Boko-Haram-snatch-young-boys-border-Cameroon-force-sign-sect.html

Cameroonian military rejects claims country is a safe haven to terrorists
Nigeria and Cameroon share 1,243-mile border from the ocean to Lake Chad
Elite battalions have been sent to Cameroon's north to fight Boko Haram

Published: 10:52 GMT, 19 June 2014 | Updated: 13:29 GMT, 19 June 2014

Villagers in Cameroon are living in fear of Boko Haram militants who have been launching raids across the border from Nigera to snatch children, a report claims.
Hundreds of troops have been dispatched to the country's north, which shares a long border with Borno, the Nigerian state at the heart of the group's Islamist insurgency.
But despite the deployment of some of Cameroon's most-elite units, whole villages have been cleared out and schools torched by Boko Haram raids.

Child snatcher: Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau in a video he sent taunting the Nigerian government over the more than 200 schoolgirls the group kidnapped from their boarding school dormitory in April

Villagers told Sky News correspondent Alex Crawford that Boko Haram fighters made daylight raids to snatch young boys to force them to take up arms as child soldiers.

One boy described how he was confronted by militants while out working in the fields. After he refused their invitation to join them the situation became tense but he was able to run away.

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Cameroon shares a 1,243-mile border with Nigeria that is mostly unmanned. Nigeria has accused Cameroon of failing to stop Boko Haram using its territory as a safe haven.

But Cameroon's Defence Ministry spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Badjeck, rejected the claim.

'They are not in Cameroon. Why would we allow that? This is bad for Cameroon,' he told Sky New. 'We are suffering too at the hands of Boko Haram.'

Cameroonian army soldiers deploying in Dabanga, in the country's north, as part of a reinforcement of its military forces against Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram, which has been making sorties over the border