To avert civilian casualties, a safe corridor that goes south into Nigeria should be opened for the mass evacuation of non-Boko Haram elements in the combat area, after which a comprehensive ‘wetting’ of the area is sustained until insurgents are defeated once and for all. The leadership of the Nigerian State and the armed forces must adopt this option as the final solution before drone-flying insurgents acquire air power capabilities.
A recent Boko Haram terror attack on a farming community in Kukawa Local Government Area of Borno State may have left over 40 people dead. The attack, which took place at about 5 p.m. on Sunday 12 January, is coming after a similar attack by drone flying insurgents on a military unit that left scores of personnel dead. These recent attacks are stack reminders of the unending Boko Haram terror and insurgency that has plagued Nigeria’s North-East corner for more than 14 years since it started effectively in 2010 in Borno State.
Founded by Mohammed Yusuf, an influential Muslim cleric and virulent advocate of Islamism in Nigeria, the Boko Haram group whose official name is Jama’at Ahl as-Sunnah Wa lid Da’wah wa’l Jihad (Group of the people of Prophetic tradition of propagation and armed struggle) has as its ultimate goal, the forceful obliteration of Nigeria and its replacement with an Islamic state. True to their name, the Borno based group started out in 2002 as an Islamist advocacy Salafi movement that propagated (Da’wah) the return of the Muslim “ummah” to the puritan prophetic tradition as a complete way of life (Ahl as-Sunnah). And in the estimation of Mohammed Yusuf, all forms of innovation not practiced by the Prophet of Islam, including Western Education, was a sin. But the gradualist approach of Da’wah failed to achieve the implementation of Sharia in Borno State, and armed struggle (Jihad) was launched in 2010.
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Since 2010 when the insurgency started, the Boko Haram terror group has killed thousands of people and displaced millions into camps both within and outside Nigeria. From staging massive bombing campaigns in urban centres including Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, to occupying territories in rural areas and the sacking of military formations, the Boko Haram insurgency has been Nigeria’s biggest security challenge after the Biafra/Nigeria civil war. And to contain what is essentially Nigeria’s greatest security challenge in supposedly peace times, the Federal Government of Nigeria has equally launched the largest military operation to defeat the Boko Haram insurgency and restore normalcy. Code named “Operation Hadin Kayi,” with air, land and water components, Nigeria’s military forces have been engaged in a war on terror and counter-insurgency in the North-East.
Whilst the military may have succeeded in containing and confining the insurgency to the north-east corner of the country, the war is nevertheless still raging with heavy civilian and military casualties. And many worry that the confinement of the Boko Haram insurgents to the North-East might just be a strategy of the terrorists to drain and exhaust the armed forces of Nigeria in one theatre of war and thereafter take over the country by a simple call to prayer. The unending war on terror and the continuous loss of both civilian and military lives calls to question the current combat strategy of the armed forces and a need to review it urgently.
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…to achieve this final solution, Operation Hadin Kayi should be renamed “Operation Wetie” as the new module of operation should shift from ground operations to sustained periods of aerial bombardment (wetting) of the entire combat area (Borno/Yobe axis) and to be followed with armoured and artillery clearance operations.
The armed forces of Nigeria, like its counterparts all over the world, are not oriented for the asymmetrical and non-conventional warfare that is being waged by the Boko Haram insurgent group. And his explains the limited success achieved so far. To change the tide in the theatre of the war against terror and bring to a decisive end the decades long conflict will be for the armed forces to change the war from asymmetrical and non-conventional to symmetrical and conventional warfare as a final solution to this challenge.
And to achieve this final solution, Operation Hadin Kayi should be renamed “Operation Wetie” as the new module of operation should shift from ground operations to sustained periods of aerial bombardment (wetting) of the entire combat area (Borno/Yobe axis) and to be followed with armoured and artillery clearance operations.
To avert civilian casualties, a safe corridor that goes south into Nigeria should be opened for the mass evacuation of non-Boko Haram elements in the combat area, after which a comprehensive ‘wetting’ of the area is sustained until insurgents are defeated once and for all. The leadership of the Nigerian State and the armed forces must adopt this option as the final solution before drone-flying insurgents acquire air power capabilities.
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Majeed Dahiru, a public affairs analyst, writes from Abuja and can be reached through [email protected].
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