Mishap
An Air Force operation targeting armed gangs has caused the death of at least 24 people in the Jika da Kolo community, Giwa Local…
Mishap
An Air Force operation targeting armed gangs has caused the death of at least 24 people in the Jika da Kolo community, Giwa Local Government Area of Kaduna. The Air Force said it was investigating the allegations but added that the airstrike was based on “credible intelligence” and “confirmatory surveillance of the target area.” Muhammad Hussaini, a resident, said the airstrike hit a local mosque instead of the intended armed gangs. On Saturday, two persons were killed and about 40 were abducted in an attack at Defence Minister Bello Matawalle’s hometown, Janboka — a community in the Maradun LGA of Zamfara State.
The influx and growth of bandit groups in Northern Nigeria have become too widespread for the military and its partners to keep up. This is after several counterinsurgency campaigns in the region have failed to decimate these groups. The government has thus relied heavily on aerial bombardment by the Air Force and the Nigeria Army’s air wing. The terrain being operated on is a dangerous one, and although it is not as densely populated as the more urbanised south, the region possesses a lot of state-spanning forests in its rural areas that provide impregnable bases for armed groups. Some of these forests also house villages and communities which the bandits draw support from. With aerial bombardment, the government found a seemingly cost-effective strategy for containing the security challenge with minimal personnel losses. However, it substituted the life of its soldiers with that of civilians. Since 2017, it has become an annual military tradition to bomb civilians to death under the guise of chasing after terrorists. This is a phenomenon that most geopolitical zones in the country are familiar with. What used to be an exclusive preserve of the Nigerian Air Force has now become democratised to involve the army’s aviation wing which is less than three years old. The aviation wing was responsible for the last massacre in December, where no fewer than 85 Muslim worshippers were killed in the Tudun Biri area of Kaduna. Despite its decade of experience and a large pool of human intelligence in undertaking such missions, the military has yet to get its intel verification correctly. A notable driver of these alleged mistakes is the absence of accountability. Before 2023, the military staunchly denied claims that it killed civilians from the air while going after terrorists. However, that year marked a turning point because the more frequent these mishaps become, the more international opprobrium it has drawn, thus forcing a mealy-mouthed and belated promise to investigate with hardly any public results. The Air Force’s statement concerning this latest strike confirms the new regime of promising a review to no effect, and equally worse, transferring responsibility for the victims and their families to the state governments.