Garba Shehu, the senior special
assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on media and publicity, says the real
Boko Haram has been defeated.
In a statement released on
Tuesday on the ten years of the Boko Haram insurgency, Shehu said the
terrorists the military is fighting are remnants of Boko Haram and
international criminals taking advantage of the country’s porous border.
The Boko Haram insurgency began
in 2009 following the killing of the group’s leader, Mohammed Yusuf.
“What we have now is a mixture of
remnants of the Boko Haram, fugitive criminals and the Islam in the Maghreb
together with West African terrorists bonding together,” he said.
“This is a fall out of the
collapse of the Libyan State, and from farther away, of the Islamic State in
Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. They are taking advantage of our porous Sahelian
borders.
“As a consequence of these
international gangs, we have seen an increase of trans-border crimes and the
proliferation of small arms in the Lake Chad Basin area. Outrages are common in
Niger, Mali, Chad and Cameroon.”
Shehu said the situation would
have been worse but for the efforts of the army and the Nigeria-led
Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF), formed by the countries in the Lake Chad
Basin.
“At the moment, the Nigerian
government under President Muhammadu Buhari has made the country safer than it
met it. In 2015 when he took power, Boko Haram terrorism was active in nearly
half the number of states in the country,” the presidential spokesman said.
“They controlled a territory the
size of Belgium, with a flag and systems of administration and taxation of
their own. Emirs and Chiefs had fled their domains along with hundreds of
thousands of ordinary citizens. Such is no more; they have been taken from
them.”
Shehu noted that the nation has
received support from international countries to procure arms in sustaining the
fight against the insurgents, while a digital monitoring system has been
deployed to the borders.
“In addition to the support the
government of Nigeria is receiving from friendly countries across Europe, the
United States and the Middle East, the Nigerian government is spending large
sums of money in weapons procurement to keep our military in good fighting
shape.
“The Buhari administration is
strongly encouraged by successes recorded so far by our armed forces and the
MNJTF, and is optimistic that in the same way as our military defeated the Boko
Haram, so would the ISWA terrorism be defeated.”
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