Scores of Boko Haram terrorists have been killed in Cameroon after the country’s military forces launched air strikes over the weekend against the insurgents who had taken over a military base.
More than 1,000 members of the Islamist group crossed the border into Cameroon over the weekend and launched an attack on the military base in Assighasia and nearby villages.
An unspecified number of soldiers and civilians are said to have been killed while many others were injured.
This prompted the Cameroonian President, Paul Biya, to order the air strike on Sunday, which forced the insurgents to flee the camp in Assighasia, the Communications Minister Issa Tchiroma Bakary, said in a statement.
“After two strikes and heavy fire … the assailants fled the Assighasia camp … losing several fighters,” the minister said. He added that the military operation was on going.
Cameroon has recently stepped up military operations against the Boko Haram insurgents who have increasingly made incursions from safe havens in Nigeria into towns and villages across the border.
Cameroonian media reported last week that the country’s military forces raided a Boko Haram training camp near the Nigerian border where they rescued 84 children who had been brought to be trained as terrorists.
The Cameroonian authorities have in recent months deployed thousands of additional troops to towns and villages along the Nigerian border to protect residents from terrorist attacks. But the troops are hardly ever enough to police more than 2,000 kilometres of largely porous border between the two countries.
With the insurgency ravaging North east of Nigeria gradually spreading to other countries and threatening sub regional peace, the country along with Cameroon, Niger and Chad in May agreed to pool resources, including sharing intelligence and joint border patrols, to fight the insurgents.
Each country is expected to have contributed 700 soldiers to a sub-regional force but it is not known how far that effort had gone.
An estimated 40 Cameroonian soldiers are believed to have been killed in confrontations with the dreaded insurgents this year.