The death toll of the suicide attack in Cameroon on Friday morning has increased to 11, local newspaper, L’Oeil du Sahel, said on Saturday. Previous reports had said that six people were killed and more than 30 injured when a Boko Haram bomber attacked Kolofata, a town in Cameroon’s far north close to the border with Nigeria where Abubakar Shekau’s men are based and from where they launch bloody attacks into Cameroon, Chad, Niger and other parts of Nigeria.
The latest attack came only a day after two suicide bombers blew themselves up nearby in the village of Djakana, killing themselves and injuring several civilians.
Djakana is located in Mora in the department of Mayo-Sava, also in Cameroon’s far north. On May 25, the terrorists killed a Cameroonian soldier at his security post in Makary, also in the country’s far north.
The same day, there was a suicide attack in Kolofata that killed only the bomber and injured several people. A day earlier on May 24, Boko Haram kidnapped three girls and a woman in Gakara and Doudje localities.
On May 23, there was a suicide attack in Double while the other suicide bomber was gunned down by the army in the same area. Double is also in Cameroon’s far north.
These attacks are so frequent that it’s becoming difficult to keep track of all of them, but they paint a chaotic image of a region under siege and a President who has not visited in years to see things for himself and boost the morale of the troops.
In more than 500 gun and bomb attacks, Boko Haram has killed more than 2000 people in Cameroon since 2014, including more than 150 soldiers. The terrorists have also displaced hundreds of thousands of people from their ancestral land, and promised in a video to behead the country’s long serving dictator, Paul Biya.
It’s difficult to know what Boko Haram wants. In public video, the ISIS-partners in West Africa claim they are trying to establish a Caliphate, which will expand from Nigeria to Cameroon, Chad and Niger. But in practice, Boko Haram bombs mosques full of Muslims, churches full of Christians and market places, villages and towns full of people from different faiths.
There have been insinuation that the insurgency in the Lake Chad Basin has more to do with oil below the ground than religion or a bloody, fictional Caliphate.
Cameroonian 35-year-in-power President, Paul Biya, has promised many times that the terrorists Nigerian leader Muhammadu Buhari has labelled the “mindless, godless” militants would be wiped out, but as weeks and months pass, the terrorists leave bloody scenes of deaths and empty villages of horror and a proof that they are far from being defeated.