About 12,000 Nigerians are being repatriated over the next
three to four days after seeking refuge in Cameroon from attacks by Islamist
militant group Boko Haram, Nigeria’s
state emergency agency said on Wednesday.
A National Emergency Management Agency spokesman said the
returnees would be accommodated mainly in the town of Mubi in Adamawa state,
close to the border.
“We already
cleared about 1,150 people but border officers projected that 12,000 people
would be arriving,” spokesman
Manzo Ezekiel said.
Cameroonian authorities expelled about 2,800 Nigerians over
the weekend following a series of suicide bomb attacks in July.
The six-year-old insurgency waged by Boko Haram to establish
an Islamist state in the northeast of Nigeria has displaced around 1.5 million
people internally and forced thousands to flee into neighbouring Cameroon,
Niger and Chad.
A multi-national joint taskforce combining 8,700 troops from
Nigeria and its neighbours is being set up in Chad’s capital N’Djamena
to combat the militants.
A similar-sized repatriation occurred in May from the Lake
Chad islands in Niger when Nigerien authorities told residents, many of them
Nigerians, to evacuate before military operations.
About 25,000 people were forced to leave, sometimes
brutally. Some died en route due to inadequate evacuation assistance.
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