A Civilian Joint Task Force officer in Maiduguri, in northeastern Nigeria, screening residents of nearby villages and towns who were displaced by recent Boko Haram attacks.


Through the fall and winter, the Islamist militant group Boko Haram has seemed nearly unstoppable. It has captured town after town in northeastern Nigeria and laid siege to the fishing hamlet Baga and nearby villages, killing hundreds of people. But over the weekend, the group finally suffered a significant setback. The militants tried to invade Maiduguri, a city of two million in the northeast, as well as two towns in the area, Monguno and Konduga. While Monguno — which is 80 miles north of Maiduguri and houses a military base — fell under Boko Haram control on Sunday, Maiduguri and Konduga held their ground, in no small part because of vigilantes who fought alongside the Nigerian military.

Hundreds of Boko Haram militants descended upon Maiduguri from two directions and were met by the vigilantes and soldiers. The assault prompted Nigerian troops, who were caught by surprise, to call in airstrikes. Scores of Boko Haram members — and probably soldiers too, though numbers have not been released — were killed in the fighting. Without the vigilantes, the battle would have most likely been lost.

One of these vigilantes was Abba Aji Kalli, whom I wrote about for the magazine in November. I called Kalli early this week to find out how he was faring after the battle. “We are doing fine,” he told me. “We pushed them back. They didn’t enter Maiduguri.”

Kalli said his men recovered artillery and rocket-propelled grenades from the militants. None of the vigilantes died in the fight, he added with his usual cockiness, though some were wounded during the battle, which lasted about 90 minutes. “Maiduguri was surrounded by Boko Haram,” Kalli went on. “They had been trying to break into Maiduguri at different locations, but, God help us, we are repelling them.”

Like other residents of Maiduguri who were fed up with the Nigerian military’s weak response to Boko Haram’s insurgency, Kalli helped create what became known as the Civilian Joint Task Force, a battalion of volunteer combatants who organized to defend their homes from the Islamist militants. Kalli eventually abandoned his job as a government auditor to command his own unit, leading his friends and neighbors in what has been a sometimes-ragtag struggle against Boko Haram. With homemade arms and self-taught counterinsurgency strategies, the vigilantes have managed to push the group out of Maiduguri.

Meanwhile, the military struggles to keep its soldiers, who complain of a lack of munitions, from abandoning their posts whenever they’re attacked. (The military and the vigilantes have each been accused of engaging in abuses in the name of ending terrorism: arbitrary arrests and beatings, summary executions, forced recruitment and the use of children in their ranks. Kalli denies that he or anyone in his group has ever been involved in any human rights abuses or that any members of his group are under 18. “We don’t kill anybody,” he told me in November. “We hand them to the authorities. We have to protect ourselves, but we normally catch them alive.” )

Kalli told me that his men were alerted on Saturday night to Boko Haram activity near Maiduguri. By 7 the next morning, when the militants tried to enter the city, Kalli and other vigilantes were blocking their way. At least eight people died during the clashes, and residents were forced to flee from nearby housing estates. Some residents, worried about their safety, have not yet returned. But life in Maiduguri — a rambling, sandy metropolis with a university and historic mosques — is otherwise back to normal, or at least what residents now consider normal given the recent suicide bombings orchestrated by Boko Haram. The city’s relative peace may be fragile, but Maiduguri, largely because of the vigilantes, remains a haven for residents of nearby towns and villages who are not as lucky — the inhabitants of Monguno, for instance, who fled into the city.

I asked Kalli if he thought Boko Haram would try again. “They are always ready to try,” he said. “But we are always ready to engage them.”

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/01/28/magazine/the-people-vs-boko-haram.html

It is only thru joint effort that the fight against BH can be won.

Effective leadership is the panacea!
'help is on the way'

This war is beyond our comprehension. It is only the authorities that knws the truth about this war.

So it is their call not mine