At least 20 fishermen were killed in an airstrike by the Nigerian army targeting a jihadist camp in the northeast of the country, residents and military sources told AFP on Monday (September 27th).
A fighter plane bombed Kwatar Daban Masara on Sunday morning, a village bordering Lake Chad, on the borders of Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon, a stronghold of the Islamic State group in West Africa (Iswap).
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Kwatar Daban Masara, on the shore of the lake, is a
"gateway to the Iswap camps on several islands,"
says Labo Sani, a fisherman from the village, who says he witnessed the strike on Sunday at 6 a.m. ( 05:00 GMT). The jihadist group recently lifted the ban on fishermen in this territory, allowing them to operate in the waters of the lake for a fee, bringing back a population of fishermen who had left the region.
"Any fisherman who goes to this area does so at his own risk, because it is enemy territory and there is no way to distinguish them from terrorists," said
a member of the intelligence services.
"According to our information, the death toll is much higher than 20 dead," he
adds, assuring that the air strike was based on
"credible information"
of a gathering of Iswap fighters in the region. village since Wednesday.
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Nigeria has been fighting for 12 years a jihadist insurgency that has spread to neighboring Niger, Chad and Cameroon.
It has left at least 40,000 dead and two million displaced.