The brutal Islamist insurgency had sapped the morale and discipline of
the Nigerian army and seemed poised to carve out a caliphate that
rivalled 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 neighbouring Cameroun, Chad and Niger, all of which eventually
joined a five-nation military coalition against it (along with Benin and
Nigeria).
The coalition has done a number on Boko Haram. Not only did it rout the
group from its former strongholds, but follow-on pressure from the
Nigerian military has degraded the insurgents’ ability to pull off
brazen attacks on high-profile targets — such as the 2011 bombing of the
U.N. headquarters in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja. But if the arrival of
regional forces helped turn the tide against Boko Haram, so did changes
to Nigeria’s own military strategy.
A special forces unit under Maj. Gen. Lamidi Adeosun, the commander
heading up the battle against Boko Haram, has implemented an aggressive
new policy of “relentless pursuit”, which has denied the Islamists the
luxury of occupying towns they attack. The Nigerian military has also
increased pressure on Boko Haram by releasing photos of its most wanted
100 members, 10 of whom have been arrested in the past month alone.
The increase in pressure on Boko Haram helps to explain why it has
shifted tactics. Unable to square off against the Nigerian military
directly, the group has resorted to deploying child suicide bombers and
IEDs against softer targets, like the market in Kano, Nigeria, that was
hit by a twin suicide bombing on November 18.
But not all of the group’s behavioural changes reflect tactical
decisions. Boko Haram is showing signs of battle fatigue and depressed
morale. New African magazine recently reported that “the average age of
Boko Haram’s fighting force keeps dropping” and that “the majority of
[its] fighters are teenagers.” With its fighting cadre depleted by
recent military setbacks, Boko Haram has reportedly replenished its
ranks by kidnapping children and forcing them to fight.
The pressure on Boko Haram is unlikely to let up anytime soon.
Nigeria’s uncompromising new president has ordered the army to crush the
insurgency before the end of 2015. He has also replaced much of the
military leadership, sacking his national security advisor, chief of
defence staff, and the heads of the army, navy, and air force, in one
fell swoop in July.
Last month, he ordered the arrest of the ousted national security
advisor, Lt. Col. Sambo Dasuki, for corruption, after an investigative
panel accused Dasuki of misappropriating more than $2 billion of the
defence budget (perhaps explaining why Nigerian soldiers have complained
of being under-equipped).
But if Boko Haram is on the defensive, it would be a mistake to assume
that the group is near defeat. It is more than capable of mounting
devastating attacks from its current hideouts in the northeastern
Sambisa Forest and the Mandara Mountains that straddle Nigeria’s border
with Cameroun. It has also risen from the ashes before.
In 2009, the Nigerian military killed Boko Haram’s former leader,
demolished its mosque in Maiduguri, and summarily executed hundreds of
its members. But instead of dying out, the group simply laid low,
regrouped, and reemerged deadlier than ever in 2010.
There are reasons to think it could pull off something similar again.
For one thing, the group’s methods are becoming fragmented.
Increasingly, they involve acts of banditry that serve no obvious
theological objective. Whereas Boko Haram’s leaders once focused on
increasing the size of their “caliphate,” they are now carrying out
isolated attacks on towns that they have no realistic possibility of
capturing. This shift may be partly explained by the fact that Boko
Haram has had to rely more heavily on forced conscripts, who lack the
theological fervour of earlier recruits.
Regardless of the precise reason for the transformation, Boko Haram has
come to resemble the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group that
demonstrated remarkable longevity as it terrorised northern Uganda,
parts of South Sudan, and the Central African Republic over the last
three decades. Both groups had their origins in religious doctrine, and
both have evolved to the point where they employ nearly tactic-less
violence — violence that is both extraordinarily difficult to counter
and seemingly unrelated to the groups’ religious objectives.
Boko Haram and the LRA both abduct children, use them as sex slaves and
fighters, and force them to commit atrocities that sever the social
bonds that link them to their communities. They both also tend to
retaliate against civilian populations when they come under attack by
the military.
Finally, both use rape as a weapon of war. And as the startling number
of released Boko Haram captives who turned out to be pregnant suggests,
the group is deliberately impregnating female captives in an effort to
replenish its ranks in the future. All of these traits will make the
group hard to stamp out for good.
After a year of dizzying gains and losses for Boko Haram, the conflict
has arrived at a bloody stalemate. For Boko Haram at least, this is
familiar territory: The group has been reduced to the level of
capability it enjoyed in 2009, when it carried out sporadic attacks
against civilians and routinely gave the army a bloody nose.
The fact that Boko Haram is unable to seize and hold territory is not
much of a consolation. If there’s one thing the group has demonstrated
over the years, it’s that it can strike even when badly wounded and
cornered.
• Culled from Yahoo News
No comments:
Post a Comment