Boko Haram
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Reports say Boko Haram has begun using drones to terrorise people.
According to L'OEIL du Sahel, a newspaper based in the Far North Region of Cameroon, the first of such drones was spotted and brought down in Borno in Nigeria by the army during the third week of August.
It is believed the drones are meant for information gathering, at least for now.
Several other drones have reportedly been seen by residents of the Lake Chad region.
These unmanned machines are being used by the Al Barnaoui faction of Boko Haram. There are two different factions of the terrorist group now.
The source of the drones is yet unclear. But some people suspect the Islamic State group. Others are of the opinion that Boko Haram is the producer.
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- Tasha Seidou
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According to L'OEIL du Sahel, a newspaper based in the Far North Region of Cameroon, the first of such drones was spotted and brought down in Borno in Nigeria by the army during the third week of August.
It is believed the drones are meant for information gathering, at least for now. Several other drones have reportedly been seen by residents of the Lake Chad region. These unmanned machines are being used by the Al Barnaoui faction of Boko Haram. There are two different factions of the terrorist group now. The source of the drones is yet unclear. But some people suspect the Islamic State group. Others are of the opinion that Boko Haram is the producer. |
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- Tasha S.T
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Exasperated by many attacks and killings, at least 400 Cameroonian villagers stormed a Nigerian territory on Friday in search of Boko Haram terrorists, but details were just beginning to come out.
Local newspaper, L’Oeil du Sahel, said the inhabitants of Madina and Boulo localities in the Logone and Chari department, Cameron’s far north, conducted a raid in Nigeria on August 25.
Despite assurances from Cameroonian and Nigerian authorities that the terrorists were on the run, more people are being killed regularly and the populations seem to be taking their destiny into their hands.
Boko Haram has been wreaking havoc in Cameroon since 2014, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands.
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- Simon Ateba
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A loud explosion was heard in Cameroon on Tuesday night in the same area where Boko Haram terrorists have been wreaking havoc in recent time.
Cameroonian newspaper, L’Oeil du Sahel, said the bomb blast occurred in Amchide, a locality in the the country’s far north, which was recently hit by Boko Haram.
Casualty figure was unknown as the blast happened in the night in this central/west African country.
Boko Haram has been wreaking havoc in Cameroon since 2014, leaving thousands of people dead and hundreds of thousands scampering for safety away from their ancestral land.
In neighboring Nigeria, where the insurgency began in 2009, more than 25 thousand people have been killed by Boko Haram and over two million others have been displaced.
Nigerian leader, Muhammadu Buhari and Cameroonian President Paul Biya, had all vowed to crush the ISIS partners in West Africa, but as days turned into weeks and weeks painfully turned into months and years, it soon became clear that they had failed as the terrorists continued to kill.
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The mass abduction of more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls from Chibok - the biggest publicity coup of Boko Haram's jihadist insurgency - was the accidental outcome of a botched robbery, say the girls who spent three years in their brutal captivity.
The Chibok girls made the surprise revelation in secret diaries they kept while held prisoner and a copy of which has been exclusively obtained by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Recalling the night of their kidnapping in April 2014, Naomi Adamu described in the diaries how Boko Haram had not come to the school in Chibok to abduct the girls, but rather to steal machinery for house building.
Unable to find what they were looking for, the militants were unsure what to do with the girls.
Arguments swiftly ensued.
"One boy said they should burn us all, and they (some of the other fighters) said: 'No, let us take them with us to Sambisa (Boko Haram's remote forest base) ... if we take them to Shekau (the group's leader), he will know what to do'", Adamu wrote.
She was one of about 220 girls who were stolen from their school in the northeastern town of Chibok one night in April 2014 - a raid that sparked an international outcry and a viral campaign on social media with the hashtag #bringbackourgirls.
Championed by former U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama - along with a diverse cast of media celebrities - the campaign won international infamy for Boko Haram and helped galvanise the Nigerian government into negotiating for the girls' release.
Adamu was among 82 of the Chibok girls released by Boko Haram in May - part of a second wave after 21 of them were freed in October. They are being held in a secret location in Abuja for what the government has called a "restoration process".
A few others have escaped or been rescued, but about 113 of the girls are believed to be still held by the militant group.
The authenticity of the diaries, written by Adamu and her friend Sarah Samuel, cannot be verified, nor their intended role as the government negotiates with Boko Haram for more releases.
CLANDESTINE CHRONICLES
The diaries shed light not only on the horrors the girls endured under Boko Haram, but their acts of resistance, and their staunch belief that they would one day go home.
The girls said they started documenting their ordeal a few months after the abduction, when Boko Haram - whose name loosely means 'Western education is sinful' in the local Hausa language - gave them exercise books to use during Koranic lessons.
To hide the diaries from their captors, the girls would bury the notebooks in the ground, or carry them in their underwear.
Three of the other Chibok girls also contributed to the undated chronicles, which were written mainly in passable English, with some parts scribbled in less coherent Hausa.
"We wrote it together. When one person got tired, she would give it to another person to continue," Adamu, 24, said from the state safe house in the capital, where the girls are being kept for assessment, rehabilitation and debriefing by the government.
"CONVERT OR BURN"
Life in the Sambisa involved regular beatings, Koranic lessons, domestic drudgery and pressure to marry and convert.
The girls' spirits remained intact, as they devised amusing and mocking nicknames for the fighters, the diaries show.
Yet cruelty and brutality were ever present.
When five girls tried to escape, the militants tied them up, dug a hole in the ground, and turned to one of their classmates.
The jihadists handed her a blade and issued a chilling ultimatum: 'cut off the girls' heads, or lose your own'.
"We are begging them. We are crying. They said if next we ran away, they are going to cut off our necks," Adamu wrote.
On another occasion, the militants gathered those girls who had refused to embrace Islam, brought out jerrycans and threatened to douse them in petrol then burn them alive.
"They said: 'You want to die. You don't want to be Muslim,(so) we are going to burn you," read the diary entry.
As fear set in, the militants cracked into laughter - the cans contained nothing but water, the girls wrote.
FEAR DOES THEIR BIDDING
One of the most striking excerpts illustrates the pervasive fear spread by Boko Haram in northeast Nigeria, where the group has killed 20,000 people and uprooted at least 2 million in a brutal campaign that shows no signs of ending soon.
During their captivity in the Sambisa forest, some of the Chibok girls escaped, and ended up in a nearby shop where they asked the owners for help, as well as food and water.
"The girls said: 'We are those that Boko Haram kidnapped from (the school) in Chibok,'" Adamu wrote. "One of the people (in the shop) said: 'Are these not Shekau's children?'"
The shop owners let the girls stay the night.
But the next day they took them back to Boko Haram's base, where the girls were whipped and threatened with decapitation.
Despite being flushed with relief at her own freedom, Adamu worries about her closest friend and co-author, Samuel, who is still with the group, having married one of its militants.
"She got married because of no food, no water," Adamu said from the government safe house in Abuja.
"Not everbody can survive that kind of thing," she added. "I feel pained ... so pained. I'm still thinking about her."
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- Rita Akana
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A suicide bomber has killed at least seven people in a small town in northern Cameroon near the Nigeria border, a local official and a military source said on Sunday.
The attack occurred on Saturday near Amchide in Cameroon’s Far North region, which has become a target for Boko Haram suicide bombers, many of whom are young women forced to enter populated areas with explosives strapped to their bodies.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack and the identity of the bombers is unknown.
Another suicide bomb exploded in the town of Waza in north Cameroon on Saturday, but no casualties were reported other than the bomber, the sources said.
Boko Haram’s bid to establish an Islamic caliphate in northern Nigeria has spilled over into neighboring Cameroon, Chad and Niger, killing more than 20,000 people in the Lake Chad region and displacing nearly 3 million people, according to the United Nations.
Despite military gains by the Nigerian army and a regional force, attacks by Boko Haram continue unabated. Last month, suicide bombers killed at least 12 people and wounded over 40 others in Waza.
Reuters
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