Borno residents fight back, kill over 200 insurgents

Residents of some communities in Borno State may have been pushed to the wall as some of them dared Boko Haram on Tuesday, killing about 200 insurgents. The villagers also arrested the injured among them, a police source told Daily Sun.

The insurgents who were in a convoy of about 10 Sport Utility Vehicles (SUV) painted in military colour with guns mounted on some of them, invaded Sangayari, Mairari and Garawa in Kala Balge Local Government Area, Tuesday morning. The residents confronted them. “It is like many residents were aware the insurgents were coming and have prepared for them. They killed about 200 Boko Haram members and arrested some of the injured,” the source said.

Kala Balge is about 160 kilometres from Maiduguri, the state capital and located in the northeast, around the Nigeria-Cameroon border. A security source hinted that “the attackers of Kala Balge are likely to be the same set of people that carried out Gamboru Ngala attack last week.” About 150 people were killed.

Chairman of Kala Balge Local Government, Alifa Bukar Rann, told Daily Sun that he could not give the exact figure of insurgents killed in the attack. “I don’t have the details and figure of the death now,” he said

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Meanwhile, angry soldiers yesterday shot sporadically into the air in Maiduguri, to vent their anger over the killing of their colleagues by Boko Haram while returning from an operation. The soldiers were ambushed.

The incident, according to sources, happened when the General Officer Commanding (GOC) of the newly-established 7 Division of the Nigerian Army, Maiduguri, Maj-Gen Ahmadu Mohammed, visited the Maimalari Barracks in the metropolis from where some of the dead soldiers were deployed. While the GOC was at the barracks calming frayed nerves, some soldiers shot into the air in protest over what they said was the order of their boss that led to the killing of over 10 of their colleagues.

A military source told Daily Sun that some soldiers were sent on counter-insurgency operation and had indicated their willingness to spend the night in a village, but they were allegedly ordered back to the barracks in the night after the operation. The order was fatal, the source said, adding that they were ambushed by Boko Haram, leading to the death of over 10 soldiers.

“The corpses were brought to the barracks yesterday morning, provoking anger among the soldiers because of the way their colleagues died, some of them felt the deceased wouldn’t have been killed in that manner had their boss allowed them to stay back in the village,” the source said. Efforts to get the reaction of the division’s spokesman, Col Mohammed Dole, were futile because calls to his phone were not successful.

Director, Defence Information, Maj-Gen Chris Olukolade, had in a BBC Hausa service monitored in Maiduguri, said the incident was an internal affair, adding that it will be addressed and resolved.