N'DJAMENA, Aug 14 (Reuters) - A suicide bomber killed five
people, including a Chadian soldier, when she blew herself up on
the shores of Lake Chad on Wednesday, three military and
government sources said.
The sources said the attack happened shortly after midnight
in the compound of a traditional chieftain in the district of
Kaiga-Kindjiria. The attacker walked in and detonated her bomb
just as people in the compound were preparing to go to bed, they
said, without giving further details.
Lake Chad, which sprawls across Nigeria, Niger, Chad and
Cameroon, is a stronghold for the two main factions of Nigerian
Islamist militant group Boko Haram: Boko Haram itself and the
Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP) splinter group.
Violence in the region has killed more than 30,000 people
and displaced about 2 million since 2009, when Boko Haram first
launched an uprising with the intention of carving out an
Islamic caliphate in northeast Nigeria.
Jihadists in the Lake Chad region have routinely ambushed
soldiers, opened fire on markets and kidnapped women and
children, including nearly 270 schoolgirls in the village of
Chibok in 2014, a hundred of whom are still missing.
In June, West African troops killed 42 suspected Islamic
State fighters in a battle in the Lake Chad region, the heaviest
death toll suffered by the insurgents in the last six months.
But they continue to show themselves capable of devastating
hit-and-run attacks. Last month, an attack by suspected
Islamists on a group returning from a funeral in Nigeria's
northeastern Borno state killed at least 65 people.