One morning, Marcus Drabo was working on the farm alongside his mother and other villagers, when a Nigerian Air Force jet passed overhead.
Accustomed to frequent sorties by military aircraft attacking nearby Boko Haram targets, the farmers were unfazed. Soon, they were, however, startled by a huge bang as the jet roared above their villages. Their knowledge of the community’s geography told them that their homes could have been hit.
Later, they found out that the aircraft had actually targeted their village and had, by less than a hundred metres, missed dropping a large bomb on their homes. Luckily for them, the bomb it dropped did not explode. It instead broke into the ground and sat their quietly.
The explosives presence at Drabo’s domain gave him an uneasy feeling and prodded him to search further homewards, where he made startling discoveries. The jet, he said, had also fired guns that cut down tree branches and did even more.
“I was shocked about the whole thing and thought that was where it had stopped, until when I got into my room,” he said, as his face contoured in anger. “As soon as I got into my room, I perceived the smell of burning rubber and was baffled the most by strange rays streaking down into the room from holes that were never in existence in the roof. As I looked down, I saw a steaming bullet burning out the leather carpet some inches from my mattress,” he said.
Drabo’s Kwa village sits about 10 kilometres from Dilchem bridge, the de facto border post separating parts of Nigeria’s territory under the control of the Nigerian government and the parts under Boko Haram in Adamawa State.
Over the past three months, the sect has overrun towns and taken over territories in Adamawa and Borno states, forcing thousands of locals to seek refuge in Cameroon and other parts of Nigeria.
Drabo’s village is one of the communities that are neighbouring the areas under the control of Boko Haram, with Bazza being the sect’s newest conquest. More than any sign, the jet attack about a month ago indicated to the villagers that the war was closing in on them. This was confirmed about two weeks after, when Boko Haram invaded Betso, another farming community five kilometres away.
Though the group did not place the village under its control, its fighters killed 17 people and set houses ablaze before withdrawing, locals said. They returned six days later and unleashed more atrocities on the devastated residents.
Since the incessant attacks on their next door neighbours and the ensuing exodus by survivors, Kwa villagers have been rankled with fears of a possible invasion. Previous attacks in Bazza had sparked panic in Vimtim, the hometown of Nigeria’s Chief of Defence Staff, Alex Badeh, sitting about 10 kilometres behind, as well as in Mubi, Adamawa’s biggest commercial hub.
When the insurgents took over Bazza and threatened to march on Mubi, a lot of residents, including internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Borno and occupied parts of Adamawa, fled to the state capital Yola.
“We live in fear of our lives here,” Drabo said, as his finger probed the bullet hole in the carpet on Thursday.
“Every day we are rattled by gunshots, sometimes forced to take refuge in the bush,” he added.
‘Radio ceasefire’: Over eight days ago, Badeh announced a ceasefire agreement between government and the Boko Haram insurgents, declaring that the truce was coming into effect immediately, while ordering commanders to abide by it.
The ceasefire, he said, would, aside ensuring the cessation of hostilities, also clear the ground for the release of abducted Chibok girls, who have been held captive for over six months by the Boko Haram. The issues of the girls and the ceasefire have a peculiar sense and meaning to the people around here, as they live close to where they were abducted, as well as face the threat of being consumed by the raging war next door.
But as far as they are concerned, the meaning of the truce ends at the speakers of their transistor radios. “We heard about the ceasefire over the radio,” Julius Jerome, a fleeing resident of Betso, told Sunday Trust at Kwa. “But we have not seen a sign to support the declaration,” he expatiated. Asked what signs was he looking for, Jerome replied, “To go through one week without hearing gunshots,” he said, adding, “For the past two days, we have been hearing gunshots from Bazza and two days ago, the terrorists raided Shafa (a village about two kilometres from Betso) and killed a retired soldier and my parents are presently in the bush.
So, to us here, the ceasefire is only a radio programme.”
Jerome linked the attacks on his Betso hometown to a failed attempt by soldiers to retake Bazza early October, recalling that troops had used the town as a route to go after the insurgents. “The soldiers were said to have killed many of the Boko Haram fighters in the early hours of the attack. But later on, the sect members regrouped and forced the soldiers to beat a retreat,” he explained.
The troops ran past Betso with Boko Haram men in pursuit. At the village, the insurgents stopped the chase and launched a killing spree. “They killed 17 people, 14 were members of our community and three were persons taking refuge there from Bazza. They came back after six days and destroyed houses. We have only elderly people in Betso,” he explained.
Military sources told Sunday Trust that it was during that withdrawal that the battalion commander, Lt. Col Orji Ememe, ordered troops to destroy five armoured personnel carriers (APCs), in order to prevent them from falling into the hands of the insurgents.
The source also disclosed that the officer had been transferred out of the unit, on possible disciplinary grounds, and that a military board of inquiry will determine whether or not the action was necessary and appropriate.
Eighty-year-old Usman Sinu lives in a thatched-roof house near Drabo’s residence and entertains the same reservations for the ceasefire. “It used to be bad here until when things improved recently, but we still hear gunshots,” he said. “If they (Boko Haram) are coming I will not run because I’m frail. I will wait for death to meet me here,” he sounded defiantly.
Another resident, Andrew Musa, said people are still fleeing the village because of ongoing attacks in nearby villages. “We hardly sleep because of fear and sounds of explosives from attacks in communities close to us.
Mere looking at us will tell you that we are disturbed, because we know an attack can come at any time. So, the so-called ceasefire does not affect us here,” he said.
The only bridge at Dilchem connecting Bazza to other parts of Adamawa has been blown off by a military jet in order to halt the advance on more territories by the Boko Haram, soldiers told our correspondent. Locals said a large body of soldiers had been deployed there and is preventing commuters from accessing the bridgehead. Back at Vimtim, another contingent of soldiers defends the military chief’s town.
Some military men believe that the ceasefire was being accepted by the Boko Haram members in the field. A soldier told Sunday Trust at Vimtim on Sunday that there were reports of Boko Haram fighters walking up to Nigerian soldiers’ positions at the frontline to exchange pleasantries.
“This is what we heard from our colleagues who came from Dilchem and Kuzum this morning,” he said.
He also claimed that the Boko Haram insurgents had stopped firing at Nigeria’s military jets since the truce was announced. “Before the ceasefire, they would always attempt to bring down our jets by firing anti-aircraft guns at them whenever they were patrolling areas under their control.
Now they have stopped doing that,” he stated, gleefully.
Ceasefire, yet a tough row to hoe: But continuous attacks in more places than one by the insurgents have continued to depict the ceasefire agreement as a tough row to hoe in the current attempt to end the Boko Haram crisis.
A military officer attached to a unit at Hussara, along Uba-Bazza road, told our correspondent that Boko Haram men had attacked another village near their position on Thursday. “My colleague who came from the area informed me that the insurgents had destroyed homes and killed people,” he said.
The officer said the whole issue of ceasefire was a sham that was being spread by the media. “It is the media that is spreading stories about an ongoing ceasefire which is not the situation here at the front,” he said.
“There was never a day that these people did not carry out an attack targeting one village or the other since the said ceasefire was proclaimed,” the officer claimed.
About two kilometres from the checkpoint, the community of Hussara shared his misgivings. They are struggling to recover from a Boko Haram invasion on September 10, the farthest the group had advanced along the Uba highway in Adamawa, after crossing the Hussara bridge.
During the morning attack that lasted less than an hour, hundreds of the sect’s fighters marched straight to the village home of a police officer along the major road, less than five kilometres from Uba town, and bombed it.
Bitrus Bello, the representative of the ward head of Hussara, said the militants killed 12 people in the attack. He explained that residents who fled were willing to return to their houses but were staying away because of the group’s presence around the village, adding that food production may be greatly affected this year, as farms had been abandoned. “Many of the farms have been overgrown with weeds because their owners are not here to tend them. We are afraid there may be food scarcity this year. “You can see the roads are empty, only military vehicles ply them and even this morning there was gunfire in Bazza and Michika,” he added.
Sunday Trust gathered that with the Delchim bridge blown off and soldiers barring people from crossing to other parts of Adamawa State, including Bazza, Michika, Gulak and Madagali, the towns have been effectively cut off and left under full control of the insurgents, with no means of access, save by air or through the bushes.
However, our correspondent observed that the military was moving heavy artillery guns to the fronts on Thursday. Military sources said weapons of such calibre had never been deployed since the war with Boko Haram broke out. With the increasing attacks by Boko Haram, despite the ceasefire, more questions are nagging the minds of many locals in the area. Is the military preparing to fortify areas under its control, thereby abandoning the occupied areas to Boko Haram? Or is it planning an all-out offensive, under the shadow of a shaky ceasefire, to liberate the captured territories?
Source: #SundayTrust_News.
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