Negro_Ntns:

What is the total number of our military personnell?
Anyone knows?

Estimate - 85,000 active personnel (70,000 are in the army)

KnowAll:


You want to win an insurgency and you have the bulk of your soldiers in relatively peaceful places like Ibadan, Lagos, Enugu, Abeokuta, Markurdi whilst the NE Frontier with Cameroon and Chad is recklessly un manned, do we have sensible and serious military strategist planning this operation where is our priority in this country.

The Key to a resounding victory is close the supply route where the bombs and ammunition are ferried into the country and all outlets out of Maiduguri. B4 long the insurgence would be trapped in Maiduguri and would invariably run out of ammunitions making them take the easier way out of give up the battle or or die in battle.

Excellent ! My brother we dont have real generals anymore. Just teddyboys and politicians. I can imagine if abacha was COAS now. I tell you the first step should be to close the border, send in about 20,000 troops and lock Borno down. Comb the place continuously and do a house to house search if necessary.

Jakumo:

The precise number of troops in the Maiduguri theater will no doubt remain a military secret for now, but regardless of troop strength, the danger of Improvised Explosive Devices looms larger for federal troops, than do than the risks of the odd ambush or firefight with insurgents.

Maiduguri is today as lethally perilous a place to walk or drive as are the remotest Taliban enclaves of Afghanistan, and, as with all urban warfare eruptions, civilians get caught in the middle and wind up massacred by both sides.  The outflow of refugees from any previously urban setting is indeed an ominous harbinger of all-out war.

Any intelligence or military assistance that the West can muster to Nigeria's aid right about now, to facilitate the URGENT objective of snuffing out this fundamentalist terror uprising currently sweeping the land from the north, would be ENORMOUSLY appreciated by Nigeria's peaceful majority spread south of the Niger/Benue River confluence.   Wishful thinking aside, it would be downright foolhardy from a strategic standpoint, to ASSUME that the mayhem unfolding in northern Nigeria will remain localized, in a country not renowned for the effectiveness of its security and intelligence services.

Anecdotal reports from early morning commuters at the Lagos end of the Ibadan Expressway describe frequent convoys of civilian trucks that arrive along that route in the pre-dawn hours, and discharge large numbers of young men carrying backpacks, before u-turning back to retrace their arrival route, while the mysterious groups of men walk on before dispersing into the peripheral shanty-towns fringing metropolitan Lagos.    Coincidentally, an ENORMOUS crime wave has reportedly descended on Lagos over the past few months, with heavily armed gangs exceeding 50 in number, calmly laying siege on entire residential and commercial districts, pillaging, maiming and slaughtering with unusual brutality as they swarm civilian targets.

It does not take a military strategist to discern that the suspiciously regular pre-dawn discharge of backpack-toting men on the Lagos end of the Ibadan Expressway is indeed DIRECTLY related to the sudden resurgence of violent gang-perpetrated crime all over Lagos City, and that this phenomenon is in turn organized by entities familiar with the use of both extreme and low-level insurgency to achieve political ends.   In other words, the Al Queda-guided terror wave consuming Maiduguri has ALREADY extended its tentacles 400 miles southward into the very heart of Lagos, spreading primal fear as a prequel to the unthinkable.

Uncle Sam, Nigeria needs your help NOW.   The die is cast, the dogs of war are loose and if there is one thing Africa's most populous oil-producing nation sorely needs in a big hurry at this time, that would be a little help from her friends.