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 around 5pm on Sunday, January 12, 2025, is coming after a similar attack by drone-flying insurgents on a military unit that left scores of troops dead. These recent attacks are reminders of the unending Boko Haram terror that has plagued Nigeria’s North East corner for more than 14 years since it started effectively in2010 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 when the gradualist approach of Da’wah failed to achieve the implementation of Sharia in Borno State, an armed struggle [Jihad] was launched in 2010.
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 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 time, the federal government of Nigeria has equally launched the largest military operation to defeat Boko Haram insurgency and restore normalcy. Codenamed Operation Hadin Kai 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.
While 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 by the terrorists to drain and exhaust the armed forces of Nigeria from 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 civilian and military lives calls to question the combat strategy of the armed forces and a need to review it urgently.
The armed forces of Nigeria, like counterparts all over the world, are not oriented for the asymmetrical and unconventional warfare that is being waged by the Boko Haram terror group. And this explains the limited success achieved so far in the theatre of war. To change the tide in the war against terror and bring to a decisive end the decades-long conflict, the armed forces will have 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 Kai 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 south into Nigeria should be opened for 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.