Empty streets, body searches and tips to police
embody the fear that Boko Haram has instilled in
northern Cameroon, where they killed more than 40
people in suicide bombings in July.
Raiders from the Nigerian sect later kidnapped 135
villagers and killed eight others in a pre-dawn strike
across the border last Tuesday, police and local
sources said.
Boko Haram has attacked villages in Cameroon’s
Extreme North region for about two years, but the
horrific bombings mark a change of tactics, while
Cameroonian troops have joined a regional force to
tackle the Islamists.
The suicide bombers can be young women and even
teenage girls, who behave like locals and blend in at
crowded places to cause maximum casualties.
Residents of Maroua, the main town in the Extreme
North, were spared until successive blasts tore
though the bustling central market and a bar on July
22 and 25. Those bombs killed 33 people and
wounded dozens more.
“We’re very worried and no longer know where to
turn,” says Albert, a worried father.
“Should we send the children to school when the next
school year starts?” he ponders. “Boko Haram is
against Western education and may very well carry
out attacks on schools.”
The sect’s name loosely translates as “Western
education is forbidden”, and Boko Haram notoriously
abducted 276 Nigerian schoolgirls in April last year.
Some managed to escape but more than 200 are
believed to be held in the large Sambisa forest,
where the Nigerian army this week said it had freed
178 captives.
– ‘People like you and me’ –
Boko Haram has frequently massacred students in
northeastern Nigeria during an insurgency with the
aim of establishing an Islamic caliphate, at a cost of at
least 15,000 lives since 2009.
“When you see somebody who isn’t familiar in the
neighbourhood, you call the police,” says Oumarou,
who works for a Maroua logistics firm.
He has sent his family away to Douala, Cameroon’s
economic capital on the Atlantic, more than 1,300
kilometres (810 miles) away.
Information Minister Issa Tchiroma Bakary has
meanwhile heaped praise on an astute taxi-
motorcycle driver who turned in a 15-year-old boy
carrying explosives last week.
The driver found the teen was behaving suspiciously
and decided to drive him to a police station, where
he was detained. Two other suspects were picked up.
“Their objective was to blow up inside a mosque,”
Bakary said.
Security has been tightened repeatedly in Maroua.
When the market closes at 5:00 pm, “everybody goes
home. There is nobody left on the streets apart from
the soldiers,” Oumarou says.
Sources in the security forces believe that Boko
Haram infiltrators and sympathisers have operated in
Maroua for months, relaying information to their
chiefs.
“They are people like you and me,” a Cameroonian
army officer says. “It’s almost impossible to identify
them.”
Bus terminals catering for southern destinations,
notably big cities like Douala and the capital Yaounde,
are closely watched. Passengers are always frisked as
they board their coaches.
“You feel the threat most because of all the
checkpoints on the roads,” says Olivier, a young
French expatriate in Douala.
“The police have tightened up their searches. They
make us empty our cars completely, and our bags.”
– ‘We no longer know who’s who’ –
In Yaounde, police and troops are omnipresent.
“People have been very ill at ease since there were
suicide attacks” in the north, trader Abdoulaye Sani
says.
“We no longer know who’s who. I’m afraid when I’m
walking… I’m afraid that something will happen, that
a bomb will explode and take me with it,” adds the
young man.
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