Cameroon in for long fight as its youth join Boko Haram

Cameroon's security forces are predicting a drawn-out battle with Boko Haram as evidence filters out that the insurgents are now recruiting there.

"We don't doubt that Boko Haram is recruiting in Cameroon," said Col. Joseph Nouma, commander of Operation ALPHA, a special military operation set up by Cameroon's government to fight the Nigerian terrorist group.

He says communities bordering Nigeria have been emptied of men between the ages of 10 and 45.

"Many of them are found across the border in Nigeria, training with the terrorists," he told CNN.

This has made it difficult for the country's defense forces to adequately estimate the power of the terrorist group. Nouma said the number of militants may be greater than is widely believed, though there is no reliable estimate of the group's strength.

"Boko Haram is a permanent metamorphosis, dying every day but recruiting every day as well," says Col. Jacob Kodji, interim commander of the 4th Military Region. "And this complicates a lot of things for us."

Nouma agreed: "We kill them, but they keep on coming."

A heartbreaking discovery

Boko Haram is a Nigerian-based Islamic group whose purpose is to institute Sharia, or Islamic law. They have carried out a campaign of terror in northern Nigeria, killing thousands, taking hundreds captive, and occupying swaths of territory in Borno state.

As many as 200,000 Nigerians have fled to neighboring countries, creating an urgent humanitarian situation, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees reported last month.

For the past two years, Boko Haram fighters have been carrying out cross-border raids on Cameroon, slaughtering hundreds and torching entire neighborhoods. But as the country's defense forces -- later joined by battle-hardened Chadian troops -- turned up the momentum against the insurgents, the terrorists began to swell their ranks with Cameroonians.

Nouma said he believes "most of the worst attacks we have suffered" were carried out by Cameroonians fighting for Boko Haram.

Also, the militants' ability to hit several different places at once, and with precision, suggests that "there are people over here giving them information," Nouma said.

In January, Boko Haram struck Fotokol, a Cameroonian town separated by only a bridge from Gambarou, Nigeria, a stronghold of the Islamist extremists. The attackers killed more than 400 people.

Cameroonian and Chadian soldiers stationed there managed to kill 150 invaders. Among them was the son of Ahmadou Moustafa, a Fotokol resident.

For two months, Moustafa didn't know the whereabouts of his son, Akim, or what he was doing. He didn't find out until the aftermath of the fighting, when locals removed the veil on one of the dead attackers to reveal his 15-year-old boy's face.

"I was really shocked and embarrassed at the development," Moustafa said.