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The North West region of the country is a densely populated area which, unfortunately, has been ravaged by insurgency. As one of the zones with a very huge verse landmass, the population is put at about thirty-five million.
The region, with seven states; Katsina, Kano, Jigawa, Zamfara, Kaduna and Sokoto states, is predominantly a Hausa-speaking region. However, the zone has diversified ethnic groups like the Kanuri, Fulani, Zurur, Jabba, Baju, Gbagyi, Zara, Maguzawa, Dakarkari, Kataf, Gwari, Kaje, Kambari, Zabarmawa and Gungawa.
The zone thrives in agriculture – the pastoralists and the farmers – who have eventually been at the centre of major conflicts the North West zone is experiencing till today. For several decades, the zone has faced various degrees of criminal activities perpetrated by different bandit groups. The deteriorating security atmosphere in the zone has, over the years, raised a serious public outcry and threatened the overall national unity, and the Nigerian military is daily engaging the criminals.
Obviously, the region has witnessed various degrees of criminal activities and conflicts like farmers-herders conflict, livestock rustling – majorly cattle-, terrorism, kidnapping, illegal arms importation, and rural banditry.
Notably, the conflicts in this zone pre-dated the country’s independence but a major post-independence attack took place in Yar’ Galadima, Zamfara, in April 2014 when 200 people were killed. That was a snowballed effect of unchecked deadly conflicts between farmers and herders before 2014. As the clashes remained, they turned into armed banditry. The armed bandits moved into the criminal acts of kidnapping people for ransom, cattle rustling, terrorism, and other criminal activities.
Since the criminalities are thriving, and the perpetrators are making fortunes from them – like cattle rustling and kidnapping - they have been entrenched. The stolen cattle are hidden in the forest at Zamfara’s border region with Kaduna and Niger states until they are sold for slaughter. The rustlers make quick money from this.
The bandits brazened up and got to the level of calling or sending notice letters to the villagers before some of the attacks are launched. When Amnesty International visited some of the communities in the zone, a villager from Gidan Goga in Zamfara State told the group that the bandits called him on the phone to demand that the community should pay them the sum of five hundred thousand Naira, if not, they would kidnap either him or the village head of Gidan Goga. The villagers of the various communities in the region constantly live in fear due to this level of banditry; raiding and killing the citizens of the affected communities.
Abdulaziz Yari, the former governor of Zamfara State, raised alarm over the level of devastation that part of the region was facing. From what the former governor said, over five hundred villages and thirty thousand hectares of land have been devastated, and two thousand eight hundred and thirty-five people were killed between the years 2011 and 2018. The criminal operations are carried out from eight major camps across Zamfara State with at least ten thousand armed bandits and cattle rustlers.
The bandits operating in the Northwest region are having a safe haven in Zamfara due to the many forests surrounding the state and then bordering it with other states in the region. The Rugu, Kamara, Kunduma, and Sububu forests have over time aided the criminals’ operations who emerge from there to attack highway users, towns and communities within the zone, and they also hide the stolen cattle in the forests.
Farmers-herders' conflicts escalated over time into claiming several lives of members of both divides. Initially, the nature of the farmers-herders crisis was different from the other conflicts – rustling, kidnapping, terrorism and rural banditry - carried out in the area. It was a mere strive between two groups struggling for space to carry out their agricultural activities. As the conflicts prolonged unchecked, the herders engaged in arms bearing, killing farmers and villagers of the conflict areas.
Others like rustling, kidnapping, and rural banditry are pure acts of criminality with the outright motive of killing natives of given communities, annexing villages, making fortunes from their kidnap victims, extorting money from the victimized communities, and raising large sum of money from rustled cattle. Most of the successful attacks by the bandits were deadly. Attacks like the March 28, 2018, on the Bawan Daji community of Anka Local Government Area saw more than thirty people dead. On February 15, 2018, gunmen intercepted a vehicle conveying bridesmaids and traders to the Birane village market, killed all n board, proceeded to the market where they fired indiscriminately, and about forty-one people were killed.
April 11, 2018, Kuru-Kuru and Jarkuta villages in the same Anka Local Government Area were attacked by gunmen, and twenty-six people were killed. After that incident, villagers of Kaboro and Danmani caught and killed one of the bandits. Then, in a reprisal attack, the cattle rustlers invaded the villages and killed twenty-seven people in that single attack. Another circle of attacks were launched across eighteen villages in Zumi Local Government Area on July 27, 2018, after those eighteen villages were taken over by the bandits in June of that year. They were in Zamfara State alone. There are handfuls of other conflicts around the North West region.
The numerous attacks and criminal fanfare didn’t go on without responses from the Nigerian military. The army, together with the Airforce, has been repelling and curbing the criminal activities in the zone with the available resources. There were reactive responses from the military. After the attack on Bawan Daji, the Nigerian Air Force deployed Special Forces to Zamfara on the 4th day of April 2018, and the army launched an attack on the bandits in Tungan Daji on April 5, killing twenty-one bandits. Two soldiers were killed in that operation.
Under the leadership of the current Nigerian Chief of Army Staff, Lt. General Tukur Buratai, the army mobilized troops to attack the herders and the rustlers in their camps within the zone. A combined operation of the 35 Battalion, 3 Brigade and 1 Division launched a manhunt on the syndicates under Operation Sharan Daji, and lots of the bandits were dislodged and captured.
Other strategic areas in the zone have also witnessed increased criminal activities over the years. the Birnin-Gwari Kaduna highway turned into a dead zone for travellers and residents of the communities around there. That area witnessed frequent violent incidents like ambushes, abductions and kidnapping of road users for ransom. Abuja-Kaduna highway is another notorious axis. Taking advantage of the large expanse of land and forest there, about 150 kilometres, the criminals used it as safe haven. The bandits operated at spotted areas away from military spots or patrol spots at a time along the road. The bandits operating within the axis operate with motorbikes. They station their motorbikes at strategic places in the forest, and once they kidnap their targets, they move them to their hideouts with the motorbikes through the bush tracks.
When Lt. General Tukur Buratai was appointed the Chief of Army Staff by the President, Muhammadu Buhari, in July 2015, the COAF appointed Major General Adeniyi Oyebade as the General Officer Commanding 1 Division in August 2015. The 1 Division of the Nigerian Army is the base that covers the entire North West region and some parts of the North Central region. The area covered by 1 Division is about 267,000 square kilometres in landmass. Saddled with the responsibility of fighting criminality in the zone, the division mounted a lot of attacks against the criminals – both reprisal and manhunt.
The G. O. C. 1 Division, Major General Adeniyi who spoke at a time about the activities of the division in the zone said, “We dealt extensively with criminality (in) the North West zone such as retreating bandits escaping from the onslaught in the North East and cattle rustling, banditry, kidnapping and all levels of criminality.” During the periods, he introduced various code-named operations to tackle security challenges. It was during this period that Operation Sharan Daji was launched to check cattle rustling. The GOC said that the army through the Operation “recovered thousands of livestock; cattle and sheep, and others which were given back to their owners.”
Other code-named Operations; Operation Harbin Kunama, Operation Diran Mikiya, and Operation Puff Adder were also launched by the army to tackle banditry in the North West region. The army also introduced Operation Cat Race on February 15, 2018, which was used to tackle armed banditry, kidnapping and cattle rustling. It conducted the OCR in conjunction with other security agencies like the Department of State Services, the Nigerian Police Force, and the Nigerian Security and Civil Defense Corps. The OCR was also code-named in the Tiv language as Operation Ayem Akpatuma. Afterwards, Operation Whirl Stroke 1 an 2 were introduced as follow-up operations to Operation Cat Race. It also continued earlier operations by previous authorities of the Force like Operation Safe Haven which was launched in 2010 with the aim of maintaining peace and security in the zone.
Apart from launching attacks on criminals, the army adopted other strategies to check criminality in the zone. GOC 1 Division, Major General Adeniyi, adopted what he called ‘Soft Power’. He engaged with the major principal players in the region, especially the areas of conflict. It was in that arrangement that the ethnoreligious conflicts which ravaged parts of Southern Kaduna that resulted in the loss of lives and properties were brought under control. Talking after some recorded successes of the peace moves, he said that “the issue of the herdsmen and farmers clashes (were) also dealt with, and of course, as GOC, we organised so many peace initiatives which we actually kick-started, and I am proud to say that under my leadership of 1 Division, we achieved quite a lot. We recovered thousands of weapons and ammunition. Hundreds of bandits who are criminals laid down their arms; which led to the amnesty and peace initiative in Katsina and which led to the destruction of hundreds of arms that were in our possession and surrendered by bandits.” He also initiated such peace movements in Niger, Kaduna and Zamfara States.
The army also adopted what Major General F. Yahaya, the Military Secretary, tagged as a “multifaceted line of operation”. When he talked about it, he said, “We have this line of tracking. We have lines of other agencies including informants, but above all, our own is aggression, systematically taking all the camps that we can. All the ones that we can identify, also being careful not to visit violence on innocent people. Why I’m saying so is that sometimes when you go to a typical village, if you are not careful, you won’t distinguish Fulani Settlement with (from) bandit Settlements”.
At some points, he sent some of the force men to the communities under disguise to get information about the criminals but that strategy always failed because the villagers already knew themselves, and also those from the military. So, they would decline to give information for fear of being victimized or even killed by the bandits. More challenges kept militating against a successful elimination of criminality in the North West region. Again, inadequate and insecure reporting systems posed a major challenge. Members of the community who knew some of the criminals would not report to the police or even the military. The people had no confidence that if they report to the police, their identities would be protected because they believed that the security agents would reveal their identities to the criminals.
Some of the citizens were even informants to the bandits. That was why troops would be at a place making inquiries on the whereabouts of the bandits, the bandits themselves would be getting firsthand information that the troop was at that particular place making inquiries about them.
Again, some of the bandits were converted local vigilantes. In Zamfara, some youths of the villages were recruited by the state government to augment in places where the police fail to secure them. They were equipped with motorbikes, uniforms and locally-made single-shot hunting rifles. The government was not meeting up with their payments and supply of ammunition, and some of the vigilantes converted to bandits. So, the informal security setup members turned out to be criminal gangs terrorizing the villagers. They in turn engaged in criminal acts of robbery, kidnapping, unlawful confiscation of people’s properties, and human rights abuses.
Corruption was another major challenge which fed criminality fat in the region. An air force officer had arrested a person with AK47, and he handed over the man to the police in the area. After some time, he returned from Zamfara where he had gone and then arrested the person again with an AK47. What happened was that the man sold cows from which he raised N1.2 million for them. They released and he went back to banditry. Some captured criminals who were taken to court got bailed because almost every offence has bailing provisions. Once they secured their bails, they returned to business. It was like recycling criminality.
Also, the poverty ravaging most of the communities made it easy for criminals to recruit more youths into their gangs. There are no significant developments in the communities, and the zone is consistently being de-industrialized, and the situation worsens the poverty level. In the zone, there are porous borders which have made arms movement and smuggling very easy. Some of the herders use their cows as vectors carrying arms into the zone unchecked.
The security crisis in the region has almost crippled economic activities in the region. Food production in the zone has dropped drastically due to the farmers-herders' constant conflict. Most of the farmers have been driven to IDP camps with their farmlands destroyed. Those who are still in their communities are afraid to go to their farms for fear of being attacked, kidnapped or killed by the bandits. Cattle rustling have driven the remaining genuine herders away as most of them lose their lives during attacks by rustlers. As noted earlier, industries located in the towns ravaged by the crisis have all relocated to safer areas for fear of losing their properties or lives.
The military has recorded various degrees of success in tackling the security crisis in the North West zone of the country. In one of its operations in March 2018, the army killed a notorious cattle rustling and kidnapping gang leader named Buharin Daji. Also, it was in one of the onslaughts of the 1 Division, in early 2016, under its Operation SharanDaji that about thirty-five armed bandits were killed, and thirty-eight of them were captured and handed over to the police for prosecution. The Operation led by the division’s GOC, Major General Adeniyi rescued over six hundred cattle, sanitizing the area at that moment. The operation further raided forty-nine camps of the bandits across the states of Kaduna, Niger, Kano and Katsina. Several weapons were recovered, and it was in one of those operations in Katsina State that the army captured Abubakar Mohammed, a known notorious cattle rustler and kidnapper, alongside his co-perpetrators; Anas Gora and Bello Sani.
The army has also succeeded in repelling bandits who had sacked residents of some communities in the zone and returned the communities to the villagers.
