Boko Haram militants burned dozens of children alive as they firebombed a village in northeastern Nigeria on Saturday, according to a witness who watched the massacre from the refuge of a nearby tree.
Local survivors worked alongside Nigerian soldiers to collect charred and bullet-riddled corpses from Dalori, a village just a few miles from Maiduguri, the largest city in the country’s volatile northeast and the birthplace of the extremist group.
The mayhem didn’t stop there. When villagers fled from Dalori to the neighboring Gamori village, they were met by three female suicide bombers who killed many people, according soldier who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
The death tolls from either incident have yet to be confirmed as efforts to asses to the carnage are still underway.
ThinkProgress previously reported on the massive scale of horrors wrought by Boko Haram.
Boko Haram is the deadliest terrorist group in the world, according to the Global Terrorism Index 2015, released on Wednesday. The group narrowly beat out ISIS, which was responsible for 6,073 deaths by terrorism in 2014. Boko Haram was responsible for 6,644 terrorism deaths and increased its activity by over 300 percent.
RELATED: The World’s Deadliest Terrorist Group Has Killed 40 People In The Last 48 Hours. It’s Not ISIS.
The Islamist militant group abducted more than 200 girls from their boarding school in the town of Chibok in 2013. Many of them are believed to have been married off to Boko Haram fighters or to have been forced into fighting on the group’s behalf.
In the last six years, Boko Haram has killed about 20,000 people and driven 2.5 million from their homes.