The killing of about 40 herders from Nigeria Air Force airstrikes in Nasarawa State has again reinforced the grim reality that the 14-year-old Islamic insurgency, and the attendant banditry are far from over. The conflict has taken a heavy toll in human and material resources and denied the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), success in delivering on his solemn campaign promise of making Nigeria safe. The war against insurgency should be reinvigorated and the repetitive “friendly fire” incidents avoided at all costs.

The tragedy of the accidental bombing of the innocent victims was made worse by the conspiratorial silence from the NAF. This is unacceptable in a supposed democracy.

Reports said the herders had just returned from Makurdi where they went to recover their impounded cattle from the Benue State Livestock Guards, when they were bombed on January 24. While 27 herders died instantly, 13 others were said to have succumbed to their injuries while other victims are still battling for survival.

In his version of the horrific incident, the President of the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria, Baba Ngelzarma, said, “They (victims) hired vehicles from Makurdi to convey their seized livestock back to Rukubi, and it was in the process of offloading their livestock that an attack was conducted that killed 31 pastoralists and eight Hausa butchers from Benue. Four others are now on admission in a Lafia hospital.”

Playing central and strategic roles in the counter-insurgency war, the NAF has collaborated with other security forces to turn the tide against the militants. However, the cost of its accidental strikes on the innocent has been devastating. A report by The PUNCH indicates that the NAF recorded at least nine incidents of miscalculated airstrikes between September 2021 and January 2023. The incidents claimed 147 innocent citizens, including children, with about 72 others injured in Zamfara, Yobe, Katsina, Kaduna, Niger, and lately, Nasarawa states.

A day before the Nasarawa incident, there was a case of a mishit by a NAF aircraft in Galadima Kogo, Shiroro Local Government Area, Niger State, where dozens of vigilantes and residents were reportedly killed. The incident, according to the state government, rendered over 8,000 residents homeless. Imperatively, the NAF authorities must investigate the serial accidental attacks on civilians and make their findings public.

The failure to detect civilians, to investigate on the ground, to identify causes and lessons learned, to discipline anyone or find wrongdoing that would prevent these recurring problems must not be trivialised. The failure of the NAF to probe and institute measures to prevent accidental strikes stains the otherwise gallant efforts of the service. It should urgently unravel the causes of the accidents and rectify the problems. Faulty intelligence or miscalculation by military planners should not be tolerated.

While accidents do happen; elsewhere, those responsible for such grave operational blunders are held accountable. For instance, no fewer than 16 American military personnel, including a general officer, were given administrative punishments for their roles in the accidental strike on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, in October 2015.

Indeed, the NAF authorities owe the victims of the airstrikes not just an apology but compensation. According to Pentagon data, the United States military provided about $2 million in condolence payments to civilian victims of its airstrikes in Afghanistan between 2015 and 2020 to address the impact of unintended injury and death.

The International Humanitarian Law; also known as ‘the law of war’ or ‘the law of armed conflict,’ stipulates that parties to an armed conflict “must at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly, shall direct their operations only against military objectives.”

The IHL is made up of treaties (the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols are the main ones) and customary international law and all signatories, including Nigerian security forces, are expected to comply with these rules. It expressly prohibits attacks directed against civilians, as well as indiscriminate attacks, namely those that strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.

In targeting enemies in combat situations, accuracy is a key element of precision, which imposes strict conditions on the forces to locate, survey, discern, and track objectives or targets; select, organise, and use the correct systems; generate desired effects; assess results; and re-engage with decisive speed and overwhelming operational tempo as required, throughout the full range of military operations.

Precision strikes therefore require more than accurate weapon systems. Robust command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, for instance, can be as determinative of success as the weapon employed, says the International Review of the Red Cross, 2005. Nigeria’s military should develop the capacity and cutting-edge skills for precision location and targeting of enemy combatants.

From Iraq and Syria to Somalia and Afghanistan, air power allowed coalition forces to take territory from ISIS and the Taliban, and drone strikes provided a means to engage al-Qaeda, al-Shabab and Boko Haram. Therefore, the military must carefully recalibrate its air campaign based on meticulously gathered intelligence, technological wizardry, extraordinary restraint and precision strikes. This is necessary to avoid or completely eliminate avoidable civilian deaths and other collateral damage.

Other militaries also rely heavily on civilian intelligence services to identify, locate, and target enemies. This calls for close collaboration among all the security agencies, an area where Nigeria has faltered badly with serious consequences. Buhari should make achieving seamless inter-agency collaboration a top priority in the anti-insurgency war.

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