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Some 500,000 children have been forced to flee Boko Haram militants in the last five months after an upsurge in attacks in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger, the UN children's agency said on Friday.

The additional numbers of children made homeless has taken the total number of youngsters in the Lake Chad region who have been forced to flee to 1.4 million, Unicef said in a statement, according to AFP news agency.

Nigeria was worst affected, with nearly 1.2 million children -- more than half of them under five -- uprooted by the Islamist insurgency, which is concentrated in the country's remote northeast.

Some 265,000 other children have been affected in neighbouring Cameroon, Chad and Niger, which Boko Haram has increasingly targeted after they joined Nigeria's military in a regional counter-offensive.

"Each of these children running for their lives is a childhood cut short," said Unicef's regional director for West and Central Africa, Manuel Fontaine.

"It's truly alarming to see that children and women continue to be killed, abducted and used to carry bombs."
Boko Haram has been fighting to establish a hardline Islamic state in northeast Nigeria since 2009.
At least 15,000 people have been killed since then, some 1,100 of them in a wave of suicide bombings, deadly raids and bomb attacks since Muhammadu Buhari became Nigerian president on May 29.