L’Oeil du Sahel reports that the attack took place on the bridge over the River El Beid that links Fotokol, a locality in the Logone and Chari Division of Cameroon’s Far North Region, to Gambaru, a village in Nigeria.

Cameroon-info.net recalls that Fotokol is a municipality about 300metres across River El Beid from the Nigerian village of Gambaru, where Fotokol residents often go for supplies.

This appears to be the bloodiest Boko Haram attack in Cameroon since that of June 2019 in which 16 soldiers of the country’s defence forces were killed when the jihadist fighters attacked Darak, a locality in the Far North Region.

Last year’s incident took place in the night of Sunday June 9 to Monday June 10, 2019 when 300 heavily armed fighters of the Boko Haram terrorist group attacked Darak in the Logone and Chari Division of the Far North Region, Beti Assomo Joseph, Cameroon’s Minister Delegate at the Presidency of the Republic in charge of Defence said in a statement at the time.

During the said attack, a riposte by Cameroon’s Defence Forces attached to Sector No. 1 of the Multinational Joint Task Force of the Lake Chad Basin resulted in a fierce gun exchange that lasted for several hours.

After taking control of the situation, the government said 16 soldiers were shot and killed, while eight others were injured. On the part of civilians, eight were killed and one wounded.

The defence minister said 64 Boko Haram fighters were neutralised (killed), eight captured and many others wounded as they fled while three heavy duty machines belonging to the assailants were destroyed in last year’s Darak attack.

Boko Haram's decade-long uprising to establish a hardline Islamic state in Nigeria's northeast, which has killed more than 27,000 people and left 1.8 million homeless, spilled into neighbouring Niger, Chad and Cameroon.

An anti-Boko Haram force combining soldiers from Chad, Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria has since been set up but has failed to rout the group from the restive Lake Chad region.