MOUNDOU: Suspected Boko Haram militants staged their first attack in Chad on Friday, hitting the third country outside their home base of Nigeria in recent days as the region beefs up its military response to the armed Muslim extremist group.

The assault took place in the village of Ngouboua on the shore of Lake Chad early Friday, and left a community leader, one Chadian soldier and at least two militants dead, Chad’s military said.

Boko Haram has threatened any nation contributing to the fight against them. The nation of Chad is contributing the most military muscle to the effort, with its soldiers already attacking the insurgents in the countries of Cameroon and Nigeria. “The assailants have scattered and the army is now pursuing them,” Chad army Col. Azem Bermandoa Agouna told The Associated Press by telephone.

Ngouboua is already home to nearly 3,300 refugees who had fled Boko Haram-related violence back home in Nigeria, according to the United Nations. The UN refugee agency said on Friday it had heard reports of the deadly violence there and was investigating. “Security is a major concern for all humanitarian agencies, and for the refugees themselves,” the agency said on Friday at a briefing in Geneva.

Boko Haram’s insurgency has forced some 157,000 people to seek refuge in Niger, while 40,000 others have gone to Cameroon and 17,000 are in Chad, the UN said. Almost one million Nigerians are internally displaced, according to the country’s own statistics.

Chad, Niger, Cameroon and Benin all have pledged to send military support though Chadian soldiers are already fighting Boko Haram militants inside Cameroon and Nigeria. The multinational force to fight Boko Haram is expected to be formally launched in coming weeks.

Larson reported from Dakar, Senegal.

Meanwhile, the Nigerian human rights commission said on Friday that political violence in the run-up to Nigeria’s election had killed 58 people, with rising “hate speech” between rival camps threatening to spark further unrest.

“If urgent steps are not taken to arrest further escalation, Nigeria’s 2015 general elections would confront a high risk of significant violence,” the commission said in a new report.

Such violence “could pose a clear and present danger to the stability of the country and its neighbours”.

The Nigerian election, initially scheduled for Saturday, was postponed by six weeks because of struggles in distributing voter identity cards and the Boko Haram Islamist conflict in the northeast, which has killed 13,000 people in six years.

Published in Dawn, February 14th, 2015

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