Many people were killed on Tuesday when an air jet accidentally bombed a camp in the northeast for the internally displaced by Boko haram insurgents. The incidence took place at about 9:00 AM in Rann as aid workers distributed food to people who were forced to flee the violence. Recently, Boko Haram moved base from Sambisa forest to Kala and obviously, the military jet mistook Rann for Kala. Right?
Major General Lucky Irabor, Head of the military operations against militants said the air force had been given coordinates of the Boko Haram terrorists in Kala-Balge area. “Unfortunately the strike was conducted but it turned out that the locals somewhere in Rann were affected,” he told reporters at a briefing in Maiduguri.
“These are the results of the fog of war,” he added. It is unfortunate. That is the reason why this war must come to end.”
Some members of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) were killed in the airstrike which accidentally bombed a camp for people displaced by Boko Haram, said the International Committee of the Red Cross on Tuesday. “We regret that among the casualties at today’s air strikes in Rann, there are six Nigerian RC members killed and 13 wounded,” an ICRC spokeswoman told AFP in a text message.
Medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) on Tuesday condemned an accidental air strike by the Nigerian military on an Internally Displaced Peoples’ Camp (IDPs) which was mistaken for Boko Haram, saying it killed 52. “This large-scale attack on vulnerable people who have already fled from extreme violence is shocking and unacceptable,” said MSF director of operations Jean-Clement Cabrol in a statement.
President Muhammadu Buhari has also expressed deep sadness and regret over the accidental bombing of a civilian community in Rann, Borno, by the Nigerian Air Force engaged in fighting Boko Haram insurgency in the area. In a statement issued by his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Mr Femi Adesina, in Abuja on Tuesday, the president condoled with families of the dead.
The president, who expressed sympathy to the Borno Government, also wished those wounded during the incident divine succour, leading to full recovery. He pledged the Federal Government’s help for the state government in attending to “this regrettable operational mistake”.
Prior to this ‘Fog of war’ mishap, in January 2014, the convoy of a Nigerian senator was fired on by an air force jet which mistook the six-vehicle convoy under police and military escort for Boko Haram fighters. No one was hurt and the military described the incident as an “operational blunder”. Then in March, a military jet killed five civilians and wounded many others when it mistakenly bombarded Kayamla village in Konduga district of Borno. The jet also mistook the village for a Boko Haram camp during a night raid.
Last month, the army said the conflict was in its final stages after nearly eight years of violence that has killed at least 20,000 and left more than 2.6 million others homeless. But the recent twin suicide bomb blasts at a mosque in the University of Maiduguri on Monday which claimed at least four lives while on January 8, at least five soldiers were killed when rebels targeted a base in Buni Yadi, in neighbouring Yobe state. This has so far proved the Nigerian military is incapable of curtailing the Boko Haram insurgents and there is little to indicate that anything has changed. The Nigerian military once said to be the powerhouse of African peacekeeping, in 2003 the Nigerian army helped defeat the forces of Liberia’s bloodthirsty warlord Charles Taylor. But it is yet to find 219 Chibok schoolgirls that were kidnapped by Boko Haram since April 2014.
Nigeria’s military has been in decline for the past 16 years, says J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Washington D.C. – based Atlantic Council, ever since the country moved from a military dictatorship to a democracy in 1999. The subsequent years have seen the country’s armed forces diminished by a combination of poor leadership, graft, and misdirected staff training.
Military spokesman Maj. Gen Olukolade also pointed out, Nigeria’s armed forces aren’t particularly well trained in counter-insurgency. They are a conventional army faced with an unconventional force that cares little for collateral damage. Nigeria’s army has a bad record of human rights abuses as well, according to Human Rights Watch. Unlike the militants they are fighting, they have to at least make an effort to do the right thing, says Olukolade in a wrong-footed attempt to explain the military’s limitations. “We are aware we are being watched, and are accountable, and that has affected the speed, the kind of swift actions we want to take against [Boko Haram]. We are constantly being put under check, and that has put a check on how far we can go in fighting back.”
The nation cannot continue to condone this cycle of ‘operational mistake and blunder’ from the Nigerian military. The government needs to take steps to checkmate these ‘Fog of war’ errors to reduce the rising figure of civilian casualties and put an end to the loss of lives.
