Takfiri Boko Haram militants have killed more than three dozen people and injured several others in a series of violent attacks on villages in the troubled northeastern Nigeria.

Members of youth vigilante forces in northern Nigeria said on Friday that at least 37 people lost their lives and many survivors suffered gunshot wounds after militants targeted at least six villages in Borno state near the militants’ stronghold in Sambisa Forest on Wednesday night.

Sources added that the heavily-armed militants opened indiscriminate fire from the back of pickup trucks and set scores of huts ablaze by hurling firebombs.

"It was really horrifying," The Associated Press quoted vigilante Ahmed Ajimi as saying.

Ajimi also noted that he spent the night in the bush and returned on Thursday to help bury the 37 corpses.

Many victims of the attacks are said to be farmers who had recently returned home after Nigerian army soldiers flushed the militants out of the area earlier this year.

Sambisa Forest is considered as a major Boko Haram stronghold from where hundreds of women and children kidnapped by the militants were rescued during recent military operations.

Meanwhile, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, a former army general who took power on May 29, has vowed to end Boko Haram’s six-year militancy.

On Thursday, Buhari met with the leaders of Benin and three Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC) member states -- Niger, Cameroon, and Chad -- in the capital Abuja in an attempt to find ways to counter the rising threat of Boko Haram in the militancy-riddled region.

Military chiefs of staff from Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon as well as a high-level military official from Benin also came together in Abuja to discuss ways to cope with the militant group.

Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is forbidden,” started its campaign of terror in Nigeria in 2009. The Takfiri group has also conducted military operations in Nigeria’s neighboring countries.

Some 15,000 people have been killed and around 1.5 million others displaced over the past six years.