Demonstrators holds placards and banners reading ‘I am Nigerian’ and ‘Stop Boko Haram’ during a gathering at the Trocadero in Paris yesterday to protest against a Boko Haram attack in Baga that straddles the borders of Chad, Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon.


Reuters/Yaounde

A contingent of soldiers from Chad has arrived in northern Cameroon where it will deploy to the Nigerian border as part of efforts to contain the Boko Haram insurgency, a spokesman for Cameroon’s defence ministry said yesterday.
A convoy of troops from Chad arrived in Maroua, the main town in Cameroon’s Far-North Region, late on Saturday, Colonel Didier Badjeck said while declining to say how many soldiers had been dispatched by N’Djamena.
“In the coming days, they will be deployed to the war zone on the border with Nigeria so that they can join our defence forces to crush and prevent incursions of Boko Haram into Cameroonian territory,” he said.
Cameroon’s President Paul Biya, who recently appealed for international assistance against Boko Haram, announced earlier this week that he was expecting the arrival of a large Chadian force to support his country’s efforts against the militants.
Chad has a reputation as one of the region’s best militaries and helped French forces drive Al Qaeda-linked Islamists from northern Mali in 2013.
Despite the growing cross-border nature of the threat posed by Boko Haram, efforts to deploy a joint force from Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon to take on the Islamist fighters have faltered.
Ghana’s President John Mahama, who currently heads West African bloc ECOWAS, told Reuters on Friday that regional leaders will seek approval from the African Union next week to create a new force to fight Boko Haram.
In Nigeria the Chadian troops are seeking to recapture the strategic city of Baga, on the shores of Lake Chad, which straddles the borders of Chad, Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon and which fell to the Islamists early this month.
Many say the assault on Baga could be Boko Haram’s deadliest. Satellite pictures released by Amnesty and Human Rights Watch showed widespread destruction with around 3,700 buildings in Baga and nearby Doron Baga damaged or destroyed.
Amnesty says as many as 2,000 civilians may have been massacred, but Nigeria’s army objected to the “sensational” claims and said that the death toll in Baga was about 150.
Boko Haram last Monday launched an offensive against a Cameroonian military base in Kolofata, also in the far north of the country, in which 143 “terrorists” and one Cameroonian soldier were killed, according to Cameroon.