By Rafiu Ajakaye
LAGOS
At least 2,000 Nigerian children currently residing at refugee camps across neighboring Niger are scheduled to be repatriated to their home country on Tuesday.
"Arrangements have been made to receive 2,000 Nigerian children who had been staying at refugee camps in Niger," Manzo Ezekiel, a spokesman for Nigeria's National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), told The Anadolu Agency.
He said NEMA officials would receive the children in Yobe State, one of the three northeastern Nigerian states worst hit by the years-long Boko Haram insurgency.
"A camp has been prepared for the children to be received in Yobe, today or at latest tomorrow," according to Ezekiel.
The children were among the tens of thousands of Nigerians who fled the country at the peak of Boko Haram violence that ravaged the region between 2009 and 2014, when the group carried out frequent indiscriminate attacks.
"Full details about the children are not clear, but they [the children] are among those who were displaced in the violence," Ezekiel told AA.
In three recent rescue operations, the army freed a total of 687 women and girls from Nigeria's Sambisa Forest, a Boko Haram stronghold in the country's restive northeastern region.
Nigerian troops also recently rescued up to 260 women and children found fleeing Boko Haram militants in Adamawa State's Madagali local government area.
The Nigerian military – backed by Nigerien and Chadian troops – recently liberated all territory captured earlier by Boko Haram in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe states.
