The prime minister of Niger has appealed for international help to confront a looming food crisis compounded by thousands of refugees who have streamed across the border from Nigeria.<br /><br /> They have been sheltering for weeks in Niger after fleeing militant group Boko Haram at the end of November.<br /><br /> Halima Ibrahim explained that the militant group shot her husband then took her two eldest girls, aged 11 and 12.<br /><br /> “I was there with my husband’s body and with the children. They selected two of my children. What am I going to do? They left me the two boys, the twins and a daughter,” she said.<br /><br /> Halima’s sad story is one of many. She fled her home in Nigeria’s Borno state and now lives in this makeshift emergency camp.<br /><br /> Boko Haram has ransacked northern Nigeria over the past few years: raiding villages, kidnapping children and seizing territory.<br /><br /> Their operations have increasingly spilled over Nigeria’s borders into Niger to the north and Cameroon to the east.<br /><br /> The European Union has just unblocked five million euros to help more than one million Nigerians forced from their homes by the group’s insurgency.
