YAOUNDÉ, Dec 2, (AFP): Cameroon troops killed around 100 Boko Haram Islamist fighters from Nigeria, freed almost 900 hostages and seized Islamic State (IS) flags last week, the defence ministry said Wednesday. “A special clean-up operation from Nov 26 to 28” against Boko Haram fighters in the border area with Nigeria “neutralised more than 100 jihadists”, Defence Minister Joseph Beti Assomo said in a statement broadcast on national radio. The sweep enabled troops “to release almost 900 hostages, seize a large stock of arms and munitions as well as black-and-white Islamic State flags”, the statement added, without providing details on the identities of those freed.

No independent confirmation of the statement was immediately available from the region, which is unaccessible to the media. Some security sources reached by telephone confirmed that the raid took place but were unable to confirm the figures released in the government statement. Meanwhile, more than 410 babies were born in the space of two months in camps for people displaced by the Boko Haram insurgency in northeast Nigeria, the country’s main relief agency said on Tuesday.

“Over 410 births were recorded between August and September” in the camps in Borno and Adamawa state, said the head of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), Muhammad Sani Sidi. In the same period, there were 187 marriages — 100 in camps in the Borno state capital, Maiduguri, and 87 in neighbouring Adamawa, he added in a statement.

Boko Haram’s fight to create a hardline Islamic state in northeast Nigeria, which began in 2009, has killed at least 17,000 people and made more than 2.6 million others homeless. Some 10 percent of the 2.0 million or so Nigerians internally displaced by the conflict now live in government-run camps, according to the International Organization for Migration. In recent months, the camps have also accommodated hundreds of women and children kidnapped by the insurgents and rescued by the military during its counter-offensive. A statement from Borno state governor Kashim Shettima in May said the rebels “deliberately rape women with the intention of getting them pregnant so they would give birth to future insurgents”. The same month, a retired midwife helping at the Malkohi camp outside the Adamawa state capital, Yola, told AFP 10 to 15 women were in the early to midstages of pregnancy. Pregnancy tests were also given as part of medical screening for women among the 275 people rescued from Boko Haram’s Sambisa Forest stronghold earlier that month.

NEMA’s Sidi, however, made no reference as to whether the births in September and October were from women kidnapped by Boko Haram and forced into marriage with Islamist fighters. The agency’s spokesman, Manzo Ezekiel, also declined to comment, saying how the women became pregnant was not their focus. “We just help them deliver,” he told AFP by telephone from Maiduguri. “The period of time these people were displaced is not more than one year. You can still assume the husbands were responsible for the pregnancy,” he added.

No other figures were available on births in the camps, he said. The US Treasury singled out two leaders of the violent Boko Haram Islamist group in Africa for economic sanctions Tuesday, saying both are closely involved in deadly attacks in Nigeria. The Treasury said Mohammed Nur, a Boko Haram commander who has represented the group in negotiations with the Nigerian government, was placed on its financial blacklist for his involvement in suicide bomb attacks, including one on the United Nations headquarters in Abuja in 2011.