Boko Haram is
carrying out ethnic reprisals against Arabic speakers in
northern Nigeria, accusing them of aiding Chad's army fighting
against the Islamist group, military officers and residents say.
Cameroonian military authorities say these attacks against
Shuwa Arabs, an ethnic group speaking the form of Arabic common
in Chad, have forced some 10,000 refugees from Nigeria across
the border into Cameroon in recent weeks.
Chad has deployed some 2,500 troops to Nigeria's border
regions with Cameroon and Niger as part of a regional effort to
tackle Boko Haram's six-year insurgency, which is threatening
the stability of the impoverished region.
Chad's battle-hardened troops have won a series of clashes,
seizing towns and pushing back Boko Haram's fighters from the
border region with Niger and Cameroon.
But in border villages near Cameroon, Boko Haram militants
have singled out many Shuwa Arabs for reprisals, a Cameroon
military officer said.
"Boko Haram has branched into a sort of massacre strategy
against the Arab population that are suspected to be
collaborators with the Chadian forces," Cameroon Special Forces
Major Belthus Kwene told Reuters.
Chadian Arabic, also known as Shuwa Arabic, is spoken by
over a million people spread across southern Chad, northern
Nigeria, Cameroon, Central Africa Republic and Sudan.
Most of the refugees who settled in the Cameroonian villages
of Amchoukouli, Wangara, Djabrari and Nigue were women and
children. They said Boko Haram militants had massacred the men
in their villages.
"They killed 25 men," Fanne, a Nigerian refugee in Djabrari,
told Reuters television. Boko Haram fighters forced the whole
village to assemble before embarking on a killing spree, she
added.
"Nobody escaped. They shot some and slaughtered others with
machetes and axes," she said.
Boko Haram, which translates roughly as 'Western Education
is Forbidden', has killed thousands of people in a bloody
campaign to carve out an Islamic caliphate in the north of
Africa's largest oil producer.
Fanne, like the hundred others who managed to escape the
group's reprisals, sleeps under a tree with the few possessions
and domestic animals she brought when she fled to Cameroon.
Most refugees have declined to be moved further south to the
main refugee camp in Minawao, already overcrowded with over
33,000 people.
"These people are hoping that peace will return soon so that
they can go back to their communities. They prefer to wait
here," said Hayatou Oumarou, administrative head of the border
town of Fotokol.
REUTERS