Nigeria’s armed services have expanded beyond prosecuting the Civil War and keeping peace across Africa.

Presently, it is dealing with homegrown insurgency and terrorism—and now runs Special Operations unit to deal with the problem.

Special Ops might be the stuff of blockbuster movies, but across hills and forests in the country, hundreds of men and women of military and paramilitary background train in the programme in hopes of keeping the country safe.

Fagite Valentine completed four weeks of basic counter-terrorism and counterinsurgency training the Nigerian Army Base camp in Kachia, and says the rigours could prove the “final stopping point against crime.”

“With this I can assure that Nigerians can sleep with their two eyes closed, because we have been given everything within the itinerary of the Nigerian Army as regards fighting crime and terror,” he boasts.

Lock & Load: The task is to dismantle and couple in 11 seconds flat combined

“Unforgettable hijack”

The birth of a wing designated Special Ops came more from terror—a recognition that the terrain of modern-day are not as clear-cut as the jungles secessionist and federal troops forayed in the 60s war.

The wing initially had five divisions:
Jungle warfare and combat survival
Mountain warfare, merged with jungle in 1987 to become Special Warfare.
Airborne
Amphibious, upgraded to a wing in 1986 and moved to Calabar, where it is semi autonomous as a training school
Desert warfare.

The early 90s wasn’t a period seriously associated with terrorism. Even September 11 attacks wouldn’t come until a decade later. But the “unforgettable hijack” of a Nigerian Airways Airbus A300 in 1994 was a wakeup call, according to military literature.

Hijack of the flight from Lagos to Niamey in Niger Republic was blamed on the Movement for Advancement of Democracy.

The army’s response was to upgrade Special Ops to a centre, the Nigerian Army Counter Terrorism and Counter Insurgency Centre, on June 10, 2009. It has since become more popular as CTCOIN.


Winging it

CTCOIN still runs the army’s special warfare wing and counter terrorism wing.

Both are becoming increasingly important in how the military deals with battles in terrains where jungle are more concrete than vegetation.

Also increasingly important is Nigeria’s need to throw its paramilitary services into the programme, including the police and the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps.

The fourth batch of trainees to graduate from CTCOIN included 60 civil defenders and 154 soldiers.

The absence of the police, to which both army and paramilitary hand over terror suspects after capture, came under questioning.

But officials insist it is “a policy issue way beyond” them that Abuja has to decide.


Command and control

Those in training must master new scapes in urban patrol, hostage rescue and clearing multiple houses. The army is careful about its activities flying all over the place so much journalists using mobile phones are not allowed to take any images.

The demos, which Daily Trust was allowed to capture, are meant to inspire confidence in a nation edgy about routine terrorist attacks and whether its security forces can stay the course of countering attacks without going overboard.

In one image sequence, a detachment of soldiers and civil defenders leap off a roaring jeep and storm an urban building—similar to the sort of areas beset by clashes and bombings in Kaduna, Kano and Maiduguri. The urban patrol lasts anywhere from minutes to hours but the goal is to stay effective and minimise casualties.


Hostage rescue is a trickier business—and “losing hostages is normal accident,” says Maj-Gen Amnon Kwaskebe, commander, Nigerian Army Corps of Artillery.

“It is not one hundred percent that when you go for rescue ops, you rescue all the people taken hostage.”

This year, alone prominent cases of abductions and resulting rescue operations which ended in the death of the hostages.

But there is hope that training could push up standards and “their performance in the field will be better than before,” he says.

One area their performance is improving is in weapons handling, beginning with attempts to dismantle a rifle in a record 4 seconds, and couple the same weapon in 7 seconds flat—even in blindfold.

The hope is that “there will be limited problems or misfire of misuse of weapons,” Kwaskebe remarks.

Minutes later, security teams storm a replica of a multiple-room house, creating a scenario in which terrorists are holed in a large house or a hotel.

The gunshots as soldiers and civil defenders open fire on “terrorists” over a stretch of green bush are deafening. The teams manage to shoot down some terrorists, but not before some go down in the shooting.

In pairs, the troops maintain a “buddy system”—two soldiers or a soldier and a civil defender—when in advance or in retreat.

The pairing helps them watch out for each other, and ensure each mate in a pair has someone to evacuate them if they are shot in crossfire.

Commandant General Bartholomew Ezeigbo of NSCDC zone B says training targets “capability and impetus.”

“You should expect improved services to the society. And as they give us more, we will give more in return,” he adds.

Civil defenders, since they were legally allowed to bear arms in duty, have recently taken thousands of rifles in fresh delivery from the army.

The commandant says arming civil defenders is ongoing and “as time goes on, the government will see whether we have need to receive more.”

Women like Akinwale Abimbola are among defenders handling the rifles. She has being taught to handle weapons “in such ways as to protect my fellow women and young ladies coming up,” she says.

But CTCOIN isn’t all about counterterrorism. The soldiers it trained this year are balance troops scheduled for deployment to Guinea Bissau, said CTCOIN director, Brig-Gen Tijani Golau.

Their job will be to enforce peace when they deploy, but the civil defenders fanning out across the country will “enforce peace or rescue people who are distressed by terrorists and insurgents.”

And, for your peace of mind, their training “included recognising improvised explosive devices and how to handle them anywhere discovered,” said Kwaskebe.

That should ease your mind, especially with a motto that reads: “No Impossibility.”

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Just in case u thot all GEJ is doing is jumping from prayer house to prayer house on his knees, now u know better. This is a war we've got to "mature" into and initial setbacks are expected and unfortunately, necessary but slowly with the right structures, tactics and Gods help, the tables will turn and good will certainly prevail against evil. Its only a matter of time.