Report: scores killed as Boko Haram insurgents overrun Nigerian town

PanARMENIAN.Net - Islamist Boko Haram insurgents have overrun much of a northeastern Nigerian town after hours of fighting that has killed scores and displaced thousands of residents, several security sources said on Tuesday, Sept 2, according to Reuters.

The Islamists launched an attack on the town of Bama, 70 km (45 miles) from the Borno state capital of Maiduguri, on Monday. They were initially repelled but came back in greater numbers overnight, the sources and witnesses said.

The sources said there were heavy casualties on both sides. One security source said as many as 5,000 people fled the town.

In a bungled air strike, several Nigerian troops were killed at the Bama armory by a fighter jet targeting the insurgents, Reuters quoted a soldier on the ground as saying.

Two months after Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria declared the area they seized an Islamic caliphate, Boko Haram has also for the first time explicitly laid claim to territory it says it controls in parts of northeast Nigeria.

They captured the remote hilly farming town of Gwoza, along the Cameroon border, during fighting last month. The group's leader Abubakar Shekau in a video declared it a "Muslim territory" that would be ruled by strict Islamic law.

Shekau's forces have killed thousands since launching an uprising in 2009 to revive a medieval Islamic caliphate in religiously mixed Nigeria, and are seen as the biggest security threat to the continent's leading energy producer.

Boko Haram briefly got itself in the international spotlight on April 14, when its fighters kidnapped more than 200 girls from a school in the northeastern village of Chibok in April. They remain in captivity.