Nigerian fishermen feared dead in Chad strikes on Boko Haram

More than 40 Nigerian fishermen are feared dead after Chad’s military launched retaliatory air strikes on Boko Haram positions in the Lake Chad region, local officials and fishing community leaders said Monday.

The strikes over the weekend targeted islands where Boko Haram fighters retreated after attacks that killed at least 24 Chadian soldiers and two generals on May 4 and May 6. Chadian authorities described the operation as a counterterrorism sweep. But civilians live on the islands too — thousands of Nigerian fishermen work there, in an economy Boko Haram controls by regulating access to fishing grounds and collecting taxes.

“After Boko Haram attacked Chadian forces, they retreated to islands they operate from. Fishermen also inhabit these islands,” Abubakar Gamandi Usman, chairman of the Lake Chad Basin Fisheries Association of Nigeria, told the BBC.

Adamu Haladu, a fisherman from Baga on the Nigerian shore, told AFP the dead include residents of Doron Baga and Nigeria’s Taraba state. “Many people were killed,” Haladu said. “Most of those killed in the airstrikes are from the town of Doron Baga on the Nigerian shores of the lake and from Taraba state.”

Chad’s government has not commented on civilian casualty reports, and no official death toll has been issued. The Lake Chad basin — a marshy borderland shared by Nigeria, Chad, Niger, and Cameroon — has been a Boko Haram operational base for more than a decade. Its factional offshoots, including Islamic State West Africa Province, use the lake’s hundreds of islands to attack military outposts and fishing settlements across all four countries.

Usman told the BBC that Boko Haram runs an extortion network on the lake, taxing fishermen who have no alternative but to pay for access to waters the group patrols. That arrangement makes the islands economically vital to communities with few other livelihoods — and leaves them exposed when military operations target the same ground.

The strikes expose the limits of Chad’s air campaign. Air power can reach the islands, but on a lake where fishermen and fighters share the same ground, distinguishing one from the other is a recurring problem. The four-nation Multinational Joint Task Force has coordinated Lake Chad Basin operations since 2015 with backing from the African Union, but the civilian toll threatens to strain those alliances. Nigerian officials have not yet issued a formal response, and a spokesman for the foreign affairs ministry did not immediately reply to a request for comment.