A Chadian warplane and ground troops drove
Boko Haram fighters from a Nigerian border town, leaving it strewn with
the bodies of the Islamic extremists, witnesses said Friday. The
African Union moved to send ground forces to Nigeria and the United
States said it would assist.
Thursday’s fighting marked the first such action by foreign troops on Nigerian soil to fight the Islamic extremists.
The African Union chairwoman, at an AU
summit in Ethiopia, called for deployment of 7,500 African troops to
fight the spreading Islamic uprising by Nigeria’s home-grown extremists.
A senior U.S. official told reporters that the United States government
will take a role in the fight against Boko Haram.
“We
are prepared to provide technical support, training and equipment to
fight the Boko Haram group. The group’s activity in the region has
clearly affected our attention in Africa away from development,” said
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Africa.
Abari Modu said he witnessed the Chadian offensive on Malumfatori village in Nigeria’s Borno state.
“We
saw the fighter jet when it started shelling and bombarding the
insurgents who were lodging mostly inside the local government
secretariat and the district head’s palace,” he told Associated Press.
He
said the bodies of many Boko Haram fighters were still in the town
Friday morning. Modu spoke by telephone after crossing the border from a
Chadian village where he had sought refuge after Boko Haram seized
Malumfatori at the end of October.
He
said the Chadian jet had pursued fleeing fighters to the border, and
that the bombardment was co-ordinated with Chadian ground troops,
offering the fighters no escape.
A
Nigerian military officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because
he was not authorized to speak to the press, confirmed the account.
There was no immediate official word from Nigerian authorities about the
Chadian offensive.
Boko Haram’s five-year Islamic uprising has killed about 10,000 people in the last year and displaced 1 million people.
AU
chairwoman Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma made the recommendation to deploy
troops before the AU Peace and Security Council meeting of African
leaders on Wednesday night in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The troops would be
deployed under the Multination Joint Taskforce and would have a
12-month period of initial operation time. It would also be tasked with
searching for, and freeing, all abductees, including the young girls
abducted in Chibok in April, 2014.
“The
countries of the region have each pledged one battalion to be part of
the Force,” the AU Peace and Security Council statement reads.
UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a guest at the AU summit, said: “The
Boko Haram insurgency poses a clear danger to national, regional and
international security. This group continues to kill Christians and
Muslims, kidnap women and children, and destroy churches and mosques.”
“We
will never forget the girls kidnapped from Chibok last April, and I
will never stop calling for their immediate and unconditional release,”
he said.
Nigeria’s President Goodluck
Jonathan said Nigerian troops on Thursday recaptured several villages
and the town of Michika in northeast Adamawa state. There was no way to
immediately confirm the claim of a rare victory for the demoralized and
ill-equipped Nigerian soldiers.
Jonathan,
who is running in Feb. 14 elections, told a campaign rally Thursday in
Yola, the Adamawa state capital, that “Michika local government was
recaptured by our gallant forces today.”
He
added, “We will soon recover all our territories … All of us here feel
burdened, I feel so burdened about the excesses of Boko Haram.”
Adamawa
state legislator Adamu Kamale complained Wednesday that he had appealed
in vain for troops to fight insurgents rampaging since Jan. 23 through
seven villages and Michika town. He said the extremists slit people’s
throats, abducted dozens of people and burned and looted mosques, homes
and businesses. He charged there was no response from the Nigerian
military.
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