Boko Haram fighters are overrunning villages near the northeastern
Nigerian town of Chibok, forcing hundreds of people to flee as the
insurgents loot and burn in the area where nearly 300 schoolgirls were
kidnapped in 2014, local leaders said Tuesday.
“Chibok is now under Boko Haram siege,” the chairman of the Chibok
local government area, Yaga Yarkawa, told journalists Tuesday in
Maiduguri, the birthplace of Nigeria’s homegrown Islamic extremist
group some 130 kilometers (80 miles) northeast of Chibok.
The accounts of Boko Haram violence around Chibok, along with multiple
suicide bombings in Maiduguri city and attacks on army outposts raise
doubts about military and government claims that the 7-year-old
insurgency is nearly defeated. Instead, the rebels have stepped up
attacks as the rainy season draws to an end, making them more mobile.
Nine villages within 25 kilometers (16 miles) of Chibok town have been
razed in the past two weeks with the most recent attack at
Thlaimaklama at the weekend, Yarkawa said.
Boko Haram is employing scorched earth tactics, rustling livestock,
looting crops just ready to harvest, and burning homes and what crops
they cannot carry, he said. “Contrary to claims by government and
security operatives, Chibok is not safe.”
It’s not known if anyone has been killed because people are too scared
to go back to the deserted villages, civilian self-defense fighter
Bulama Abogu said. No soldiers have intervened, he said.
Many of the villages fringe on the Sambisa Forest, where Nigerian
security forces have been carrying out near-daily air bombardments and
ground attacks in which they have freed thousands of Boko Haram
captives and cut food supplies.
The forest stronghold was where Boko Haram initially took 276
schoolgirls kidnapped from the government high school at Chibok April
14, 2014. Nigeria’s government last month secured the first negotiated
release of 21 Chibok girls. Another Chibok girl escaped captivity in
May and one was rescued in an army raid earlier this month. The
government says it is conducting negotiations with Boko Haram for the
freedom of nearly 200 Chibok girls remaining in captivity.
The chief of army staff, Lt. Gen. Tukur Buratai, last week insisted
that “the terrorists have been defeated” and said the army is
conducting “mop-up operations aimed at ensuring that we clear the rest
of them.”
That is disputed by former Nigerian Vice President Atiku Abubakar, who
said at the weekend that “The insurgents still occupy a specific
geographical space. They still retain the capacity for occasional
deadly attacks. Many citizens in the zone still remain vulnerable and
live in fear.”
Some Boko Haram fighters are moving south into east-central Taraba
state, according to some recent reports. There are fears that as the
extremists come under greater military pressure Boko Haram fighters
will disguise themselves as nomadic Fulani herders, who are blamed for
deadly conflicts for land and water with farmers in central Nigeria,
said analyst Jacob Zenn.
The Islamic uprising has killed more than 20,000 people, spread across
Nigeria’s borders and created 2.6 million refugees and a humanitarian
crisis that the U.N. estimates has 14 million people in desperate need
of food aid. ASSOCIATED PRESS
