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, whose 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.
