Ambazonia fighters assault travelers along Batibo-Widikum road

Armed men suspected to have been members of the Ambazonia Defence Force (ADF) assaulted travelers and collected sums of money from them as they halted tens of vehicles along the Batibo-Widikum road in the Northwest Region on Sunday, September 3.

A traveler told MMI the armed men mounted a roadblock around Nnen village near PHS Batibo, where they charged road users FCFA 10,000 for men and FCFA 5,000 for women. Those who resisted were brutalised.

Many of the occupants of the vehicles that used the road that day were traders who were headed for the Widikum market.

“Women were forced to pay FCFA5,000 while men paid FCFA10,000. A Nigerian who refused to comply was seriously beaten. We stayed there for hours, but security forces didn’t intervene despite the fact that they had been alerted by the other vehicles that were still behind,” one of the travelers told MMI.

He was surprised that security and defence forces were nowhere to be found amid the armed men’s incursion. Usually, security forces patrol the road stretch regularly to keep track of separatists’ movements.

But this was not the case on September 3, when the armed men came knocking. They carried out the operation unperturbed.

Recently, gunmen also attacked and collected huge sums of money and valuables from traders who were traveling to Yoruba Market in Small Babanki, Tubah Subdivision of the North West Region. The Cameroonian military killed at least three of them.

Insecurity has remained constant in the North West Region of Cameroon since the Anglophone Crisis degenerated into a bloody armed conflict in 2017.