Boko Haram attack is something you may not want to remember, but it is Acertainly what you will never forget in a lifetime”. These were the touching words of Yusuf Ahmad and thousands of others, who have managed to escape a terrorist attack and lived to tell the story.
Tens of thousands of innocent Nigerians have not been so lucky as they have died in the hands of the dreaded Islamic sect. Some beheaded, others shot or bombed.
More so, hundreds of thousands of assaulted victims have been flushed into various poorly-equipped Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) settlements; thus forgoing their means of livelihood and becoming destitutes.
While it is obvious that terrorism has found a safe abode in Nigeria, as the criminals relentlessly prey on the civilian population, the military seems to have been weakened and overwhelmed in tackling the decade-long war. Terrorists have continued to expand their territories in the northeastern region and in some instances, they are in charge of the economy of their areas and they collect taxes and levies from traders and farmers. Uncooperative villagers are shot.
Hundreds of soldiers have been killed mostly in ambush, a development that has drained the morale of the surviving fighters. Many of them have elected to abandon the warfare for lack of equipment and good pay but were egged on by the military authorities.
Higher budgetary allocation to security agencies seems not to have made much difference as troops keep complaining of insufficient weapons and other logistics.
Several videos exist where frustrated soldiers accused the military authorities of leading them into mass suicide in the name of fighting Boko Haram, since the insurgents seem to have superior firepower and Intelligence than they do. Some of them were court-martialed and demoted for making such videos.
In 2019, Nigeria’s Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen. Tukur Buratai, said the military alone could not eliminate terrorism and terrorist groups and called on religious bodies and organisations in the country come to the ‘forefront of the spiritual battle.’
The army chief noted that the focus must be religious groups addressing the ideologies which fuelled the Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorists activities.
Recent reports show that Boko Haram terrorists, whose factional leader, Abubakar Shekau, are in firm control of a quarter of the geographical space in Borno, Katsina, Zamfara and a few other States; where they have fortified camps.
Hence, it has become easier for them to carry out coordinated attacks on soft targets like farmers, students, traders, herders and others with minimal or zero resistance.
In some cases, they deploy the suicide bomb attack tactics and have successfully attacked mosques, churches, schools, markets and other places people cluster.
Millions of lives have been lost and displaced, just as unquantifiable property have been lost to Boko Haram.
The signature of their dastardly operations is to hoist their flags on conquered territories, appoint a commander and field officers, who inherit the villagers and convert the women among them to sex slaves and use the men as labourers.
Almost on a daily basis, scores of Nigerians are killed in terror attacks such that it no longer makes headlines in the media, unless the devastation is widespread.
For three times this year, the Nigerian Senate, has asked President Muhammadu Buhari to sack the Service Chiefs, saying they have shown convincing evidence of incapacity and paucity of potent ideas to tackle insurgency.
Similar calls were made in January and July. The resolutions on both occasions were borne from debates on insecurity.
Penultimate Saturday, Boko Haram terrorists struck at Zabarmari community, in Jere Local Government Area of Borno State.
The massacre involved more than 70 farmers in Zabarmari community, Jere Local Government Area of Borno State, a development that left the whole country in shock.
The Sultan of Sokoto and the Head of the Muslim Community in Nigeria, Alhaji Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III described it as one of the most horrifying murders ever carried out by Boko Haram terrorists in Nigeria.
More so, the United Nations, in a statement by its Resident Coordinator in Nigeria, Mr Edward Kallon said the entire UN system was outraged by the killing.
Zabarmari is an agrarian community predominantly occupied by Hausa people who came from Zamfara, Jigawa, Katsina, Kebbi and Kano states to work in the community as hired labourers on the farms with very few Kanuris and other minority tribes.
This community, which is less than 20km from Maiduguri, the state capital, has a vast fertile land which guarantees dry season farming due to its proximity to Lake Chad Basin and other riverine areas. It has a population of over 10,000 inhabitants who are mostly farmers in rice, pepper, onion, okro and fishing.
A tormented survivor, 24-year-old Abdul, said the murderers posed as labourers who had come to the rice fields in Koshobe, Borno state, to engage in seasonal work.
“For several days, the killers lived peacefully among us sharing our buildings and eating our food and pretending to be labourers who came for seasonal work. I ran errands for them, getting them food and washing their plates. “Then, on Saturday afternoon, they took out their guns, rounded up the people like cattle and slaughtered about 60 workers one by one in front of an abandoned building. They separated the aged from the rest of us and ordered us to take turns in paying homage to their leader who was in the building. But it was only a ploy because whoever went in never came out. At a point, one of the insurgents guarding us told us that those who went inside were being slaughtered and asked us to flee.
“I was one of the few lucky ones. As I fled, I witnessed the unbearable as the assailants then went on a killing spree, seizing workers on the rice fields, tying them up and slitting their throats. About 40 jihadists were involved in the massacre”.
Another scary Boko Haram atrocious act was on April 15, 2014 when the terrorists abducted 276 Chibok Schoolgirls (mostly Christians).
57 of the schoolgirls escaped in the months following the incident, while some others were rescued by Nigerian military forces on several occasions.
82 others were not only forced into converting to Islam, but also used as negotiating pawns in exchange for five Boko Haram commanders in the custody of security operatives.
Again, some were reportedly killed and others impregnated by the terrorists to birth a next generation of terrorists.
Jonathan N.C. Hill of King’s College London, pointed out that Boko Haram kidnapped the girls after coming increasingly under the influence of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and asserted that the group’s goal is to use girls and young women as sexual objects and as a means of intimidating the civilian population into compliance. Hill described the attacks as similar to kidnapping of girls in Algeria in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Before then, Boko Haram stormed a boarding secondary school, Federal Government college, Buni Yadi in Yobe State in February 2014.
In the overnight attack, they killed 29 pupils. Many of the victims died as the school was burned to the ground. A similar attack in June in the village of Mamudo left 22 students dead.
Again, in February 2018, approximately four years after the 2014 Chibok abduction, in the nearby town of Dapchi in Yobe State, another 110 schoolgirls were abducted by Boko Haram, with no government intervention intercepting the abductors yet as of 4 March 2018. Though the Nigerian government negotiated the release of the schoolgirls, the only Christian among them, Leah Sharibu is still in their custody.
A UNICEF report released in April 2018, claimed that more than 1,000 children have been kidnapped by Boko Haram since 2013.
However, on several occasions, the Nigerian military—with assistance from Benin, Cameroon, Chad, and Niger—has pushed Boko Haram out of several provinces in northeastern Nigeria, but the group retains control over some villages and pockets of territory.
Regional security forces are struggling to adapt to Boko Haram’s asymmetric tactics. Lacking numbers and logistical capacity (as well as adequate roads and other transportation infrastructure), they are unable to protect far-flung settlements in remote and sparsely populated areas.
The origin of Boko Haram can be traced back to 2009 when the Nigerian military captured and killed Mr Mohammed Yusuf, the founder of the terrorist group, at his parents-in-law’s house in July of that year.
Since then, the country literally murdered sleep and has been battling homegrown terrorism for over a decade.
Boko Haram has expanded into groups known as the Islamic State’s West Africa Province (ISWAP) and has become a full-fledged jihadist terrorist organization based in northeastern Nigeria, also active in Chad, Niger and northern Cameroon.
To defeat the group, security experts suggest that Boko Haram-affected states will need to do more than increase and improve their military efforts, but also implement more comprehensive programmes to address drivers of radicalism, particularly bad governance and official corruption, as well as provide better services and development assistance.