Boko Haram abducts nearly 100 boys and men during village raid

Suspected Boko Haram fighters abducted nearly 100 boys and men during a village raid in northeast Nigeria, witnesses who fled the violence said Friday.

Residents who escaped the Sunday raid on Doron Baga, a sandy fishing village in Borno state near the shores of Lake Chad, said the abductors burned several houses and that as many as 97 people were unaccounted for. The witnesses also said six older men were killed during the attack, details of which took days to emerge because of the village’s remote location. 

“They left no men or boys in the place; only young children, girls and women,” said Halima Adamu, sobbing softly and looking exhausted after a 110-mile road trip on the back of a truck to the northern city of Maiduguri. “They were shouting 'Allah Akbar' (God is greatest), shooting sporadically. There was confusion everywhere. They started parking our men and boys into their vehicles, threatening to shoot whoever disobey them. Everybody was scared.”

Nigeria’s military spokesman Gen. Chris Olukolade earlier said on Twitter that he was unable to confirm the abductions.

In November 2013, Human Rights Watch accused Boko Haram, an Islamist anti-government group, of using children as young as 12 years old as fighters — actions that draw parallels to Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, which has operated in Uganda, what is now South Sudan and central Africa for decades. 

The latest incident comes four months after Boko Haram, which has been fighting for the creation of an Islamic state in religiously mixed Nigeria since 2009, abducted more than 200 schoolgirls from the village of Chibok and threatened to sell them into slavery and as child brides. Dozens of the girls managed to escape their captors, but most remain missing since the April kidnappings.

Boko Haram, seen as the number one security threat to Africa's top economy and oil producer, has dramatically increased attacks on civilians in the past year, resulting in rapidly waning support for the movement. So far in 2014, more than 4,000 Nigerians – mostly civilians – have been killed by Boko Haram and government forces battling them, Amnesty International said earlier this month.

Al Jazeera and wire services. Rawya Rageh contributed to this report.