Boko Haram militants on Thursday killed at least 20 people in an attack on a remote village near Askira Uba, Borno State.

Survivors, according to an online news medium, Premium Times, said the insurgents stormed Dile village at 2 a.m. in several vehicles, burning houses and killing anybody in sight.
Ibrahim Usman, a resident who fled to Mubi, said 20 persons were feared killed in the village and many others sustained injuries during the attack.
“Dozens of Boko Haram fighters attacked our village at about 2a.m. and killed 20 people,” Usman said.
“Many of us fled to the bush to avoid being killed. Everybody was running for his life. We don’t know the whereabouts of our family members.”
He called on military authorities to deploy troops to the area to check the activities of the militants.
Another fleeing resident, Gambo Abakura, said: “They just started burning houses and shooting at sight. Most of the insurgents had turbaned their heads; others in quasi-military uniform, chanting Allahu Akbar, meaning Allah is Great,” he said.
Although attempt to speak to military authorities in Yola was not successful but a security source confirmed the attack.
”Yes, there was an attack because many residents had fled to Mubi and they told us the insurgents have several camps in the bush around the area from where they wreak havoc on villages,” said a local vigilante in Askira, Mallam Baba.

The Kenyan air force has destroyed two Al Shebaab camps in Somalia, it said on Monday, in the first major military response since the extremist group massacred students at a Kenyan university last week, wrote timesofoman.

Al Shebaab denied the camps were hit, saying the air force bombs fell on farmland.

Gunmen from the Al Qaeda-aligned group killed 148 people on Thursday when they stormed the Garissa University College campus, some 200 km (120 miles) from the Somali border.

Jets pounded the camps in the Gedo region on the other side of the frontier on Sunday, Kenya Defence Forces spokesman David Obonyo said.

The mission was part of efforts to stop fighters from those camps carrying out cross-border raids into Kenya.

“Our aerial images show that the camps were completely destroyed,” he said, though cloud cover made it difficult to estimate the death toll.

Al Shebaab has killed more than 400 people on Kenyan soil in the last two years, including 67 during a siege at Nairobi’s Westgate mall in 2013, piling political pressure on President Uhuru Kenyatta that intensified with last week’s killings.

Kenya has struggled to stop the flow of militants and weapons across its porous 700-km border with Somalia, and the violence has also damaged the country’s economy by scaring away tourists and investors.

Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, Al Shebaab’s military operations spokesman, told Reuters that none of its camps were damaged in Sunday’s raid, and that the fighter jets bombs had instead struck farmland.

“Kenya has not targeted any of our bases,” he said.
The rural Gedo region of Somalia is difficult to reach and reports about the raid could not be verified independently.

Message very clear
A government source on Monday said governors, members of parliament and security officials from regions bordering Somalia would compile a list of people suspected to have joined Al Shebaab or been radicalised.

“The message is very clear: we have to deal with this problem once and for all,” said the official, adding that regional governors discussed the idea with President Kenyatta on Monday.

Garissa was the most deadly attack on Kenyan soil since Al Qaeda bombed the American embassy in Nairobi in 1998, killing more than 200 people and wounding thousands more.

In the capital Nairobi, where local media have become increasingly critical of what they call a bungled security response to the Garissa attack, dozens of grieving families are still trying to identify bodies at the mortuary.

The US and French military are assisting in the search for a Romanian mineworker kidnapped in Burkina Faso and believed to have been taken into Mali, Burkina Faso’s security minister has said to AUNews.

Both the France and US have drones based in Niger, which neighbours Burkina Faso, as part of efforts to combat Islamist extremists in the region.

“Investigations are continuing… with our strategic partners, the French and the Americans, who have in-depth surveillance capabilities,” security minister Auguste Denise Barry told reporters on Tuesday.

Barry also spoke of being in regular contact with the authorities in Mali and Niger on the search.

He said while there had been speculation that the kidnappers had taken the security officer from the mine into Mali before moving into Niger, the site of the abduction was “much closer to the Niger border”.

The security officer was taken on Saturday when five armed men attacked a manganese mine in Tambao, 350 kilometres (220 miles) northeast of the capital, Ouagadougou.

The unidentified gunmen took off in the direction of the nearby border with Mali, according to security officials in both countries.

Kidnappings of foreigners, often for ransom, occasionally occur in Mali and Niger but not usually in Burkina Faso, a landlocked Sahel country.

A Dutch hostage freed by a French raid after being held by Al-Qaeda’s north African arm in Mali for more than three years arrived in the Malian capital Bamako on Tuesday before a planned return to the Netherlands.

The members of the United Nations Security Council condemned in the strongest terms the spate of recent terrorist attacks perpetrated by Boko Haram in northeast Nigeria and Chad.

In a press statement released by Un.org, Council members extended their condolences to the families of the victims and their sympathy to all those injured in the attacks in Kwajafa, Borno state, Nigeria, on 5 April, and in Tchoukou Telia, Chad, on 3 April 2015, and reminded States that they must ensure that measures taken to combat terrorism comply with all their obligations under international law, in particular international human rights law, international humanitarian law and refugee law.

They also reaffirmed that terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, including the actions of Boko Haram constitutes one of the most serious threats to international peace and security, and that any acts of terrorism are criminal and unjustifiable, regardless of their motivation, wherever, whenever and by whosoever committed. Members stressed that it should be combated by all means, in accordance with the UN Charter.

The Council’s press statement urged the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) and their members to adopt a common strategy and develop active cooperation and coordination to more effectively and urgently combat the threat posed by Boko Haram at their upcoming Summit.

It also stressed the need for a comprehensive approach to successfully combat Boko Haram and the threat it poses to the region and added that members welcomed the convening of a Joint ECOWAS-ECCAS experts meeting in Douala, Cameroon on 2 April 2015 as a step towards achieving this goal of enhanced cooperation.

Kenya needs more help from its U.S. and European allies with intelligence and security measures to help prevent further massacres by Somali militants, Foreign Minister Amina Mohamed told Reuters on Tuesday.

Last week’s killing of 148 people at a university has piled pressure on President Uhuru Kenyatta to stop frequent gun and grenade assaults staged on Kenyan soil by the al Shabaab group, which is aligned to al Qaeda.

Mohamed said Kenya, a staunch Western ally in the fight against radical Islam in east Africa, already receives intelligence support but was seeking additional help in the area of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR).

“Now we are looking at what else we may need and one of the areas is improved ISR, improved capacity, improved intelligence gathering, equipment,” she said in an interview.

Last Thursday al Shabaab gunmen stormed the Garissa University College campus, about 200 km (120 miles) from the Somali border. They initially shot indiscriminately but later hunted down and killed Christian students, while sparing Muslims. The Somali group has now killed more than 400 people in Kenya since Kenyatta came to power in April 2013.

“We are carrying out a gap analysis to see where we need additional support,” Mohamed said at her Nairobi office, close to where al Qaeda bombed the U.S. embassy in 1998, killing more than 200 people in the most lethal attack in Kenyan history.

In 2013, the United States sent FBI investigators to help Kenyans with investigations into an al Shabaab raid on Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall, in which 67 people were killed during a four siege.

Kenya has struggled to stem the flow of al Shabaab fighters and weapons across its 700 km (440 mile) border with Somalia, and the recent bloodshed has damaged the economy by scaring away tourists and investors.

Mohamed said Kenya was looking at ways it can put up more border posts and improve surveillance along the frontier, an area where foreign allies may be able to help.

Kenya has responded to the Garissa attack by bombing two al Shabaab camps in Somalia, while Kenyatta asked the Muslim community on Saturday to help root out radicalization at home, saying the planners and financiers of the attack are “deeply embedded” in Kenya’s society.

One of the four gunmen in the Garissa raid was an ethnic Somali whose father is a Kenyan government official, intensifying fears about the threat from home-grown militants.

Mohamed said Kenya plans to compile a list of radicalized young men in the next few weeks to determine the scale of the problem within its Muslim community, who make up about 10 percent of Kenya’s 44 million people.

“We’re waiting to see how big the numbers are,” Mohamed said, adding that many are suspected of having joined al Shabaab by illegally crossing into Somalia, where the group is fighting African Union soldiers, including Kenyan troops. “The idea is for us as a government is to try and account for those people and…help them to get de-radicalized.”

The Garissa assault has strained historically cordial relations between Kenya’s Christian and Muslim communities, which have deteriorated in recent years following Islamist attacks on churches and Christian priests.

Mohamed said Muslim leaders have heeded Kenyatta’s call for the community to do more to combat radicalization and had put forward proposals to do that, including the vetting of Islamic teachers and how to deal with Muslim institutions.

Boko Haram insurgents stormed a mosque in Kwajafa town in the southern part of Borno State on Sunday evening, opening fire on Muslims worshipers as well as bystanders, according to SaharaRep.

The insurgents thereafter swept through other parts of the town in a shooting rampage, killing at least 25 people and leaving many others injured.

Kwajafa is about 140 miles away from Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State. The nearest big town to the community is Biu, which is about 22 miles away.

Peter Wida, a Christian resident of Shaffa, which is a neighboring town to the besieged community of Kwajafa, told SaharaReporters that the Islamist militants killed at least 25 civilians near a mosque during evening Muslim prayers on Sunday.

He said the armed assailants had arrived at the mosque under the pretense that they wanted to preach to the gathering.

“Some of the people from [Kwajafa] fled to our town,” said Mr. Wida. He said the refugees disclosed that the assailants told me that they came to preach at the mosque.

“The people did not know that the so-called preachers were Boko Haram [members]. They gathered the worshipers in a place near the mosque and then, suddenly, opened fire on them,” he added.

Another source named Ibrahim Musa said he received a telephone call from his village that Boko Haram insurgents had killed three of his brothers yesterday and burnt their ancestral homes.

He said he had been trying to reach relatives in Kwajafa since yesterday, “but all their lines were switched off. I am seriously in trouble.”

Mr. Musa said he learned that the insurgents shot and wounded dozens of people, inflicting critical injuries on many.