Boko Haram Read Online Free PDF Page B

seemed as if they had grown accustomed to it. One explained that the bodies had come from an area about 45 miles away called Benisheik and had been dumped either by security forces or residents who had recovered a corpse along the roadside. If relatives did not come soon to collect the bodies, the corpses would be buried in a mass grave like others before them. The hospital worker said that both victims of insurgent attacks and the insurgents themselves, or at least those labelled as such, were regularly dumped there in that manner, though dead soldiers were usually taken out of view inside the mortuary, steps away. Asked why all the bodies were not placed inside instead of on the dirt outdoors, she reasoned that the lack of steady electricity would cause them to rot even faster there. She said there was an electricity generator for the mortuary, but it didn’t always work properly. In any case,the mortuary was locked up tight on this Friday afternoon since the workers there had gone to pray. It closes at other times because the attendants are often ill, according to the hospital worker. The conditions apparently make them sick.
    This was at a time when, if the military was to be believed, things were getting better. The truth was far more complicated, and the reason the bodies were rotting in the dirt at the back of Borno State Specialist Hospital complex in Maiduguri would attest to that. Another state of emergency had been declared in the region more than four months earlier, in May 2013, with President Jonathan having decided after years of attacks and mayhem that something dramatic must be done. Additional troops were deployed into the region, tasked with taking back villages that the president said the insurgents had occupied. He told the nation in a televised speech that the extremists from Boko Haram had replaced the Nigerian flag with their own in certain remote border areas. Some estimates put the number of districts under Boko Haram control at 21 and described it as a gradual process, beginning around January 2013. Since Boko Haram had not been previously known to seek to take territory and had focused solely on insurgent attacks, the development would mean a sharp change in tactics. It came at a time when the world had been focused on a different Islamist extremist advance in nearby northern Mali, where rebels had taken control of around half the country, sparking a French military assault to chase them out. Jonathan’s declaration led to worry over whether Nigerian extremists had gone to Mali and returned home battle-hardened, ready to emulate the strategy there, or whether insurgents who never left had simply taken inspiration from it.
    Within hours of the president’s emergency declaration, the military assault began, and it became clear almost instantly that determining what was really happening on the ground was going to be next to impossible. One of the army’s first moves was to cut mobile phone lines in the north-east, ostensibly because the insurgents used them to coordinate attacks. Satellite phones wouldalso be banned later for the same reason. Since landlines are virtually non-existent in Nigeria, this meant the region was cut off from the rest of the world. On top of that, visiting remote areas without a military escort was considered too dangerous – because of the insurgents, certainly, but also thanks to the presence of soldiers with ruthless reputations. Nonetheless, through a combination of military statements, limited visits to the region, accounts from local residents and, perhaps above all, the emergence of a new pattern of attacks, details began to filter through and a picture, however incomplete, gradually took shape.
    Early on in the offensive, the military claimed to have cleared out insurgents from camps, often in forests or on the outskirts of villages. It said it had done this with aircraft providing cover for ground troops. How many insurgents were involved, how many