12 Nigerien soldiers were killed by gunmen belonging to the ISIS-affiliated Boko Haram following a pre-dawn raid on a military base in southeastern Niger’s Diffa region.
Another eight soldiers were wounded in the attack on the Blabrine military unit, said the Defense Ministry statement. This was the latest in a string of increasingly brazen attacks near the west African country’s border with Nigeria, where the radical Islamist insurgency has claimed hundreds of lives.
The statement further said that the attack occurred at around 3 am and the terrorists torched military weapons and equipment around the military base.
Diffa, which borders the birthplace of Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria, has been hit by repeated cross-border attacks by the Nigerian jihadist group since 2015. Located in the Lake Chad basin in the middle of the Sahel, the Diffa region is home to 120,000 refugees from Nigeria fleeing the Boko Haram violence, as well as 110,000 people internally displaced within Niger.
A regional military coalition is battling the group, but the decade-long insurgency has killed at least 35,000 people in Nigeria alone.
