Boko Haram fighters
A military source in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, confirmed that more than 30 volunteers known as “Civilian JTF” (Joint Task Force) are missing after suspected Boko Haram insurgents launched a surprise attack Friday in Monguno, a town on the outskirts of Maiduguri. The source added that the attack claimed 24 casualties as well.
According to the source, “twenty-four corpses were retrieved from the battleground. There was not even any fight between [the Civilian JTF members] and the Boko Haram. [The Boko Haram] attackers just rounded them up with bullets and went away with some of them.”
The source added that the volunteers were armed only with knives, swords and sticks while members of the extremist Islamist sect wielded sophisticated, high-caliber guns. “This is why Boko Haram did what they did to them,” said the source, adding, “over 30 of them have not been found.” He said it was unclear whether the missing were also dead or were simply taken away by the insurgents that have been waging a war against Nigeria in order to dethrone what the sect considers a decadent secular system based on Western values.
“The whereabouts [of the missing] remains unknown to us in the operations. Before we arrived, the attack had finished and the terrorists had escaped,” said the military officer.
He explained how his operatives determined the number of casualties and the missing. “We counted [the] corpses we retrieved yesterday [Saturday]. And then we are taking note of parents and relations coming to search for their children or relations,” he disclosed.
He said that the military’s preliminary findings suggested that the Boko Haram attackers must have been tipped off that the volunteers were headed to their hideouts to confront them. He said this conclusion arose from how the Boko Haram attackers “strategically hid in the bush waiting for their hunters, and suddenly opened heavy fire on the convoy of the civilian volunteers.”
The source said the military was about to use Air Force patrols to identify and destroy Boko Haram’s hideouts in thick forests and mountainous areas.
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