​Boko Haram fighters are overrunning villages near the northeast Nigerian town of Chibok, forcing hundreds of people to flee as they loot and burn in the area from which nearly 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped in 2014, local leaders said Tuesday. "Chibok is now under Boko Haram siege," the chairman of the Chibok local government area, Yaga Yarkawa, told journalists Tuesday in Maiduguri, the birthplace of Nigeria's homegrown Islamic extremist group 130 kilometres to the northeast. Boko Haram is employing scorched earth tactics, rustling livestock, looting crops just ready to harvest, and burning homes and what crops they cannot carry, Yarkawa said. The forest stronghold was where Boko Haram initially took 276 schoolgirls kidnapped from the government high school at Chibok on April 14, 2014. The government says it is conducting negotiations with Boko Haram for the freedom of nearly 200 Chibok girls who remain missing.

Source: CBC News November 22, 2016 11:15 UTC