All the US bomb’s debris

VIEW FROM THE GALLERY BY MAHMUD JEGA

American drones dropping bombs on Nigerian soil is a very big deal historically, politically, psychologically, diplomatically, militarily, legally, geo-politically, medically, criminologically, imperialismically, Africo-logically and colonialsically. In all our life as an independent country, every national government had worked at various times to ward off foreign encroachment on our sovereignty, security or dignity.

Tafawa Balewa resisted French nuclear tests in the Sahara Desert; Gowon resisted De Gaulle’s support for the break-up of Nigeria; Gowon joined other African leaders to sever diplomatic ties with Israel because it occupied the territory of an OAU member state, Egypt; Murtala defied US President Ford’s circular to African leaders, declared that “Africa has come of age” and recognized MPLA government in Angola; Obasanjo nationalised Western banks and oil firms in Nigeria doing business in Apartheid South Africa; Obasanjo also rejected French meddling in Chadian civil war and sent a Nigerian peace keeping force; Shagari defied US President Reagan’s order and attended an OAU Summit in Tripoli; Buhari recognized Polisario’s rule in Western Sahara despite Western support for Moroccan annexation; Abacha kicked when the French naval cruiser Lavoisier docked off the Nigerian coast to offer support to Cameroon during our tangle with our neighbor over Bakassi.

Vive la difference. Since November, when the mercurial US President Donald Trump threatened to carry out military raids in Nigeria in order, he said, to stop the genocide of Christians by Jihadists, our government mounted many efforts to ward off such an attack and to correct his perception of the nature of the insecurity problem in Nigeria. It was not possible, since Mr. Trump’s trumped-up perception is basically designed to ingratiate himself with a domestic evangelical constituency. When the US finally dropped bombs, our government saved face by saying it authorised it, though Trump made no mention of that.

The strike, when it came at 1am on December 26, raised many questions. Beginning with the sovereignty question, but our government squelched that by saying it approved of and cooperated with the attack by providing intelligence info. If it did,

why then was the choice of target so wide off the terrorism mark?  Sokoto State’s banditry problem is far less than those of Borno, Yobe, Zamfara, Kebbi, Niger, Katsina, Kaduna, Benue, Plateau, Kogi, Taraba and lately Kwara states. Within Sokoto State too, it is the north western part adjoining Niger Republic and the north eastern part adjoining Zamfara State that have suffered the most terrorist attacks.

Tambuwal Local Government has never been reported to harbor or suffer any terrorist attacks. From all media reports, victim accounts, security reports and military activity we have seen and heard in the last sixteen years, Borno’s Sambisa Forest, Mandara Mountains and Lake Chad islets harbor the largest ISWAP and Boko Haram terrorist camps. Then there are obviously large bandit camps in Zamfara, Katsina and Niger states, parts of Kebbi, Kaduna, Plateau, Kogi and Benue states, roving bandit bands in Taraba state, as well as recently established terrorist camps in Kwara State.

Minister of Information Mohammed Idris’ account however is that the shrapnel pieces that locals picked in Jabo village of Sokoto State and Offa in Kwara State were not from the main strike, which he said was targeted at a Lakurawa assembly point in Bauni forest of Tambuwal Local Government. Even though my native LGA, Jega, is next door to Tambuwal, I have never heard of this Bauni forest, despite driving through Tambuwal every time I went to Sokoto and back. Locals in the area also never seemed to have complained that bandits and terrorists were congregating in the area. If these were “precise munitions” that were fired after gathering the best hi-tech surveillance info, why did these pieces fall in Jabo and Offa?

There was this post by an anonymous retired Air Force officer, who said “long-range munitions were launched from naval platforms stationed in the Gulf of Guinea… The flight path was a straight line from the ocean to the Sahel. That line runs directly over Kwara State. What the people of Offa witnessed is known as ‘staging’. Long-range missiles shed weight as they fly. They drop their fuel tanks or booster rockets once the fuel is spent, allowing the warhead to continue to the target. Offa just happened to be the geographic drop-zone for that stage of the flight.”

But retired Group Captain Sadeeq Shehu said this is not true.  Idris had said MQ-9 Reaper, not long range missiles, was used in this attack. “MQ-9 is built for precision, not area bombing…It is not a system that sprays fragments across towns or states… Its small GPS-guided bombs detonate ON or VERY NEAR their target. When they explode, their effects are local. Fragments travel metres… and in rare cases a kilometre but no further than that.”

Group Capt. also said, “From Tangaza to Jabo is well over 100 kilometres. From Tangaza to Offa is roughly 400 kilometres. Those distances are far beyond anything that can be explained by debris from precision weapons fired by an MQ-9 Reaper. A weapon that detonates in Tangaza cannot scatter debris into Jabo. And it certainly cannot deposit debris in Offa.” Also, that “Debris does not create crater. A crater [as seen in Jabo] is a weapon effect. Debris does not dig holes. Explosions do.” In other words, Jabo and Offa were the targets, not debris.

Officials’ communication of the strike’s capacity as well as intent were also problematic. President Trump said he delivered a “powerful blow” on a terrorist target, but the evidence was almost absent. All we saw were Jabo and Offa locals picking up metal pieces, alleged to be shrapnel from the main blast. No video or pictorial evidence surfaced at the weekend of the site of the main blasts, including remains of the terrorists that Trump said were wiped out in large numbers. The claim is curious because US military authorities said the “operation deployed a highly sophisticated, multi-platform strike package, including long-range combat drones launched from a US facility supported by naval strike capabilities operating from the Gulf of Guinea.” This is news to us; so there are US naval forces stationed in the Gulf of Guinea, right on top of Nigeria’s offshore oil reserves? As for the lethal and hi-tech capabilities of the strike, it is necessary to prove this with pictures and videos of the dead terrorists and destroyed camps.

American officials’ explanation of the mission’s intent differed widely from Nigerian officials’. President Trump’s social media post on the attack presented it as unilateral American action; he did not say that Nigerian authorities either knew or cooperated with it. Our government, on the other hand, said it was the outcome of structured security cooperation and intelligence collaboration, that President Tinubu authorised it, and that our military took part in it [to what extent, was not made clear]. If, as some sources claimed, Nigeria’s military provided the intelligence for the Americans to strike, it is no small curiosity that they pointed in the direction of Sokoto State, which scantily features in the anti-terrorism charts.

Most problematic was President Trump’s assertion that he ordered the raid in order to protect Nigeria’s Christian communities from genocidal attacks. The local priests who feed this narrative point to events in Plateau and Benue states as the evidence. It is not logical for a terrorist who wants to wipe out Christians to locate in predominantly Muslim Sokoto State, even for staging purposes. Besides, in contrast to the North Eastern ISWAP and Boko Haram, the bandits operating in the Northwest have a religiously blind purpose. All the villages they sacked, all the protection fees they imposed and all the schoolchildren they carted away in Kagara, Kankara, Jangebe, Birnin Yauri, Kuriga and Maga were Muslim, though they raided Christian schools too at Baptist Academy and Greenfield University in Kaduna State and most recently Catholic school in Papiri, Niger State. All for one strictly secular purpose: money. While Trump is eager to ingratiate himself with evangelicals in his country, our leaders here are desperate to dispel the notion of a religious war in Nigeria, lest it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Official accounts say the Sokoto target was chosen because intelligence indicated that an ISWAP team was assembling there. Complicating this claim however was the widely shared video of a recent rally in Washington, D.C, by far-right pro-Trump elements supported by some Nigerian Diaspora elements, where they called for the “Sokoto Caliphate” to be declared an “international terrorist group”. Check your History books; there has been no Sokoto Caliphate since 1903, when Lord Lugard read a proclamation dissolving it on behalf of the English King. Of course its old territory is still there and its old traditional ruling structures are still there, now fragmented by state creation into innumerable entities without effective central coordination and mostly symbolic appearance. Besides, the old Caliphate’s territory, plus that of the sibling Kanem Borno Empire, are the ones most ravaged today by terrorism and banditry. Was Sokoto target chosen in answer to that rally’s demand?

US State Department suggested that Friday morning’s attack was only the beginning and that many more will follow. If the US really wants to help, why not provide our forces with the weapons, training and sophisticated intelligence support to carry out the mission themselves, the way USSR gave Federal troops MiG-17 fighter-bombers during the Civil War but did not drop bombs on Biafran towns?  Anyone who desires to trust Donald Trump should first ask Mexicans, Icelanders, Dutch, Canadians, Ukrainians, Gazans, Iranians, Indians, Chinese, South Africans, Syrians, Venezuelans, International Criminal Court, United Nations, Elon Musk, Department of Government Efficiency workers, American Blue City mayors, Presidents of US TV networks and Presidents of Ivy League universities.