MAIDUGURI: Boko Haram insurgents overran most of a north-eastern Nigerian town on Tuesday after hours of fighting that killed scores and displaced thousands of residents, security sources said.

The Islamists launched an attack on the town of Bama, 70km from the Borno state capital of Maiduguri, on Monday.

They were initially repelled but came back in greater numbers overnight, the sources and witnesses said.

Nigerian defence spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

The sources said there were heavy casualties on both sides and one said at least 5,000 people fled the town.

In a bungled air strike, several Nigerian troops were killed at the Bama armoury by a war plane targeting the insurgents, a soldier on the ground said.

Two months after Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria declared the area they seized as an Islamic ‘caliphate’, Boko Haram has also for the first time explicitly laid claim to territory it says it controls in parts of northeast Nigeria.

They captured the remote hilly farming town of Gwoza, along the Cameroon border, during fighting last month. The group’s leader Abubakar Shekau in a video declared it a “Muslim territory” that would be ruled by Islamic law.

Mr Shekau’s forces have killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands since launching an uprising in 2009 to revive a ‘caliphate’ in religiously mixed Nigeria. They are the biggest security threat to Africa’s top oil producer.

“When we started hearing gunshots, everybody was confused. There was firing from different directions. We just ran to the outskirts of town,” Bukar Auwalu, a trader who fled with his wife, three children and brother, said by phone.

“There were military helicopters and a fighter jet. We slept in the bush on the outskirts of town. We can’t go back.”

Adrian Edwards, spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said 9,000 people fleeing violence in Nigeria’s northeast had arrived in Cameroon’s Far North region in the past 10 days.

“Even upon arrival in Cameroon, they are not necessarily out of harm’s way. On Sunday, insurgents attacked Kerawa town inside Cameroon, forcing refugees and some local residents to flee further inland,” he said in a briefing note from Geneva.

Another 2,000 had crossed into Niger, which is already hosting some 50,000 refugees from fighting since May 2013. Some 645,000 people are internally displaced in Nigeria, she said.

Cameroon state radio said on Tuesday it had killed 40 Boko Haram insurgents during an attempted incursion by the militants the previous day.

Because of Bama’s proximity to Maiduguri, a metropolis and home to an army base, security officials are worried there is now little to keep Boko Haram from gaining access to a city that was also the birthplace of their movement.

The military has extended Maiduguri’s nightly curfew to 7pm until 6am — it previously started at 10pm — to fight infiltration by insurgents, Nigerian defence headquarters said.

The insurgents have also been in control of a small town called Gamboru Ngala, on the shores of Lake Chad to the north, which they seized in August which potentially opens up two fronts for an attack on Maiduguri.

“Boko Haram is beginning to operate like a conventional army, a major change from... before July, when it focused on carrying out short-lived hit-and-run assaults,” the Nigeria Security Network’s Andrew Noakes said in a report on Tuesday.

“If Maiduguri falls, it will be a symbolic and strategic victory unparalleled so far in the conflict.”

Published in Dawn, September 3rd, 2014