BY ADU AZIBALOGHOM
Scores Die in Cameroon Fighting Between Military and Boko Haram
Thousands Flee Fierce Battles as Islamist Group Seeks to Establish Greater Presence in Country
Cameroonian soldiers patrol in Amchide, near the Nigerian border, in November. ENLARGE
Cameroonian soldiers patrol in Amchide, near the Nigerian border, in November. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
By
Emmanuel Tumanjong
Updated Jan. 13, 2015 12:46 p.m. ET
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YAOUNDE, Cameroon—A five-hour gunbattle between Boko Haram and soldiers in Cameroon sent thousands fleeing in this West African country that has become the Islamist insurgency’s second front.

The battle erupted early Monday in the northern city of Kolofata, just across a mountainous border from Boko Harams heartland in Nigeria, government spokesman Issa Tchiroma Bakary said. The militants, carrying heavy machine guns and Motorola two-way radios, sneaked in under the cover of fog, he added.

The fighting killed 143 members of Boko Haram but only one soldier from the antiterrorism battalion, he said, but it wasn’t possible to confirm that toll. A clearer indication of the carnage came from the thousands of residents who military officials and witnesses said had fled Kolofata before soldiers secured control.

“Only very old people are now in Kolofata,” said Oumarou Garba, a grocery owner who fled 15 miles on foot and motorbike to the town of Mora. “We see Boko Haram determined to carve out a caliphate in Cameroon, as it is doing in Nigeria.”

‘We see Boko Haram determined to carve out a caliphate in Cameroon, as it is doing in Nigeria.’
—Oumarou Garba, a shop owner from Cameroon

Boko Haram, which emerged from the sprawling poverty of Nigeria’s northeast, has opened an additional campaign in neighboring Cameroon.

This week, the group’s purported leader, Abubakar Shekau, issued another menacing statement against the former French colony. “You will taste what has befallen Nigeria,” he said on a video posted to YouTube, in which he then fired an assault rifle. “Your troops cannot do anything to us.”

Cameroon military authorities said they took the video and its threats seriously and were studying its authenticity, a senior defense ministry official said. In December, the country launched its first airstrikes against the militant group.

A country of 23 million people, many of whom speak the same Kanuri language as Boko Harams fighters and follow a similarly orthodox strain of Islam, Cameroon sits at a nexus where Africa’s Islamist-tinged rebellions are beginning to merge. Untold thousands have died in neighboring Central African Republic amid fighting between a Muslim rebellion and Christian militias. Mali, where French and United Nations peacekeepers have watched AL Qaeda allies seize a string of towns of late, is also nearby.

On Thursday, Cameroon President Paul Biya used his first speech of the year to ask unnamed foreign powers to supply African nations with more help in their struggle against fundamentalists, saying, “A global threat calls for a global response.” The country’s two former colonizers, France and Germany, have both lent varying degrees of support, as have China and the U.S.

—Drew Hinshaw in Accra, Ghana, contributed to this article.
BY ADU AZIBALOGHOM O.

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