According to BBC, the militant group Boko Haram has seized a town and key multinational military base in north-eastern Nigeria, officials and eyewitnesses say.
A senator in Borno state said troops had abandoned the base in the town of Baga after it was attacked on Saturday.
Residents of Baga, who fled by boat to neighbouring Chad, said many people had been killed and the town set ablaze.
Baga, scene of a Nigerian army massacre in 2013, was the last town in the Borno North area under government control.
It hosted the base of the Multi-National Joint Task Force (MNJTF), made up of troops from Nigeria, Chad and Niger.
Set up in 1998 to fight trans-border crime in the Lake Chad region, the force more recently took on Boko Haram.
Boko Haram attacks towns and villages on an almost daily basis, abducting people including young boys and girls, BBC Africa analyst Mary Harper reports.
The military, which includes Western advisers and surveillance, seems incapable of dealing with the problem, she adds. (Credits: BBC)
An abject shame. My rudimentary?? knowledge of military war strategy would stipulate ordered tightening of borders, recce of vast areas around any recently and long captured territory as well as use of reinforcement to smoke out any boko haram pretenders who may guise as neutral citizens. While it is not intended to ‘knock’ the army, it seems that the attitude to the woes of boko haram is trivialised, often, with complaceny. How can anybody justify a slackening of security measures to a point where the insurgents managed to outrun military posts – and a multi-national formation for that matter, leading to death,destruction and displacement of many Nigerians?
This lends validity to some quartered assumptions that the whole chaos is a ruse; an orchestrated political gambit. No it can not be because this has gone too far and for too long, with thousand deaths. However, the army must seek international consult further to gain better strategic route-map to enable them win this war.
Obviously, current engagement outcome conflicts with what the army spokesman stated to a press conference on Sunday that they (military) were subjugated because they had plans whereas the insurgents’ attacks were ad-hoc and haphazard. It’s true that military operations require strategic planning and implementation but there seemed not to be ‘contingency and emergency’ planning in the case of Baga, which resonates various criticisms that our forces have not been doing effectively. The primary objective of a law enforcer/security personnel is to ‘win the race’. It is, thus, unbecoming that a joint military operatives lacked the foresight to expect even an attempt by the enemies to retake lost territory. The impact of this is demoralising for the troops all around, and dehumanising for the populace. Do we now need ‘combabtant mercenaries’ to sustain the country’s safety, integrity and security?
In popular views, there should be no justification for boko haram to re-take any space regained from them by the legitimate forces. It is up to the planners to re-strategise and ensure that their planning includes ‘how boko haram can not return to an area where they had already been sacked’.