Niger Reports “30 Jihadists Dead,” Arrests 960

Over 30 members of the Boko Haram terrorist organization were murdered last week by jihadist-infested Niger, while 960 followers—mostly women and children—who had fled neighboring Nigeria were imprisoned.

According to Tele Sahel, a government-run television station, aerial surveillance on March 7 detected a “huge flow of people” traveling towards Lake Chad along the Kamadougou Yoge River, which serves as the border between the two nations.

According to the account, they were Boko Haram terrorists who had been forced to leave their refuge in the Sambisa forest in northeastern Nigeria by their adversaries, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP).

In 2016, ISWAP broke away from Boko Haram to take control of the protracted Islamist unrest in the area.

After Boko Haram commander Abubakar Shekau was killed during combat with ISWAP in May 2021, it conquered large portions of the country that was under their control.

The army attempted to negotiate a surrender, employing envoys and dropping leaflets, but eventually launched a dawn assault on March 11, according to Tele Sahel, in an effort to stop the group from traveling to Lake Chad and exploiting its marshlands as a shelter.

A total of 960 persons were caught, transferred to the town of Diffa, and turned over to the Nigerian military authorities, it added. “Roughly 30 terrorists were neutralized” in the process.

At Toumour, a community near Bosso on the Lake Chad border, a local elected official claimed on Wednesday that “a substantial number of Boko Haram” who were attempting to flee Sambisa had been “intercepted on the Niger border and given over to the Nigerian authorities.”

Yet, according to a different official, “many more, notably women and children, are rushing towards (the islands) on the lake in awful conditions.”

Niger, one of the world’s poorest nations, is under attack from two jihadist insurgencies.

One originated in the southwest in 2015 from neighboring Mali, while the other has been a persistent outgrowth of Boko Haram’s operations in Nigeria.

According to the UN, since 2009, the group’s brutality has claimed the lives of over 40,000 people and driven around two million people from their homes.

Both Boko Haram and ISWAP frequently hide out in the huge Lake Chad region, which is shared by Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, and Chad. Both terrorist groups erect camps on islands in the region’s marshlands.

The four nations established an 8,500-member Multinational Joint Task Force in 2015 with the intention of dismantling the armed organizations.