© REUTERS/ Joe Penney
The Nigerian army has managed to regain control over all the communities previously captured by Boko Haram militant group in the northeastern part of the country, the head of the local National Emergency Management Agency said as quoted by local media on Saturday.
He added that this success was possible because of the courage of the local soldiers and commitment of President Muhammadu Buhari to the fight against Boko Haram.
"There is no community that has not been liberated from Boko Haram now," Sani Sidi told reporters in the city of Kaduna.
On Thursday, Buhari told the BBC that his country "technically won the war" against Boko Haram since the militants had lost capability to carry out conventional attacks against security forces or populous areas.
Northeastern Nigeria has been mired in a conflict since 2009, when the Boko Haram extremist group began large-scale attacks in the region, seeking to impose strict Sharia law.
In February, the group expanded its attacks to neighboring Niger, Cameroon and Chad, prompting these states' governments to launch a regional offensive against them.
Comment: In Western 'dynamic narratives' concerning how ISIS got its massive arsenal, the pseudo-plausible version is that al-baddy al-Baghdadi just scooped them up from abandoned US weapons stores in the deserts of northwestern Iraq. The terrorists would still require operational training and a supply chain several orders of magnitude greater than the arsenal, but we'll just let that those issues slide and pretend to go along with it...
Boko Haram, meanwhile, has tanks, high-grade explosives, armoured personnel carriers, anti-aircraft rockets, vast stores of ammunition, technical expertise, operational expertise, the requisite logistical supply lines, and enormous quantities of cash. The narrative goes that they bought them from Eastern Europe and Libya after generating cash by kidnapping people.
Yeah right!
Boko Haram is no rag-tag bunch of 'jihadis'. They too, clearly, have MASSIVE military-intel and financial support from Uncle Sam and friends in Western intel.
Comment: In Western 'dynamic narratives' concerning how ISIS got its massive arsenal, the pseudo-plausible version is that al-baddy al-Baghdadi just scooped them up from abandoned US weapons stores in the deserts of northwestern Iraq. The terrorists would still require operational training and a supply chain several orders of magnitude greater than the arsenal, but we'll just let that those issues slide and pretend to go along with it...
Boko Haram, meanwhile, has tanks, high-grade explosives, armoured personnel carriers, anti-aircraft rockets, vast stores of ammunition, technical expertise, operational expertise, the requisite logistical supply lines, and enormous quantities of cash. The narrative goes that they bought them from Eastern Europe and Libya after generating cash by kidnapping people.
Yeah right!
Boko Haram is no rag-tag bunch of 'jihadis'. They too, clearly, have MASSIVE military-intel and financial support from Uncle Sam and friends in Western intel.