|
Listen to article
|
The Defence Headquarters (DHQ) has dismissed reports alleging that civilians were killed during a recent military air strike on Tumfa market in Zurmi Local Government Area of Zamfara State.
The military maintained that there is no credible evidence to support claims of civilian casualties arising from the operation carried out on Sunday.
A community leader, Garba Ibrahim Mashema, told AFP that the actual number of casualties could be higher because both residents and armed bandits frequently patronise the market.
“The actual death toll is hard to establish at the moment. Everybody, residents and bandits, goes to the market. People are at the mercy of the bandits. There is nothing they can do,” he reportedly said.
Human rights organisation, Amnesty International, also alleged that the death toll from the strike had exceeded 100, adding that many injured victims were receiving treatment in hospitals.
Read Also: FG Finally Names 48 Individuals, Groups Financing Terrorism
The organisation further claimed that one of the affected communities conducted a mass burial for about 80 victims.
Reacting to the reports, the Director of Defence Media Operations, Major General Markus Kangye, speaking through the Defence Headquarters spokesman, Brigadier General Michael Onoja, maintained that the operation strictly targeted terrorists.
According to Onoja, the strike was conducted based on credible intelligence which identified a high-level gathering of terrorist leaders in the area.
“The strike was carried out in line with international humanitarian law and targeted a confirmed high-level gathering of militant leaders in the village, based on multi-sourced intelligence,” he said.
The DHQ spokesman rejected allegations that civilians were affected, stressing that available assessments had not established such claims.
“No credible, substantiated evidence of civilian casualties has been established through any official assessment or independent verification,” Onoja stated.
He noted that the nature of the operation and the security situation in the area made immediate verification difficult, but added that preliminary post-strike findings showed that several terrorists were eliminated during the operation.
Onoja said: “The nature of the operation makes immediate casualty verification difficult; however, post-strike assessments indicate that several terrorists were neutralised.”
Nigeria’s former army chief deflected responsibility Friday for the government’s long-running failure to publicly name the financiers of terrorism in the country, saying the relevant agencies know who the sponsors are and that the decision to act — or not — sits with the government, not the military.
Lieutenant General Tukur Buratai, who served as Chief of Army Staff from 2015 to 2021 and oversaw the military’s most intensive period of operations against Boko Haram in the Northeast, made the remarks during an appearance on Channels Television’s Politics Today programme.
His comments come days after suicide bombers killed at least 23 people and wounded more than 100 others in coordinated attacks across Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State — one of the deadliest strikes on the city in years.
“You cannot say I should be responsible for naming the financiers of terror,” Buratai said. “Those agencies know why the names are not released. Action should be taken; these individuals are still within society today, and they are known.”
The statement amounts to a public acknowledgement that Nigeria’s security establishment has, for years, possessed intelligence on individuals financing the insurgency that has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced nearly two million in the country’s Northeast — and that this intelligence has not translated into arrests, prosecutions or even public disclosure. Buratai offered no explanation for why it had not, directing the question instead at unspecified government agencies and away from the institution he led for six years.
The identity of terrorism financiers has been one of the most sensitive and persistently unresolved questions surrounding Nigeria’s insurgency. Various government bodies, including the Office of the National Security Adviser and the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit, have at different times signalled awareness of financial networks sustaining Boko Haram and its splinter faction, the Islamic State West Africa Province.
Prosecutions have been rare. Public naming has been virtually nonexistent. Buratai’s remarks on Friday suggest the gap between what is known and what is acted upon is not a matter of intelligence failure but of political will.
He was equally direct in separating the army’s institutional responsibility from decisions that he said belonged to civilian government. The rehabilitation programme for repentant Boko Haram fighters — a policy that has drawn sustained criticism from communities in the Northeast who argue that former militants are being reintegrated into societies they terrorised — was, Buratai said, never the army’s idea in the design that was ultimately implemented.
Read also: Terror Financiers Still Within Society – Former COAS Buratai
“The initial concept that we had was that we gave them a timeline to surrender in 2016, and if they surrendered, we gave them a free passage and handed them over to appropriate agencies to rehabilitate them,” he said.
The implication was clear: what happened to those fighters after the army’s involvement ended was somebody else’s decision and somebody else’s responsibility.
The rehabilitation programme, formally known as Operation Safe Corridor, has been a source of controversy since its inception. Survivors of Boko Haram attacks and communities that lost family members to the insurgency have questioned the logic of reintegrating fighters without full accountability for crimes committed. Local officials in Borno and neighbouring states have raised concerns about the adequacy of the deradicalisation process and the capacity of communities to absorb former militants safely. Buratai’s comments suggest the army’s own original conception of the programme was more limited than what eventually emerged.
