[AlAhram] Islamist faceless myrmidons have killed five soldiers in an attack on a military outpost in restive northeast Nigeria
... a particularly crimson stretch of Islam's bloody border...
, army sources said Thursday.
Fighters from the Islamic State
 ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
West Africa Province (ISWAP) in several trucks opened fire on troops at a checkpoint outside the town of Mainok in Borno state on Wednesday, they said.
"We lost five soldiers in the surprise attack on the checkpoint," a military officer, who did not want to be named, told AFP.
Troops from the town intercepted the bully boys, leading to a shootout in which "some of the terrorists" were killed and two vehicles fitted with machine guns were recovered, he said.
Another military source said the five soldiers manning the checkpoint were "outgunned" by the hard boys.
The jihadists were said to have taken three military vehicles away.
The army said late Wednesday its troops killed nine "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...
terrorists" in an ambush, outside Mainok.
Spokesman Sagir Musa said two soldiers were "slightly maimed" in the encounter, without mentioning any fatalities from troops.
Mainok, which lies along the 120-kilometre (75-mile) highway linking Maiduguri and Damaturu, the capital of neighbouring Yobe state, is an ISWAP stronghold.
The area has seen an upsurge in abductions of civilians, prompting increased military deployments to confront the hard boys.
ISWAP which split from Boko Haram in 2016, has intensified attacks against the military since the middle of 2018.
In January, 22 soldiers were killed in three separate ISWAP attacks in the area, according to military sources.
The decade-long jihadist conflict has killed 36,000 people and displaced around two million from their homes in northeast Nigeria.
The violence has spread to 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...
, prompting a regional military coalition to fight the hard boys 
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