Rampage in Nigeria is shown in satellite images.

• Author: Nossiter, Adam
• Position: News

Byline: Adam Nossiter

DAKAR, Senegal -- Thousands of buildings were burned, damaged or destroyed in northern Nigerian towns in recent days when Boko Haram militants stormed through, using scorched-earth tactics against civilians, according to a new analysis of satellite images by human rights groups.

In a succession of attacks, fighters from Boko Haram, an Islamist insurgent group that has gripped northern Nigeria and battled the government for years, have swept through a cluster of villages along the shores of Lake Chad in a "systematic campaign of arson directed against the civilian population in the area,'' according to Human Rights Watch.

About 57 percent of one town, Doro Gowon, the location of a now-destroyed military base, appears to have been leveled, probably affecting several thousand residential and commercial structures, Human Rights Watch said.

Amnesty International, which has also analyzed the satellite images, said Thursday that about 3,100 buildings in the town had been damaged or destroyed, demonstrating a "deliberate attack on civilians whose homes, clinics and schools are now burnt-out ruins.''

Large-scale massacres of civilians by Boko Haram shook northern Nigeria throughout 2014. About 300 people were killed in Gamboru Ngala in May, perhaps 500 died in a group of villages in Borno state in early June, an additional 120 died in Kano in November, and more than 150 died in Damaturu in December, along with numerous others.

In the first six months of 2014 alone, Boko Haram killed more than 2,000 civilians in northern and central Nigeria, Human Rights Watch estimated last year.

Some of these massacres have attracted little attention. But when militants...