Nigeria’s anti-militant fighters ‘are breaking’

Troops fighting Boko Haram in Borno state say they are ‘warweary’ and want rest after years in combat

Nigerian troops battling a surge in Boko Haram militant attacks have reached breaking point, holding protests less than six months before presidential polls.

The Nigerian army dismissed the actions as a “misunderstanding”, but on Sunday hundreds of soldiers protested at the airport of Maiduguri, the capital of north-east Borno state, for hours, shooting their guns into the air and disrupting flights.

They were angry about plans to send them again to a battlefront in the Lake Chad region after fighting Boko Haram for years without rest and recuperation.

“We should not have been here for more than a year, but this is our fourth year and still they are asking us to move to Marte,” a protester said. “We need some rest. We are war-weary and need to see our families.”

There has been a wave of assaults on military bases in the north-east, forcing the army to retreat from Boko Haram’s advance.

The resurgence in violence has put pressure on Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, who is seeking a second term and maintains that the country is in a “post-conflict stabilisation phase”.

Experts said that the threat is at its highest since the peak of the insurgency between 2013 and 2015, when Boko Haram controlled large areas of Nigeria’s north-east.

“There has been a military evolution akin to what we’ve seen in Syria and Iraq,” Yan St Pierre, analyst and chief executive of the Modern Security Consulting Group, said. “Boko Haram’s quality of attack is higher, the level of preparedness is higher.”

The Nigerian military is overwhelmed by the “catastrophic security situation”, Mr St Pierre said. “They are relying on old tactics no longer applicable in the northeast,” he said.

Desperate to stop the onslaught, Nigeria’s military chief Yusuf Tukur Buratai said in a July 27 memo that “cowardly” soldiers would be punished by death.

Fighters loyal to ISIS-affiliated Boko Haram’s factional leader, Abu Musab Al Barnawi, are believed to have carried out most of the attacks.

In June, Nigerian jets bombarded Al Barnawi’s enclave in the Lake Chad area, forcing him to flee, sources said.

Al Barnawi, the son of Boko Haram’s dead founder Mohammed Yusuf, has found sanctuary in the Lake Chad region, which is difficult for soldiers to penetrate and has plenty of food sources.