A five-hour gun battle between Boko Haram and soldiers in Cameroon left 144 people dead, the government said, and sent thousands of inhabitants fleeing across this West African country that has become the Islamic insurgency’s second front.
The battle erupted Monday before dawn in the northern city of Kolofata, just across a mountainous border from Boko Haram’s heartland in Nigeria, government spokesman Issa Tchiroma Bakary said. The militants sneaked in under the cover of fog, he added, and they were well armed, carrying heavy machine guns and Motorola two-way radios.
The fighting killed 143 members of Boko Haram but only one soldier, he said, but it wasn’t possible to confirm that toll. A clearer indication of the carnage came from the thousands of residents who military officials and witnesses said had fled the town from Monday afternoon. “Only very old people are now in Kolofata,” said Oumarou Garba, a grocery shop owner who fled 15 miles on foot and motorbike to the town of Mora. “We see Boko Haram determined to carve out a caliphate in Cameroon, as it is doing in Nigeria.”
Boko Haram, the Islamic rebellion borne from the sprawling poverty of Nigeria’s northeast, appears evermore intent on opening a second front in neighboring Cameroon.
This week, the group’s purported leader Abubakar Shekau issued his most menacing statement to date against the former French colony. “You will taste what has befallen Nigeria,” he said, before firing an assault rifle. “Your troops cannot do anything to us.”
Cameroon military authorities said they took the YouTube video and its threats seriously and were studying its authenticity, a senior defense ministry official said. Last month, the country launched its first airstrikes against the militant group.
A country of 23 million people, many of whom speak the same Kanuri language as Boko Haram’s fighters and follow a similarly orthodox strain of Islam, Cameroon sits at a nexus where Africa’s Islamic-tinged rebellions are beginning to merge. Untold thousands have died in next door Central African Republic, through fighting between a Muslim rebellion and Christian militias. Mali, where French and United Nations peacekeepers have watched al Qaeda allies seize a string of towns of late, is also nearby.
On Thursday, Cameroon’s President Paul Biya used his first speech of the New Year to ask unnamed foreign powers to supply African nations more help in their struggle against fundamentalists. The country’s two former colonizers, France and Germany, have both lent varying degrees of support, as have China and the U.S.
