Nigerian military says Boko Haram is ‘close to defeat’

The Nigerian military has announced that it is close to completely defeating Islamist Boko Haram militants who have plagued the country for a number of years, according to reports.

The BBC reports president Muhammadu Buhari saying that the militants could no longer mount conventional attacks against security forces or population centres, and that he thought that “technically, we [Nigeria] have won the war.”

The president has given the army until the end of the month to defeat Boko Haram, after their six-year insurgency has devastated the north-east of the country. However, the BBC adds that the deadline is likely to be extended as Boko Haram is still bombing areas despite losing towns under its control.

The group was founded in 2002 and focused mainly on opposing a Western-style education, with the name Boko Haram meaning ‘Western education is forbidden’ in the Hausa language. The insurgency, which launched military operations in 2009 is said to have killed some 17,000 people and left more than two million homeless.

Buhari has said that the jihadists have been forced to cut back on suicide bombings as a result of the military action against them, but critics of the government argue that it has exaggerated the scale of its success against the militants, and that each time the army claims to have wiped out Boko Haram, they have quietly rebuilt.

"Boko Haram is an organised fighting force, I assure you, [but] we have dealt with them," Buhari assures, saying that the militants had all but been driven out from Adamawa and Yobe states and remained a force only in its heartland of Borno state.

"They cannot now marshal forces and attack towns or attack military installations and so on as they did before.

The president said that Nigeria had reorganised and reequipped the military, which had received training from the British, the Americans and the French.