A Nigerian military jet targeting Islamic extremist hideouts bombed a northeastern village and killed at least 20 civilians, survivors said today.
They said yesterday's airstrike hit Daglun, a village near Nigeria's border with Cameroon in an area where Islamic extremists killed nearly 100 people earlier this week.
Most of those killed were elderly, because most residents had fled because of the recent violence and rumors that the military was about to mount attacks in the area in response.
Military spokesman Capt Jafaru Nuru of the 23rd Armored Brigade operating in Yobe state, northeast Nigeria, said he was unaware that any airstrike had killed civilians.
An elderly resident of Daglun said he was sitting under a tree when he saw bombs dropping from a military aircraft. A nurse at the local hospital said it received many dead and wounded. A community leader said 20 people died and 25 were wounded.
All requested anonymity citing fear of military reprisals. Jets have been bombing the area for weeks as part of a nine-month effort to suppress an Islamic insurgency in Africa's most populous nation of about 170 million people.
The country is almost equally divided between the mainly Muslim north and predominantly Christian south. The Boko Haram terrorist network is fighting to impose Islamic law across the entirety of Nigeria, Africa's biggest oil producer.
Jets have been bombing suspected Islamic militant power bases around Daglun daily for three weeks in a bid to flush the extremists out of their remote forest hideouts and caves in mountainous terrain.
Three northeastern states covering one-sixth of Nigeria are under a 9-month-old state of emergency. The military's offensive has featured previous airstrike mistakes.
In January, a jet dropped bombs near a federal senator, who was traveling in a convoy being escorted by soldiers and police. No one was hurt. The military called the bombing "an operational blunder."
Also that month, a Nigerian jet pursued Boko Haram militants across the border into Cameroon and dropped three bombs on a Cameroon customs post, destroying two vehicles.
