Hundreds of Boko Haram extremists overnight Friday looted stores and burned houses in Bosso before fleeing with weapons and ammunition as the military pushed them out, officials said.
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The government of Chad has dispatched a 2,000-strong military force backed by armored vehicles and tanks into the town of Bosso in Niger, just across the border from Nigeria, to assist in the a campaign against Islamist Boko Haram terrorists.
He noted that the Obama administration had interpreted it and included Islamic State as third-generation descendent of Osama bin Laden’s core al-Qaeda group, but not Boko Haram.
“Insecurity and lack of access have long hampered humanitarian operations in parts of the Diffa region, though Bosso is the only area where we do not implement projects directly”, he added.
An estimated 50 000 people fled Friday’s attack, mainly walking westward to Toumour, some 30 kilometres west of Bosso.
A senior USA intelligence official said that some Boko Haram fighters travelled to Libya “to work with Islamic State elements”.
He added that “in public, USA officials rarely call the group Islamic State-West Africa Province, the name it adopted in March 2015”.
There have been periodic reports of cooperation between Boko Haram and ISIL’s Libyan branch.
A US counter-terrorism official, however, said that American intelligence has no evidence to support that report.
The sources, one at Chadian military command in N’Djamena and another in the Lake Chad region where Boko Haram operates, told Reuters the troops arrived on Tuesday and were advancing on Bosso, a town near Lake Chad that has been the scene of clashes in recent days.
Boko Haram has been trying to establish an Islamic state adhering to strict Sharia law in northeast Nigeria since 2009.
“Those uncertainties fueled tension over how best to combat the group, and even how to characterise it, the official said”.
“If they remain there they are on their own but if they come out and surrender we are here to receive them”, he said.
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Senator Chris Murphy, a Foreign Relations Committee member, said that whatever its cooperation with Islamic State, Boko Haram is so deadly that Nigeria and its neighbors should get US help to crush the group.
