Tag: Gwoza

It had all the trappings of the coordinated suicide bomb attacks that left heavy casualties, shock and awe across the country around 2011. Then, the Boko Haram insurgents, in apparent bid to attract maximum attention to their weird ideological persuasion, had taken resort to attacking soft targets.
One of their immediate victims was St. Theresa’s Catholic Church, Madalla, near Abuja where a suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into the premises as worshippers were trooping out after morning service. That Christmas day attack left more than 35 people killed and many others with varying degrees of injuries as vehicles parked within the premises went up in flames.
The choice of the church, its heavy toll ruffled feathers raising questions regarding its purpose. Their reign of terror later spread to other establishments and worship centres. A policeman was killed in another attack on a church in Jos, Plateau State. Damaturu in Yobe State recorded two attacks- one targeting security agencies and the other a church on the eve of Christmas.
Apparently to internationalise their bizarre endeavour, the insurgents took their reign of terror to the United Nations, UN Headquarters at the Federal Capital Territory FCT when a car crashed through two security barriers before ramming into the building and exploded. At least, 18 people were killed with dozens of others injured, some very critically.
That was part of the early strategy of the insurgents to spread fear and panic across the country. The situation was more pronounced in the northeast states of Borno and Yobe where the terrorists despoiled and captured many local government areas, set up their government collecting taxes and levies.
It is to the credit of our security forces that many of the local government areas hitherto under the control of the terrorists have since been liberated and normal activities restored. Gwoza, a local government that shares borders with Cameroon, was one of the towns under the control and dominance of the Boko Haram insurgents.
Penultimate Saturdays’ wedding ceremony in that local government, is a measure of the relative peace that had returned to residents of the area. It saw relatives returning from far and wide to witness the event.
But their calculations were jolted when suddenly, the unexpected happened. A female suicide bomber disguised as a beggar with a baby strapped to her back, strolled into the wedding reception and suddenly detonated bombs, killing and injuring many of the guests.
As rescue efforts were on to stabilise and convey the injured to hospital, another female, armed with Improvised Explosive Devices IEDs detonated her bomb. The second detonation happened on the same street with the first one, prompting the security agencies to impose immediate curfew in the area.
A third female suicide bomber, in quick succession, targeted troops enforcing the curfew. The woman attacked the troops from behind killing a soldier and two members of the hybrid forces.

Read Also: Suicide bombs kill three in Borno

Yet, the lethality of a fourth bomb was averted when the female suspect was identified early enough and in panic, she detonated the bombs prematurely and was killed in the process.
There was also the reported arrest of two other female suicide bombers even as speculations had it that about 30 of such females were recruited and armed to carry out the deadly activity in different parts of the local government. Perhaps, without the timely imposition of curfew in the area, the full impact of the devious onslaught would have been more badly felt.
Official records put the number of deaths at 32 with over 100 people inflicted with various degrees of injury. The number of casualties could even be more as the fate of those taken to hospitals remain uncertain. A young man, who travelled from Maiduguri to Gwoza for the wedding, gave a chilling account of how he lost three of his brothers and two friends within a twinkle of the eye.
So, the federal government may be right when they described the attacks as an isolated one. To the extent that the suicide bomb attacks were confined to Gwoza, it was a highly circumscribed endeavour. Its coordinated nature and sequence may prove insufficient to pin down the incident as a mark of resurging Boko Haram insurgency in the country.
Yet, that is not to diminish the impact, peculiar character of the attacks and the wider issues they elevated to the fore. A member of the House of Representatives, Ahmed Jaha exposed some of these fears while contributing to the debate on a motion when he said the suicide bombers were imported.
Findings he said, showed that the bombers were “recruited, brainwashed and imported from outside the state” to carry out the suicide act. What is not clear is whether the recruitment took place within the shores of the country or outside of it given that Gwoza shares border with Cameroon.
The security agencies may find the information at the disposal of Jaha handy in investigating the Gwoza reign of terror. But Jaha’s claims bear the imprimatur of similar ones bandied at the early stages of the Book Haram insurgency by some of the northern elite.
The attempt to politicise and assign culpability to imaginary enemies outside the northern enclave has since been proven futile by a chain of events. We now have better knowledge of the motives, the weird doctrinaire promptings that serve as the oxygen to Boko Haram insurgency. Ditto for the bandits that are increasingly getting difficult to differentiate from the Boko Haram insurgents.
Jaha also talked about the recruitment and brainwashing of the female suicide bombers to carry out the devious acts. This should be troubling. That innocent women could be easily recruited in their numbers, brainwashed and sent to kill other innocent people and get consumed in the process should worry the leadership of this country at all levels.
It does not only speak of the abject material circumstances of the recruits; their senses of right and wrong but the low value they place on human life. A society with a surfeit of potential women recruits for such lethal acts is in grave danger. What of those who recruited them for these senseless killings, their motives?
Here, the perspective of the Defence Headquarters comes handy. They had in a statement claimed the terrorists embarked on the attacks to project an image of strength and cover up their weaknesses and decline.
“The military is aware that in this phase of their ending life-cycle, the terrorists are desperate to attract attention, bolster relevancy, mobilize new recruits, reduce support for the armed forces and reduce support for the government”, the Defence Headquarters further explained.
That may well be. Unfortunately, this has become the stereotypical reaction of the military each time sundry terrorists and bandits succeed in levying war either on our security forces or the rest of the citizenry.
Those may well be the reasons for the coordinated suicide bomb attacks that jolted the country raising fear of possible degeneration. But the motivations adduced by the military are not substantially different from William Hutchinson’s general categorisation of suicide attacks as a psychological warfare aimed at instilling fear in the target population and undermining areas where the public feels secure.
This perspective was reinforced by Bruce Hoffman when he said suicide bombing, “tears at the fabric of the trust that holds the society together”. Conceived this way, it is a weapon to demonstrate the lengths to which perpetrators can go to achieve their goals.
If the attacks offer the insurgents the prospects of bolstering their relevance resulting in the mobilisation of new recruits, that leaves the country in grave danger unless the security forces rise to the challenge of diminishing such potential threats.
But the country has been on this path before. The claims of huge progress in the war against terrorism by security agencies will be measured by the level of tact, expertise and dexterity they deploy to put the signal served by the renewed suicide bombings at check.
President Tinubu has vowed that Nigeria under his watch will not slither into an era of blood, sorrow, fear and tears. Enough of these senseless killings!
It is hoped there is no attempt by vested interests to promote circumstances akin to the experiences of the budding stages of the Boko Haram insurgency.