Boko Haram Massacre Kills Up to 2,000, Mostly Women, Children, Elderly

Amnesty International is calling this the “deadliest massacre” in the history of Boko Haram: according to new reports, as many as 2,000 people are dead in the Nigerian border town of Baga, where Islamic extremists drove into town on Wednesday with grenades and assault rifles in their prolonged attempt to wrest control of state territory. Nigerian troops, who have a base near Baga on Lake Chad, resisted the attack until they “ran out of ammunition and fled.”

AP reporters talked to a local leader named Baba Abba Hassan who said “most victims are children, women and elderly people who could not run fast enough.” Hassan is also calling the four-digit number of victims into question.

Before this, the largest-scale Boko Haram killing was the March 14, 2014 attack in Maiduguri City, where 600 people were killed. The extremist terror campaign has claimed more than 10,000 lives in the last year and displaced more than million Nigerians. The BBC reports that “some 10,000 people” have tried to cross the border to Chad since last Saturday, when Boko Haram’s latest offensive began: “a large number reportedly drowned as they crossed Lake Chad.”

Image via AP, of displaced Nigerian children running around a soccer field at a refugee camp.