Jihadist-attacked Niger last week killed about 30 members of the Boko Haram group and detained 960 followers, mostly women and children, who had fled to neighboring Nigeria, official sources said.
The state TV channel Tele Sahel said last Tuesday that on March 7, aerial surveillance detected “crowd movements” on the Kamadougou Yoge River, which forms the border between the two countries, which leads to Lke Chad.
The report said he was a member of the Boko Haram jihadist group, which fled from a hideout in the Sambisa forest in northeastern Nigeria after coming under pressure from its rival, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP).
ISWAP broke away from Boko Haram in 2016 and became the dominant group in the region’s long-running jihadist insurgency.
It seized territory controlled by Boko Haram after its leader Abubakar Shekau was killed in clashes with ISWAP in May 2021.
Seeking to prevent the group from reaching Lake Chad and using the marshlands as a haven, the army tried to negotiate surrender, using messengers and pasting leaflets, but finally launched an attack the morning of March 11, Tele Sahel said.
“About 30 terrorists were neutralized” and 960 others, mostly women and children, were arrested, taken to the town of Diffa and handed over to Nigerian military authorities, he said.
Elected officials in Toumour, a village near the town of Bosso bordering Lake Chad, confirmed on Wednesday that “many Boko Haram” fleeing Sambisa had been intercepted at the Niger border “and handed over to the Nigerian authorities.”
Another official said that many others, however, “reached the (island) in the lake, mainly women and children, in bad conditions.
One of the poorest countries in the world, Niger has been hit by two jihadist insurgencies.
One, in the southwest, came from neighboring Mali in 2015, while the other, in the southeast, is a long-standing spillover from Boko Haram’s campaign in Nigeria.
The group’s violence has killed more than 40,000 people and displaced some two million from their homes since 2009, according to the United Nations.
The vast Lake Chad region, which is shared by Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Chad, is a notorious bolthole for Boko Haram and ISWAP, which have set up camps on islands inland.
The four countries created a Multinational Joint Task Force in 2015, consisting of 8,500, with the aim of defeating armed groups.