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N’DJAMENA: Numerous Chad troops have been killed in a clash with militants in the Lake Chad region, the latest such incident in the central African nation, officials said on Sunday.
“I present my sincere condolences to the families of the martyrs who fell defending the homeland during this clash and I wish a speedy recovery to the wounded,” President Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno said in a post on Facebook, without providing any other details.
The clash was the latest since late October, when an attack by Boko Haram militants on a Chadian military base killed at least 40 people. In response, the army launched an operation against the militants.
In a statement, the army chief of staff said on Saturday that there was a clash during the day and after several hours “numerous terrorist elements were neutralized” and that a toll would be published later.
According to military sources, the fighting took place in the afternoon on the Karia island, in the northwest of the Lake Chad region.
Several local media published what they said were lists of the troops killed and wounded.
Elsewhere in Africa, gunmen killed 15 people in an attack on a northwest Nigerian village, officials confirmed, amid reports of a newly arrived militant group operating in the area.
The deputy governor of Kebbi State said the assault on Mera, around 50 kilometers from the Niger border, had been carried out by “unknown gunmen.”
But the latest massacre came after officials warned that an Islamist group known as “Lakurawa,” thought to hail from Mali and Niger, had crossed into Nigeria.
Kebbi’s deputy governor, Umar Tafida, and senior security officials attended funeral prayers for the 15 victims in Mera, his office said in a statement.
Nigeria has been plagued by armed violence since the 2009 emergence of the Boko Haram group in the Lake Chad basin, in the northeast of the country.
Various militant groups have split from or emerged alongside the insurgency, notorious for several mass kidnappings of school girls, despite a military crackdown.
Armed bandits and kidnap gangs have also spread chaos across the region, alongside sometimes bloody conflicts between farming communities and nomadic herdsmen.