Surely the past few weeks have
witnessed a cat-and-mouse game of sorts between the Nigerian Army and the Boko
Harm sect, with the release of wanted terrorists' posters, propaganda videos,
pictures of dead terrorists and abandoned camps, rescued hostages and last
but not least, field imagery depicting
superior command of the ground from both sides.
True to their word, the Nigerian Army
have backed their claims of routing out the dastardly insurgents, with
photographic and videographic evidence, but the terrorists seem not to know
when to lie down as they have responded with videos of their own -refuting
these claims.
As such, Nigerians are caught
in-between not knowing who or what to believe anymore.
However, war analysts and other enthusiasts
would agree with me that an adversary who is at the brink of defeat and in the
throes of death will lash out vehemently and violently, struggling to hold on
to whatever breaths of life might yet remain in its body.
It is with this allusion that I will
explain Boko Haram's latest bomb-making factory photographs that have flooded the
Internet earlier today.
First, the photographs seem to be
authentic, showing the terrorists hard at work in their lab, mixing and
filtering, amongst other things. In a technological age, however, when deception
and manipulation are just a thin line
away from reality, the authenticity of the pictures will continue to be subject to debate.
But let's say the pictures are indeed authentic, it would go a long
way to show that terrorists and all other evil doers are hard at work, striving
to make themselves better positioned to inflict maximum injury on those who
oppose them. That therefore is a wakeup call to our security agencies and even
to the larger society at large.
Second, if we recall correctly, a
raid by the Nigerian Special Forces on the Boko Haram stronghold of Sambisa
forest earlier in the year, revealed a cache of video tapes etc which were
meant to be released into the Public Domain from time to time to continuously
fuel the fear of Nigerians everywhere. As a matter of principle, terrorists
everywhere make it a point of duty to record every action of theirs and
thereafter release it into the public domain to achieve a particular effect-
FEAR.
SO, it is POSSIBLE that the
pictures could be of such origins, meaning they could have been taken a long
time ago, at a time perhaps when Boko Haram were in the ascendancy, capturing
town after town, and village after village. Even the pictures themselves allude
further to this line of reasoning where they seem to have been taken in the
labs of a certain college in Bama, a town which, at present, is under the
control of the Nigerian Army who rooted the terrorists out of that enclave
sometime during thefamous 'six-week' war earlier this year.
It is therefore possible that the
terrorists are referring to a past event, which in this case, would render
their propaganda campaign useless as they ARE NOT AT PRESENT, manufacturing any
rockets or grenades (albeit, they may have done so at one time).
It is evident
that the terrorists have in their possession, lots of videos recorded at
earlier times, and are only releasing
them now to gain relevance and score cheap points, just as their last
propaganda video which Sahara Reporters graciously featured, seemed to show
the terrorists moving about during the daytime which vehicles and tanks, the
only MISTAKES being that the same video had been released months ago ( ON
YOUTUBE) thus discrediting their claim that this is a most recent production and (2)
the air elements if the Nigerian Air force have been conducting air
reconnaissance and airstrikes on any suspected terrorist movements almost on a
daily basis. How then can BH move about in daytime, firing machine guns and
RPGs in long convoys of trucks and tanks?
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