SB Morgen (SBM) Intelligence report for 2021 has revealed that 964 officers of the Nigeria Police Force and the military have been killed in during combat with non-state actors in 2021.
A breakdown of the casualties showed that 985 security operatives comprising 642 military officers, 322 police officers, 11 Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) officers, five customs officials, two Department of State Services (DSS) operatives, two immigration officers, and one Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) officer were killed in the last one year.
The report entitled ‘Nigeria at war: Combatant casualties, examined combatant attacks in the period of Q4,2020 and Q3,2021, did not, however, examine the number of civilian deaths within the period under review but rather highlighted deaths of non-state actors.
It stated that 973 Boko Haram members, 1,989 bandits and 88 kidnappers were eliminated between October 2020 and September 2021.
The report further revealed that 100 outlawed member of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), 290 cultists, 129 vigilantes, nine militants and nine smugglers were also killed in the period under review.
It stated that 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.
On the basis of the casualty figures, SBM stated that Nigeria is at war.
“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 report said.
“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 to the violence.
“This filtering has given us a total of 964 soldiers and policemen killed in the period, while 3,071 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.”
