[All Africa] Suspected Boko Haram... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality...
button men kidnapped 15 girls overnight in a village near Toumour, southeastern Niger, the local mayor said on Saturday.
Boukar Mani Orthe, the mayor of the town in Niger's Diffa region near the border with Nigeria, said about 50 unidentified gunnies seized the girls in a village about nine kilometres from the town centre.
On Thursday suspected Boko Haram fighters killed eight people working at French drilling company Foraco's water well site in Toumour.
Boko Haram has been waging an insurrection since 2009 aimed at establishing an Islamic state in northeast Nigeria
... a particularly crimson stretch of Islam's bloody border...
. It has launched repeated attacks into neighbouring Niger, Chad and Cameroon
...a long, narrow country that fills the space between Nigeria and Chad on the northeast, CAR to the southeast. Prior to incursions by Boko Haram nothing ever happened there...
The violence has killed thousands of civilians and forced millions to flee their homes in the large Lake Chad basin region.
Kidnapping of schoolgirls has been a Boko Haram horror mark, since its fighters in 2014 kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls in Chibok, Borno State, in Nigeria.
It also staged this year, another major kidnap of schoolgirls in Dapchi, Yobe state.
In Mali, French forces said they "put out of action" some 30 Islamist Lion of Islams, possibly including veteran Malian jihadist leader Amadou Koufa, during a raid in the central Mali region of Mopti.
The French army, which has about 4,500 troops in West Africa battling Islamist Lion of Islams, did not specify whether the jihadists had all been killed or taken prisoner. The operation took place with air support on Thursday night, it said.