Up to 1 million people around West Africa's Lake Chad are cut off from humanitarian aid by Boko Haram despite a regional military offensive against the extremists, a U.N. official said Tuesday. Violence from Boko Haram militants has displaced more than 100,000 people across the swamps of Lake Chad, where the borders of Chad, Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria meet, and disrupted the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of others, aid agencies say. Security officials say a regional taskforce is reasserting control of the lake, with hundreds of insurgents surrendering in the past month. Still, many areas are impossible to reach amid the insecurity, said Toby Lanzer, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for the Sahel region. "We believe that there are up to a million people in the areas and villages we haven't been able to reach," he said.
