At least 20 people were killed when Islamist
group Boko Haram attacked a town in northeast Nigeria, triggering clashes with
troops stationed there, the military said on Sunday.
Reuters reported that a spokesman for
Nigerian forces in north-eastern Borno State, which lies at the heart of a
four-year-old Islamist insurgency, said the Islamists crept into the town of
Damboa in the early hours of Saturday...
They killed five worshippers at a mosque as they
said their morning prayers, he said.
“While they were unleashing their mayhem, troops
engaged the terrorists, killing 15 in the process while others fled,” the
military spokesman, Captain Aliyu Danja, said in a statement obtained by Reuters.
The military often gives significantly higher
casualty figures for insurgents than for its own men, and it is usually not
possible to verify them independently.
Despite Military efforts to end the Boko Haram insurgency
since May, it remains the biggest security threat to Nigeria.
Its targets have traditionally been security
forces, Christians or Muslim clerics who speak out against it, but its fighters
have increasingly turned their sights on civilians in the past few months –
massacring hundreds in roadside attacks or assaults on Western-style schools
they consider sacrilegious.
Nigerian fighter jets last week bombed camps
belonging to suspected Islamist militants in northeast Nigeria in response to a
massacre of students at an agricultural college that killed at least 41.
Posted by Amaka.
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