Military has decimated Boko Haram –NAF chief

The Nigerian Air Force yesterday said it has incapacitated the Boko Haram fighters in the North-East of the country.

Indeed, the Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshal Adesola Amosu, told journalists in La­gos that the military had inten­sified efforts to ensure that in six weeks, the war against the insurgents would have ended.

He said the military needed to incapacitate the insurgents to enable displaced persons return to their homes and pre­pare for the elections.

Speaking at the flag-off of a military exercise to add more weapons and equipment and enhance the operations of the Armed Forces in the North- East, the Air Force chief said: “We are set to decimate the Boko Haram terrorists by first gaining air and ground intelli­gence to deny them the free­dom of action and movement, to destroy their communica­tion and supply line and their possibilities of regeneration.

“We have done this suf­ficiently and their command and control are already dis­rupted and what we need to do now is an exercise to com­plete the project. It is so easy for people to say what you could not do in so many years, how come you are going to do in six weeks? It is an operation and it gets to a point where you can categorically say that within a period, you can com­plete the operation and this is where we are right now.”

Air Marshal Amosu said the exercise, which was jointly organized, would bring ad­ditional capabilities to fight against insurgency, adding: “We are incorporating some new systems and some new ammunition have surfaced and we need to incorporate them into the platform we have.

“With this, we need to in­tensify the day and night op­erations. This operation is to recalibrate our weapon system and fine-tune our tactics and it is also another opportunity to look at our maritime environ­ment. There are challenges equally in that area. We have challenges in the maritime sector. We equally contribute to operations Pulo Shield in the Niger Delta. We have new ammunition that we need to test and the range here in La­gos is the most ideal for this operation. We have to make use of facilities and everything that the nation has in terms of land space and equipment to fight insurgency, terrorism and the emerging threats over the country.”

Air Marshal Amosu called on Nigerians, particularly residents of Lagos not to panic when they hear gunfire, saying the gunfire would be coming from some of the new equipment joining the plat­form to end the insurgency in the North-East.

He said Nigerian Armed Forces went into joint opera­tions with other countries to enable the forces cross into the territory of other countries