Niger troops to join fight against Boko Haram

NIAMEY, Niger: Niger is set to send troops to Nigeria for the multi-national battle against Boko Haram after scores of people were killed in a fresh onslaught by the Islamist fighters in a key border town.

Intervention from Niger would open a new northern front in the increasingly regional fight against the Islamist insurgents who killed over a hundred people, including 19 soldiers, Wednesday in a rampage in the Cameroonian town of Fotokol on Nigeria’s border.

Meanwhile, France has sent military advisers to Niger’s southern border with Nigeria to help coordinate military action by the regional powers fighting Boko Haram.

The deployment was announced as warplanes pounded Boko Haram positions just over the border in Nigeria, a resident in the Niger town of Bosso said.

The Boko Haram onslaught came a day after Chad sent troops across the frontier to battle the jihadis and recapture the Nigerian town of Gamboru. Chad’s army said it had killed more than 200 Boko Haram fighters in the clashes.

“They [Boko Haram] attacked and burned three mosques in the attack,” Mele Mohammad, a Fotokol community leader, told AFP.

“In the mosque, in the Tashangalau area, they killed 31 people who were praying,” he added.

“Our consolation is that our attackers also suffered heavy casualties, especially when the fighter jets bombed them as they fled.”

A government source said Niger’s parliament would vote Monday on sending its troops to Nigeria to fight the militants, who have killed 3,000 people and forced over a million from their homes since launching its insurgency in 2009. “Niger is indeed going to send troops to Nigeria as part of the struggle against Boko Haram,” the source said.

A stream, the Komadougou Yobe, marks the frontier between Niger and Nigeria, and the water level has recently dropped considerably, making it easy for troops to cross.

African Union leaders have backed plans for a 7,500-strong five-nation regional force to take on the extremists, who control vast swathes of northeast Nigeria.

African and Western experts were meeting in Cameroon’s capital Yaounde Thursday to devise a combat strategy against the Islamists.

The three-day summit “amounts to a crucial, determining and decisive step in the war that the international community has decided to intensify against Boko Haram,” Cameroon’s Defense Minister Edgar Alain Mebe Ngo’o said.

Nigeria’s military has drawn fierce criticism for failing to rein in the rebels, who have stepped up their campaign of terror in the northeast in the run-up to presidential and parliamentary polls planned for Feb. 14.

Viewing the widening field of Boko Haram activity as a direct threat to its national interests, Chad has had troops equipped with tanks and hundreds of other vehicles stationed since Monday on Niger’s territory in the Bosso region adjoining the border with Nigeria.

French President Francois Hollande Thursday called on the international community to help fight extremism in Africa instead of talking on the sidelines. “Do your job, don’t give lessons, act. Do your duty, no one else will do it in your place,” he said.

France is supporting the operations by carrying out reconnaissance flights over border areas of Chad and Cameroon to provide the two nations with intelligence, defense officials in Paris have said.

Boko Haram has seized control of vast tracts of northeastern Nigeria, including the strategic town of Baga in the Lake Chad region where the borders of four countries converge.

Troops from Chad and Niger stationed at a joint military base in Baga withdrew before Boko Haram fighters seized it on Jan. 3.

Nigeria has reacted defensively to the presence of foreign troops on its soil. “Nigeria’s territorial integrity remains intact,” defense spokesman Chris Olukolade insisted, claiming national forces had “planned and are driving the present onslaught against terrorists from all fronts in Nigeria, not the Chadian forces.”