[DAWN] 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...
gunnies have kidnapped 40 boys and young men in a remote village in northeast Nigeria
... a particularly crimson stretch of Islam's bloody border...
n Borno state on New Year's Eve, residents who fled the isolated settlement said on Saturday.
Scores of Boko Haram Death Eaters stormed the Malari village and whisked away the males, aged between 10 and 23, into the nearby Sambisa forest, believed to be one of the Islamists' major bases.
The news of the abductions came out only days later, when residents who fled the village arrived in the state capital Maiduguri late on Friday.
?They came in pick-up trucks armed with guns and gathered all the men in the village outside the home of the village chief where they preached to us before singling out 40 of our boys and taking them away,? Bulama Muhammad told AFP
Malari village lies 20 kilometres (12.5 miles) from the Sambisa forest and close to the town of Gwoza, which the Death Eaters captured last June declaring it part of their caliphate.
?My two sons and three nephews were among those taken away by the Boko Haram gunnies and we believe they are going to use them as conscripts,? Muhammad said.
?When we heard of the kidnap of 40 boys in Malari by Boko Haram we decided to leave because we could be the next target,? said Alaramma Babagoni, who fled from the nearby village of Mulgwi.
There was no immediate comment on the incident from the military in Maiduguri.
Boko Haram is still holding in captivity more than 200 schoolgirls it kidnapped from their school in Chibok in Borno state last April.