14th September, 2016
No fewer than seven Niger soldiers were killed and eight others wounded in two separate attacks by Boko Haram Islamists over the past week, the army has said.
According to a military statement issued on Tuesday, the two attacks took place in the southeastern Diffa region near the border with Nigeria.
Five of them were killed in an ambush on Monday morning carried out by “members of the Boko Haram terrorist group” which also left six others wounded.
According to the statement, in an earlier incident on September 8, two soldiers were killed and another two wounded when their patrol vehicle went over “an improvised explosive device”.
Earlier this month, five villagers were killed and two others wounded in the same area in another attack by the Nigeria-based jihadist group in the first such incident since early June.
Boko Haram’s seven-year insurgency has left at least 20,000 people dead in Nigeria and border areas of neighbouring Niger, Chad and Cameroon, and made more than 2.6 million homeless.