964 Nigerian security operatives killed in one year —Report

A security report released on Thursday by a research firm, SB Morgen Intelligence (SBMI) has revealed that no fewer than 964 security operatives, comprising of 322 policemen and 642 soldiers, were killed by insurgents and bandits in Nigeria in the last one year.

In the report which was made available to journalists in Abuja at a press conference, SBM Intelligence, a leading geopolitical research consultancy outfit, said the it relied on available data and also examined attacks in the period covering Q4 2020 and Q3 2021.

The report also stated that apart from the 642 personnel of the military and 322 police officers killed during the period under review, operatives of other security agencies were also killed in attacks in different parts of the country.

According to the SBMI report, they include 11 personnel of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCD, and five personnel of the Nigeria Customs Service.

Other security agencies captured in the report include operatives of the Department of State Services (DSS), which lost two personnel, and the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS), which also lost two officers while the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC), lost one personnel.

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The report also noted that at least 129 vigilantes, 100 members of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), and nine militants were also killed by non-state actors in the year under review.

Based on the figures of casualties, the SBMI report came to the conclusion that Nigeria was in a state of war.

“The Uppsala Conflict Data Programme defines war as a state-based conflict that reaches at least 1000 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 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,” it noted.

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