Nigeria: Boko Haram Cannot Be Crushed by December
Nigeria's
military cannot meet the president's December deadline to crush Boko Haram's
Islamic uprising, and Nigerians must expect suicide bombings to continue, a
government spokesman said Thursday.
Air
Commodore Yusuf Anas of the Center for Crisis Communication said the deadline
"may be unrealistic" and warned Nigerians not to view December as a
"sacrosanct date when all suicide bombings will end."
The
6-year-old uprising already has killed 20,000 people and driven 2.3 million
from the homes. Millions of dollars worth of property has been destroyed.
"The
timeline on when to stop the insurgents from activating sleeper cells and
detonating bombs into soft targets in any part of the country, especially in
the frontline states, is therefore not tenable."
Forces from
Nigeria and neighboring Chad earlier this year drove the extremists out of
areas in which they had proclaimed an Islamic caliphate. Recently, the Nigerian
Air Force and ground troops have reported destroying numerous Boko Haram camps
and freeing more than 1,000 kidnap victims.
In June,
President Muhammadu Buhari ordered the military to crush the insurgency by
December, but the extremists have pushed back with village raids and urban
suicide bombings that have killed more than 1,500 people.
Last month,
Buhari told the commander of the U.S. Africa Command, Gen. David Rodriguez,
that improved training, weapons, logistics and welfare had well-positioned
Nigerian forces to break the back of the uprising.
"Structured
attacks by the insurgents have reduced and by the end of the year, we should
see the final routing of Boko Haram as an organized fighting force,"
Buhari said.
Boko Haram
was named the world's most deadly extremist group in the Global Terrorism Index
last week, with 6,644 deaths attributed to it in 2014 — more than any other
extremist group.
Source: abcnews
