973 Boko Haram Terrrorists, 1,989 Bandits Killed Within One Year – Report

A research firm, SBM Intelligence, has released a report revealing that 973 Boko Haram members, 1,989 bandits and 88 kidnappers have been gunned down between October 2020 and September 2021.

Naija News reports that the firm made this disclosure in a report released on Thursday titled, ‘Nigeria at war: Combatant casualties Q4 2020 to Q3 2021’.

SBM intelligence revealed that 100 outlawed IPOB members, 290 cultists, 129 vigilantes, nine militants and nine smugglers were also killed in the period under review.

It stated that 985 security operatives comprising of 642 military officers, 322 police officers, 11 NSCDC officers, five Customs officials, two DSS operatives, two Immigrations officers, and an FRSC officer were killed in the last year.

According to the firm, the report was based on a number of gathering tools including the Council on Foreign Relations’ Nigeria security tracker, as well as SBM’s own internal database of security incidents around the country.

The report reads: “The Uppsala Conflict Data Programme defines war as a state-based conflict that reaches at least 1,000 battle-related deaths in a specific calendar year.

“The most known and influential definition was developed by David Singer and Melvin Small in the framework of the ‘Correlates of War (COW)’ project at Michigan University which has assembled statistical data on wars around the world since 1816.

“It also defines war as any violent conflict with at least 1,000 killed combatants in a year. Both definitions exclude genocides and sporadic massacres and make efforts to include only casualties. that belong to organised parties the violence.

“With these in mind, we have looked at SBM’s database of violent deaths in Nigeria in the period of Q4 2020 to Q3 2021. We excluded violent civilian deaths, as well as those of belligerents that could be, by whatever definition, classified as non-insurgent or non-terrorist.

“This filtering has given us a total of 966 soldiers and policemen killed in the period, while 3071 people belonging to either Boko Haram, IPOB, or various militant and bandit groups have been killed in that period. The offshoot of this is that we can only say that Nigeria is at war.”