By Sarah Kaplan
Chadian soldiers gather on Feb. 1 near the Nigerian town of Gamboru. Chadian forces carried out clean-up operations after retaking it from Boko Haram. (MARLE/AFP/Getty Images)
At last, something resembling good news in the fight against Boko Haram: Chadian troops reportedly have ousted the militant group from a Nigerian town it has occupied for months.
The victory in Gamboru, the Northern Nigerian border town where more than 300 people were killed in a Boko Haram massacre last spring, was said to be decisive. Chad’s army said it killed more than 200 militants in the offensive, its second incursion into Nigerian territory in a week. Nine were killed on the Chadian side.
“We have routed this band of terrorists,” Chadian commander Ahmat Daritold Agence France-Presse Tuesday.
Some Western diplomats are saying it could be a “game changer,” reported the New York Times.
That may be premature, at best. Still, the news comes days after the African Union agreed to deploy 7,500 troops from five West African countries to aid the embattled Nigerian military in its fight against the insurgency. Meanwhile, in the regional capital of Maiduguri — symbolic as the site of Boko Haram’s founding — the Nigerian army appeared to have repelled two successive attacks from the group.
But, like all victories against Boko Haram, these are tempered by stories of horror. Just a day after being expelled from Gamboru, remnants of the Boko Haram force attacked the Cameroonian town of Fotokol, which sits just 500 yards across the border.
There, the rebels set fire to houses and the town’s central mosque. Dozens of civilians were killed, their throats slit by the fleeing militants, residents told AFP Wednesday. Chadian troops had to scramble back from Gomboru to help Cameroon’s forces repel the assault. By the end of the day, the bodies of Boko Haram fighters lay “everywhere” in the streets of Fotokol, residents said.
The multinational, cross-border clashes reflect the changing nature of Boko Haram’s insurgency and the fight to suppress it.
The al-Qaeda-inspired group has rampaged through the countryside of Africa’s most populous nation. Founded in 2002 in protest of Western influence, it launched its current insurgency in 2009, using bombings, killings and kidnappings in an attempt to overthrow the government and replace it with an Islamic state. Boko Haram now controls large parts of the country’s northeast, and the military has been impotent at stopping its attacks on schools, marketplaces and villages. Just a few weeks ago, the group massacred hundreds — perhaps thousands — of residents of thetown of Baga, a hideous assault that seemed to wake up the world even more than the group’s infamous kidnapping of schoolgirls last April. More than 200 of the missing students have yet to be found.
The group has escalated its attacks in advance of Nigeria’s general election, set for Feb. 14, and now holds more than 130 towns across three northern states. And the violence is increasingly spilling beyond Nigeria’s borders, notably in an attack on a Cameroonian military camp last December.
In response to these attacks — and to the Nigerian military’s seeming inability to fight the group on its own — neighboring Cameroon and Chad have ramped up their efforts. Chad, said to have one of the best militariesin West Africa due to its experience fighting jihadists in Mali, has launched a bombing campaign as well as multiple ground incursions in Nigeria. Those operations, along with Nigerian strikes, have expelled Boko Haram from more than a dozen towns in the biggest offensive against the group in the past five years.
“These countries have become targets themselves … and are frustrated with what they see as the limited effectiveness of the Nigerian forces,” said Virginia Comolli, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and author of a book on Boko Haram.
For too long, Comolli said, the Nigerian government “put their heads under the sand,” failing to grapple with Boko Haram’s brutal campaign to seize control over the country’s northeast. Where it has confronted the insurgency, the army has been plagued by corruption and low morale — in more than one instance, Nigerian soldiers have fled clashes with Boko Haram fighters.
The new involvement of the Chadian military — especially given its apparent effectiveness — is a “welcome development,” Comolli said.
“I think this greater internationalization of the response and the fact that Nigeria’s neighbors are taking a more proactive role will have an impact on the insurgency,” she said. “Though I would not want to be complacent.”
But Nigerian officials have seemed uneasy about the involvement of foreign troops within their borders. In an interview with AFP, Nigerian defense spokesman Chris Olukolade insisted that “Nigerian territorial integrity remains intact.”
Nigerian forces “planned and are driving the present onslaught against terrorists from all fronts in Nigeria, not the Chadian forces,” he said.
The Associated Press also reported that Nigeria has been “ambivalent and embarrassed by the need for foreign troops” and appeared reluctant to give Chadian troops free reign to carry out campaigns across the border.
“Nigerians are very proud people, they have the number one economy in West Africa, one of the most advanced militaries. They are a big power, and I think it’s very hard from their point of view actually to admit that they need help,” Comolli said.
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