Chadian soldiers take on Boko Haram in Nigeria
TROOPS from Chad clashed with Boko Haram fighters in the northeastern Nigerian town of Gambaru yesterday after more than 2000 soldiers rolled across the border, backed by fighter jets and French surveillance planes.
Chad has deployed the troops as part of a regional effort to take on the militant group that has waged a bloody war to create an Islamist emirate in northern Nigeria. The war killed 10,000 people last year.
The fighting in Gambaru, south of Lake Chad, came as hundreds of Chadian soldiers massed near the town of Diffa in Niger, near the Nigerian border northwest of the lake, military sources in Niger said.
‘‘Our troops this morning. entered Nigeria The combat is ongoing,’’ a source at Chad’s army headquarters said yesterday.
Gambaru was one of dozens of small towns overrun by Boko Haram last year. It is less than 160 kilometres from Baga, a town on the banks of Lake Chad where Boko Haram slaughtered hundreds of people last month.
Further north, in neighbouring Niger, officials said that hundreds of Chadian troops were mustering along the Nigerian border. However, it was not clear if they had been deployed as a cordon to stop Boko Haram fighters fleeing or whether they would form part of a two-pronged assault.
President Idriss Deby of Chad had ordered his troops to start gathering inside Cameroon last month, after Boko Haram launched a series of cross-border raids from its heartlands in Nigeria, which prompted Cam- eroon’s president, Paul Biya, to appeal for help.
Yesterday’s incursion came hours after a female suicide bomber killed two people at an election rally where President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria had been campaigning. At least 18 people were injured in the attack in Gombe, which has largely been spared the brunt of Boko Haram’s attacks.
No one claimed responsibility but suspicion automatically fell on the separatist insurgents, who have killed about 13,000 people since 2009, in increasingly ruthless attacks against churches, schools and newspaper offices.
Boko Haram, whose name means ‘‘Western education is forbidden’’, claims it is fighting to establish an Islamic caliphate. More than 200 schoolgirls who were abducted by the insurgents in April are still missing and its leader, Abubaker Shekau, said any hopes of their release were no more than daydreams.
Jonathan has been criticised for allowing Boko Haram to flourish, despite calling a state of emergency in 2013 and ordering the army into the worst-affected provinces.
General David Rodriguez, the head of America’s Africa Command, said the Nigerian armed forces had made the situation worse, in some instances.
Speaking in Washington last week, he said that they were incapable of defeating Boko Haram, and warned that it would take a huge international effort.
Amnesty International accused the soldiers of a scorched-earth campaign of arbitrary arrests, forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings that forced ordi- nary people into the arms insurgents.
At its summit in Addis Ababa last week the African Union called for 7500 soldiers drawn from Chad, Niger, Cameroon and Benin to bolster Nigeria’s army. However, it was not clear whether the convoy that crossed at Gambaru yesterday was fighting under that flag.
Chad’s armed forces played a crucial role supporting French soldiers in northern Mali in 2013, but they suffered heavy casualties and withdrew abruptly after only three months.
French officials confirmed that their aircraft, based in Chad, had been carrying out ‘‘reconnaissance missions,’’ but insisted that the planes were not patrolling Nigerian airspace.
France has ruled military involvement.
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