok, where 276 schoolgirls were abducted in April 2014.
More than 10,000 people were killed last year as a result of Boko Haram’s quest to carve out an Islamic caliphate in religiously mixed Nigeria. Some 1.6 million people have been driven from their homes during the five-year insurgency.