At least 18 people were killed and 100 homes torched in an attack in the dead of night by Nigeria’s Boko Haram fighters on a village in southeastern Niger, local authorities said on Thursday.
“The toll is 18 dead, 11 hurt, almost 100 homes burned down” in the village of Wogom late Wednesday, the mayor of the nearby town of Bosso, Bako Mamadou, told AFP.
A humanitarian worker said the militants came from Nigeria and crossed the Komadougou Yobe river, the border between Niger and Nigeria.
Armed militants and suicide bombers from Nigeria’s Boko Haram group have staged repeated attacks since February in Niger’s southeast Diffa region near Nigeria, leaving hundreds of people dead.
The United Nations has registered around 50 attacks and clashes between rebel fighters and Niger troops since February.
The last came in late October when they shot dead 13 people in a village near Diffa.
Some 150 schools with more than 12,000 pupils have been forced to close due to the attacks in the southeast.
This week Africa’s prime fashion event, the FIMA festival in the capital Niamey, was called off on the eve of its launch over fears of terror attacks.A state of emergency has been declared there in a bid to boost security. But the attackers often manage to flee across the River Komadougou, marking the border with Nigeria.
Amadou said eleven people were injured and a three-year-old girl has disappeared. The army was pursuing the "terrorists in all nooks and crannies of Lake Chad", he said.
Boko Haram, which has pledged allegiance to Islamic State, which operates mainly in Syria and Iraq, has killed thousands and displaced millions of people in its six-year campaign to carve out a caliphate run according to strict Islamic law.
Central African leaders in regional bloc CEEAC said on Wednesday at a summit that they were raising 50 billion CFA Francs ($80 million) to help Nigeria's neighbors fight the Islamist militant group.
An 8,700-strong regional task force with troops from Chad, Niger, Benin, Nigeria and Cameroon is operational but has yet to begin joint military strikes against Boko Haram.
