Boko Haram kills 18 in deadly midnight assault on village

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Boko Haram staged a deadly midnight attack on a village in Niger, leaving at least 18 people dead and almost 100 homes torched to the ground.

The Nigerian terror group, recently identified as the world’s deadliest, operates within Nigeria but has expanded in the past year to stage attacks on neighbouring Niger, Chad and Cameroon.

"The toll is 18 dead, 11 hurt, almost 100 homes burned down," Bako Mamadou, the mayor of nearby town Bosso, told AFP.

It is the latest attack since the militants started targeting villagers and Niger’s soldiers in February when they killed at least 70 people. Since then, the group is believed to have killed hundreds in around 50 attacks registered by United Nations troops stationed in the area.

The militants are thought to have crossed the Komadougou Yobe river, taken as a boundary between Niger and neighbouring Nigeria, according to a humanitarian worker.

The attack comes as the Nigerian government admitted it would be unable to meet its own timetable to destroy the militant uprising to the country’s north.

In June President Muhammadu Buhari’s promised to restore peace to the country by December, but air commodore Yusuf Anas, of the Center for Crisis Communication, told the Associated Press the deadline was “not tenable”.

The group, which is attempting to establish an Islamic caliphate in Nigeria, is estimated to have killed more than 6,600 people in around 400 since last year, according to the Global Terrorism Index 2015.