Showing posts with label Maiduguri. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maiduguri. Show all posts

Monday, May 30, 2016

How To Defeat Boko Haram

By Philip Hammond
I was delighted to visit Nigeria again, the second time in under a year, to meet with President Buhari and attend the second Regional Security Summit. Combating violent extremism is a global chal­lenge, which has affected many of our countries in Europe, just as you are tackling it here in Nigeria. That is why I welcomed President Buhari’s call to hold this important summit.
The UK and Nigeria have a strong and long-standing relationship. President Buhari’s recent visit to the UK for London’s Anti-Corruption Summit underlines the importance of our partner­ship. The UK stands shoulder to shoulder with Ni­geria as it tackles corruption, something President Buhari himself has said has become a ‘way of life’.
During my visit, I was struck by how much progress had been made on President Buhari’s manifesto since I was last here for the President’s inauguration. In particular, significant improve­ments in security stood out.
Over the last 12 months, action by Nigeria and its neighbours, with the support of friends in the international community, has greatly diminished Boko Haram. We have reduced their strength and the territory they control. I congratulate President Buhari and other leaders in the region on this prog­ress.

Saturday, February 20, 2016

Boko Haram Is About Human Lives, Not Territories

By Ahmad Salkida
NIGERIA has been known to place a deplorable value on the lives of her citizens. It seems to run in the veins of successive administrations. And none has been more disturbing than the inclination to celebrate the much hyped technical defeat of Boko Haram over the continual massacre of defenceless citizens in the war-ravaged Northeast region of Nigeria as well as in camps holding numerous distressed Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs).
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Yes, ‘Boko Haram or the ‘Islamic’ State West Africa Provence (ISWAP) as they preferred to be called, may no longer lash out and hold territories as it used to, but this should not be held up as a victory by Nigerian officials who proudly celebrate their “technical defeat” of the group. The group still operates and kills at will in these areas. Is it the priority of government to protect deserted territories from being reoccupied by Boko Haram or, end further massacres and sufferings visited on civilian populations in the region? If the two are one and the same, then, Nigeria and the rest of the West African countries confronted with the Boko Haram conundrum are years from celebrating any victory.
Apparently, Boko Haram’s priority is not to spare the lives of the people in the communities they overrun in the Lake Chad area. They have come to realise the hard way that, it is rather implausible to enforce their model of the Sharia on the kaffirs, which is how they view the larger Nigerian society. Why, then, are government officials focusing on the diminished expanse of territories under the group’s control as an indication of a war won and settled?

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Boko Haram Is Wounded And Dangerous

By Max Siollun
Less than a year ago, the militant group Boko Haram controlled an area of northeastern Nigeria the size of Belgium. It was “a mortuary for the uncooperative and prison for the conquered,” as one unlucky resident described it to me at the time, and it threatened to engulf ever more of the country. The brutal Islamist insurgency had sapped the morale and discipline of the Nigerian army and seemed poised to carve out a caliphate that rivaled the one it had pledged loyalty to in Iraq and Syria.

Fast-forward just 10 months and the idea of an Islamic caliphate in northern Nigeria seems a distant memory. Delusions of statehood caused Boko Haram’s leaders to overreach, inviting a powerful regional military response and bolstering the candidacy of former Nigerian military leader Muhammadu Buhari, who set about crushing the Islamist insurgency after winning the presidency in March. A regional military coalition led by Nigeria has recaptured much of the territory Boko Haram once controlled and driven its fighters into remote regions in Nigeria’s northeastern corner.
But if Boko Haram has seen its territorial ambitions dashed in recent months, it is hardly on the verge of defeat. In a way, Boko Haram has come full circle, reverting back to the kind of asymmetrical warfare that was once its grisly hallmark. As a result, the group poses as much of a danger to civilians now as it did when it fought to control cities and towns. In the last six months alone, Boko Haram has killed nearly 1,500 people.
What explains the rollercoaster ride of the last 10 months? Part of the answer is hubris. Last month, a senior Nigerian military officer told me that the publicity Boko Haram garnered from its 2014 kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok emboldened the group’s leaders to be more ambitious, resulting in costly mistakes. Instead of sticking to the hit-and-run tactics that it had used to successfully torment the Nigerian military for years, Boko Haram began to seize and hold territory, boldly declaring an Islamic “caliphate” in the areas it had conquered. This stretched the group’s resources too thin and forced it into a conventional war with the Nigerian military that it could not win. Boko Haram also shed its domestic focus, launching cross-border raids into neighboring Cameroon, Chad, and Niger, all of which eventually joined a five-nation military coalition against it (along with Benin and Nigeria).