JOHANNESBURG (AP) — The World Wildlife Fund says soldiers in Cameroon are losing the battle to save the last elephants in that nation’s remote Bouba N’Djida National Park from marauding horsemen believed to be invading from Sudan.

The director of the organization’s Central Africa program, Natasha Kofoworola Quist, says the military arrived too late and in too few numbers to save most of the elephants.

She said in a conference call Thursday that the poaching appears to continue unabated and at least half of the park’s 400 elephants have been killed.

This past year has seen an unprecedented increase in poaching of elephants for their tusks which are smuggled mainly to China and Thailand to make ivory ornaments.