Hundreds of Islamist militants have staged one of their most audacious attacks yet on a military base in northern Nigeria, prompting a 24-hour curfew that cut off roads and closed airspace, officials and eyewitnesses said.
A massive co-ordinated assault by the Boko Haram group in the city of Maiduguri may have left scores of people dead, Associated Press reported, and civilians "said they saw bodies with slit throats and corpses of insurgents burning in vehicles", but there was no independent verification of the death toll.
The killings dashed recent hopes that Boko Haram has been driven out of Maiduguri and other urban centres into remote rural areas. Since 2009 the group has been waging a violent campaign to establish an Islamic state in Nigeria and impose sharia law on Africa's largest population.
Monday's attack was among its most dramatic and reportedly comprised up to 500 militants. In trucks and a stolen armoured personnel carrier, they laid siege to an air force and army base, razing buildings and setting shops and petrol stations ablaze on the outskirts of Maiduguri, the city where Boko Haram was founded.
Explosions and automatic gunfire could be heard across the north-eastern city from around 2.30am when the insurgents launched the attack with screams of "Allahu akbar," or "God is great".
"My family and I could not sleep till daybreak because the shooting continued till about 8am," Haruna Ali told Reuters at the scene. Military ambulances could be seen transporting bodies to a hospital morgue.
Brigadier-general Chris Olukolade, a defence ministry spokesman, said security forces had repelled attacks by "daring terrorists", adding: "Military locations such as the Nigerian air force base and some army locations in Maiduguri were targeted."
He claimed that 24 insurgents were killed and many injured along with two air force personnel, while two helicopters and three disused military aircraft were "incapacitated" in the attack.
Flights to and from Maiduguri international airport, which is near the air force base, had been disrupted during the clashes but had now resumed, Olukolade said.
The state government ordered all civilians to stay at home and extended a night-time curfew to 24 hours across the city. Kassim Shettima, the Borno state governor, vowed defiance: "We are going to replace all buildings destroyed by the insurgents even if they destroy them a hundred times. I know we shall overcome … the Satanic ideology of this group."
The attack comes a week after the Nigerian military bombarded forest hideouts of Boko Haram near the border with Cameroon, with air strikes and ground assaults.
President Goodluck Jonathan imposed a state of emergency in May in three states, acknowledging the insurgents had seized control of many towns and villages, and flooded the area with security forces. The military quickly forced the militants out of urban centres but have appeared unable to halt attacks on targets like schools, remote villages and major highways, where they set up impromptu roadblocks.
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- Boko Haram,
- Nigeria,
- Africa
