President Muhammadu Buhari has said Nigeria has “technically won the war” against Boko Haram militants.
He affirmed this in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
He said the militant group could no longer mount “conventional attacks” against security forces or population centres. It had been reduced to fighting with improvised explosives devices (IED) and remained a force only in its heartland of Borno state, he said.
Boko Haram has been described as one of the world’s deadliest terror groups. Critics of the government argue that it has exaggerated the scale of its success against the militants, and that each time the army claims to have wiped out Boko Haram, the militants have quietly rebuilt.
The president said that key to the defeat of Boko Haram is reorganising, retraining and reequipping the army. The insurgency has kept about one million children out of school in Nigeria and three neighbouring states, the UN children’s agency said earlier this week But he told the BBC that the militants had been all but driven out from Adamawa and Yobe states, and their way of operating curtailed.
“Boko Haram has reverted to using improvised explosive devices (IEDs),” he said. “Indoctrinating young guys… they have now been reduced to that. “But articulated conventional attacks on centres of communication and populations.. they are no longer capable of doing that effectively. “So I think technically we have won the war because people are going back into their neighbourhoods.
Boko Haram as an organised fighting force, I assure you, that we have dealt with them.”
Buhari said that Nigeria had reorganised and reequipped the military, which had received training from the British, the Americans and the French.
A key priority for the government now, he said, is to rebuild infrastructure and help all displaced people to return to their homes.