Dozens dead in Nigeria school blast in Potiskum

At least 46 students have been killed by a suicide bomber at a school assembly in the north-eastern Nigerian town of Potiskum, police have said.

The explosion at a boys' school in the town is believed to have been caused by a suicide bomber dressed as a student.

The militant group Boko Haram is believed to have carried out the attack, police said.

The group has targeted schools during a deadly five-year insurgency aimed at establishing an Islamic state.

It is waging a sustained campaign to prevent children from going to school. It believes girls should not attend school and boys should only receive an Islamic education.

The explosion ripped through the assembly hall at the Government Science Secondary School, reports say.

Police spokesman Emmanuel Ojukwu told the BBC Hausa service the attack had left 47 people dead, including the suicide bomber. Another 79 were wounded.

By setting off the bomb during the morning assembly, the militants clearly aimed to kill as many students as possible.

Few of the attacks here are ever claimed by any group but Boko Haram will once again be suspected. The jihadists have carried out particularly brutal attacks on schools before.

Chibok is known in many parts of the world because of April's mass abduction of girls from that remote village. But there have been many other horrific attacks on schools which have received less attention - including last February's raid on Buni Yadi, in Yobe State.

Dozens of boys were burnt to death, shot or killed with knives in the dormitory. Female students were spared but told to never attend school again, go off and get married. Boko Haram wants the education of boys to be limited to strict Koranic studies only.

The insecurity in the north-east is so rampant, with entire towns and villages now in the jihadists' hands, it will be extremely hard for other bombings to be prevented.

"At about 08:00am [07:00 GMT], a suicide bomber disguised himself as one of the male students and while the school was holding its normal assembly, the bomb went off," Mr Ojukwu said.

He added that police were investigating the explosion.

One student told the BBC he saw the mutilated bodies of fellow students at the scene, where emergency operations were ongoing. A resident reported seeing parents wailing at the sight of their children's bodies at the hospital.

Soldiers who attended the site of the explosion were met with fury by the assembled crowds who pelted them with stones and accused them of not doing enough to halt Boko Haram's insurgency.

A grieving relative told the BBC: "My brother, a student in the school, died in the blast. He was about 16 years old... We buried him at about 11:00am [10:00 GMT] today."

"The government needs to be more serious about the fight against Boko Haram because it is getting out of control," he added.

Potiskum is no stranger to attacks - last week a suicide bombing there targeted Shia Muslims

Schools in Yobe state have been frequently attacked by Boko Haram militants.

The state is one of three in Nigeria that have been placed under a state of emergency as a result of the group's activities.

Potiskum, one of the largest towns in Yobe, has been targeted before by Boko Haram.

Last week, a suicide bombing killed 15 people in the town.

The bomber joined a religious procession of the rival Shia Muslim sect, before blowing himself up.

In April, Boko Haram sparked global outrage by abducting more than 200 girls from a boarding school in Chibok town in Borno state.

Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau has dismissed government claims to have agreed a ceasefire, under which the girls would be released.

He says the children have converted to Islam, are learning to memorise the Koran and have been married off.

Iraq's Defense and Interior ministries both issued statements saying al-Baghdadi had been wounded, without elaborating, and the news was broadcast on state-run television Sunday night.

The reports came at a time when President Barack Obama said the U.S.-led coalition was in a position to start going on the offensive against the Islamic State militants.

Al-Baghdadi, believed to be in his early 40s, has a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head. Since taking the reins of the group in 2010, he has transformed it from a local branch of al-Qaida into an independent transnational military force.

He has positioned himself as perhaps the pre-eminent figure in the global jihadi community. His forces have seized large parts of Syria and Iraq, killed thousands of people, beheaded Westerners and drawn the U.S. troops and warplanes back into the region, where Washington is leading a campaign of airstrikes by a multinational coalition.

An Interior Ministry intelligence official told The Associated Press that al-Baghdadi was wounded by an Iraqi airstrike that came during a meeting Saturday with militants in the town of Qaim. The official, cited informants within the militant group. A senior Iraqi military official also said he learned in operational meetings that al-Baghdadi had been wounded.

The operation was carried out by Iraqi security forces, both officials said, although they did not know how seriously al-Baghdadi was hurt. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss confidential material.

A statement posted Sunday on the official Facebook page of Defense Minister Khalid Obeidi also said al-Baghdadi was wounded, but added that he was targeted in the northern city of Mosul, currently the group's biggest stronghold in Iraq. A senior U.S. defense official said Saturday that the coalition conducted a series of airstrikes targeting a gathering of Islamic State leaders near Mosul, but he could not confirm whether al-Baghdadi was part of the gathering.

Reports circulated Saturday that al-Baghdadi may have been wounded in an airstrike, but there was no confirmation at that time from either U.S. or Iraqi officials.

The U.S. Central Command said Friday it conducted two airstrikes near Qaim that destroyed a militant armored vehicle and two checkpoints of the militant group, which is also known by the acronyms ISIL and ISIS. On Nov. 1, the U.S. military conducted four strikes in the town.

When asked about the Iraqi reports, Air Force Col. Patrick Ryder, spokesman for U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida, said Sunday: "We have no information to corroborate reports that ISIL leader al-Baghdadi has been injured."

Rami Abdurrahman, director of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said some Islamic State militants wounded in the airstrike near Qaim were taken across the frontier to the Syrian border town of Boukamal.

"They brought ISIS injured to Aisha Hospital in Boukamal. We don't know if somebody died there or not. We know for sure that they brought some of the ISIS people injured in Roummaneh to the hospital," Abdurrahman said.

There was no indication that al-Baghdadi was among those brought to Boukamal.

The reclusive al-Baghdadi is known to have made only one public appearance, purportedly delivering a sermon at a mosque in Mosul, as seen in a video posted online in June. That came five days after his group declared the establishment of an Islamic state, or caliphate, in the territories it holds in Iraq and Syria. The group proclaimed al-Baghdadi its leader and demanded that all Muslims pledge allegiance to him.

Since then, part of the Islamic State group's core strategy has been to establish administration over lands that it controls to project an image of itself as more than just a fighting force. In parts of Syria under its control, the group administers courts, repairs roads and even polices traffic. It recently imposed a curriculum in schools in Mosul and in its Syrian stronghold, Raqqa, scrapping subjects such as philosophy and chemistry, and fine-tuning the sciences to fit with its ideology.

As his forces swept across northern and western Iraq in June and July, they seized towns, causing several of Iraq's army and police divisions to fall into disarray in the worst crisis in the country since U.S. troops withdrew in 2011.

On Friday, Obama authorized the deployment of up to 1,500 more American troops to bolster Iraqi forces, which could boost the total number of U.S. forces to 3,100 and spread advisory teams and trainers across the country, including into Anbar province where the fighting has been fierce.

The militant Islamist group has overrun a large part of the province in its push to expand its territory, which stands at about a third of both Iraq and Syria. Last week, hundreds of men, women and children with the Sunni Al Bu Nimr tribe were killed by the militant group, which apparently feared the tribe would challenge its authority in the province.

Officials with the Iraqi government, as well as officials with the coalition targeting the extremists, repeatedly have said that Iraqi tribes are key elements in the fight against the Islamic State group since they are able to penetrate areas inaccessible to airstrikes and ground forces.

In an interview with CBS' "Face the Nation" that took place Friday and was broadcast Sunday, Obama said its airstrikes, which the U.S. first launched on Aug. 8, have been effective in scaling back the Islamic State group's advance.

"Rather than just try to halt ISIL's momentum, we're now in a position to start going on some offense," Obama said.

"The airstrikes have been very effective in degrading ISIL's capabilities and slowing the advance that they were making," he added.

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Abdul-Zahra reported from Boston. Associated Press writers Robert Burns in Washington and Ryan Lucas in Beirut contributed to this report.

(The Huffington Post)