NAIROBI — In the week since Muhammadu Buhari was inaugurated as president of Nigeria, vowing to eliminate Boko Haram, the extremist group has responded with a series of deadly bombings that have killed dozens of people across the country’s northeast.
Those attacks have underscored the enormous task ahead for Buhari, a former military dictator who was seen by many as the right man to rid the country of terrorism. They have also highlighted the challenge for the United States, which is eager to defeat Boko Haram but leery of offering Nigeria a large increase in military assistance before its security forces — known forserious human rights abuses — are restructured.
The next chapter of the fight against Boko Haram could be the most difficult.
“I think we might be seeing the end of the large battlefield phase of this, but if Boko Haram goes back to hit-and-run tactics, it could be even harder for Nigerian military forces,” said a senior U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about bilateral relations.
The Nigerian military has said for months that Boko Haram has been forced out of key cities and villages in operations that seemed to lay the groundwork for the group’s elimination after Buhari took power. Instead, the past week has been the bloodiest in recent months.
Militants conducted attacks near Maiduguri International Airport last week, killing eight, and in a mosque, killing about 25. Then, on Tuesday, a man blew himself up in a slaughterhouse in the same city, killing about 40. Maiduguri, a major city in the northeast, was among the places where Nigerian security forces said they had vanquished Boko Haram. Over the past few months, there had been relatively few attacks, and the city’s markets and streets were packed.
In the most recent attack, on Thursday night, militants bombed a market in the northeastern city of Yola, killing at least 31 and wounding dozens, according to Nigerian officials.
The surge in attacks comes as the military has found itself under greater scrutiny for human rights violations. A report released Wednesday by Amnesty International alleged that the military had caused the deaths of about 8,000 civilians since 2009. Some were executed, the report said, but the majority died in military custody.
“Former detainees and senior military sources described how detainees were regularly tortured to death — hung on poles over fires, tossed into deep pits or interrogated using electric batons,” said the report. It named five military officers who it said should be investigated by Buhari’s government.
Now, the United States is trying to navigate ways to support Nigeria’s new leader, who bills himself as a reformer, without violating U.S. legislation that prevents the country from giving aid to human rights abusers. The authors of the Amnesty International report suggested that foreign funding to the military should continue, but that a more robust effort should be made to punish those responsible for human rights violations.
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