The Boko Haram wing of the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) has reportedly executed 10 people and abducted 13 others, including women and children, during a raid on a village near the town of Chibok in northeastern Nigeria’s Borno state, where the African terrorist group kidnapped nearly 276 schoolgirls more than two years ago.
“After killing 10 people and burning the entire village, the gunmen made away with 13 people, including seven women, five boys and a girl,” Ayuba Alamson, a community elder in Chibok, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
News of the raid, which took place Saturday in a village about 12 miles from Chibok, comes nearly a month after the Nigerian army claimed to have completely eliminated Boko Haram in its stronghold of northeastern Nigeria.
Similar claims by military leaders in the West African country have been shattered in the past.
Boko Haram’s primary stronghold has been identified as the Sambisa Forest, which covers parts of the northeastern Nigerian states of Borno, Yobe, Gombe, Bauchi, and Kano.
Kubrrivu, the village where the latest Boko Haram raid occurred, is located in Borno.
AFP reports:
Boko Haram Islamists have killed 10 people and abducted 13 others in a raid on a village near the northeast Nigerian town of Chibok where the militants kidnapped over 200 schoolgirls in 2014, locals told AFP Sunday.
Armed militants on motorcycles invaded Kubrrivu at dawn on Saturday, firing on the residents as they were sleeping and looting and burning homes before fleeing into the bush with 13 women and children seized from the village.
In the wake of the attack, Kubrrivu residents reportedly fled to nearby Kautikeri village.
“The Boko Haram attackers rode on four motorcycles, three on each, and opened fire on the village as residents slept,” Luka Damina from Kautikeri told AFP, adding, “They burnt down the whole village after looting food supplies and livestock and taking away women and children.”
Kubrrivu residents are no strangers to Boko Haram’s reign of terror.
AFP points out:
In 2014 Kubrrivu was burnt down in a deadly Boko Haram raid which forced residents to flee. A year later they returned and rebuilt their homes after Nigerian troops recaptured swathes of territory from the Islamists in a series of military successes against them.
Of the 276 girls who were kidnapped from the Government Girls Secondary School in the Chibok region of Borno during an April 14, 2014, raid by Boko Haram, at least 218 are believed to remain in the clutches of the jihadi group.
AFP notes:
Boko Haram, which seeks to impose strict Islamic law in northern Nigeria, has been blamed for some 20,000 deaths and displacing more than 2.6 million people since 2009.
The Nigeria-based organization was deemed the most lethal terrorist group of 2014 by the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) — accused of 6,664 deaths that year before it pledged allegiance to ISIS.
Boko Haram was the second-most deadly group (5,450 deaths) of 2015, after ISIS (6,050), according to the U.S. State Department, which used the same metric as the GTI.
Despite having pledged allegiance to ISIS, Boko Haram was treated as a separate terrorist group by the U.S. government. Taken as one, ISIS-Boko Haram was responsible for more deaths (11,500) last year than any other terrorist group in the world.
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