Cameroon sends another 2000 military to fight Boko Haram

Cameroon will send about 2,000 military reinforcements to the north to fight Boko Haram, the Nigerian jihadist movement behind bloody cross-border raids and suicide bombings, state television said Tuesday.

Cameroonian soldiers patrol on November 12, 2014 in Amchide, northern Cameroon, 1 km from Nigeria. The city was raided by Islamists from Nigeria’s Boko Haram, killing eight cameroonian soldiers and leading the population to flee on October 15, 2014, before another six coordinated attacks that killed at least three civilians in the remote north of the country, on November 9, 2014. Boko Haram’s five-year insurgency in neighboring Nigeria has left thousands dead, and the Islamists have occasionally carried out attacks over the border. Cameroon has deployed more than 1,000 soldiers in the extreme northeast of the country to counter the Islamist threat. AFP PHOTO

“Almost 2,000 extra soldiers will be deployed in the Extreme North region,” on the border with northeastern Nigeria, according to the report on Cameroon Radio-Television, which gave no timetable for the operation.

The reinforcements will raise to 8,500 the number of troops deployed to take on the Boko Haram insurgents, who have attacked villagers and towns inside Cameroon for two years, massacring and abducting civilians.

In the past fortnight, an unprecedented series of five suicide bombings by Boko Haram has claimed dozens of lives, including 33 people killed by teenage girls in three attacks on the market town of Maroua.

Since Sunday, seven people were slain in village raids, three of whom were beheaded, according to local security sources.

Cameroon has joined a regional campaign alongside Chad, Niger and Nigeriaitself to battle Boko Haram, which has killed at least 15,000 people since 2009 in the name of founding an Islamic caliphate.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari will travel to Cameroon on Wednesday for talks with President Paul Biya in a bid “to build a strong regional alliance to confront Boko Haram,” Buhari’s spokesman Garba Shehu told AFP.

After more than seven months of delay, the deployment of a long-awaited Multinational Joint Task Force of 8,700 soldiers, police and civilian personnel has been announced for the end of July.

Nigeria’s small western neighbour, Benin, has been sitting in on high-level military talks and will be a part of the task force, to be based in Chad’s capital N’Djamena.

The Chadian army is engaged in a major military operation against Boko Haram forces that have fallen back on the many islands of Lake Chad, a key location where the borders of Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria converge.

 

Cameroon sends another 2000 military to fight Boko Haram