The White House has been at pains to stress that personnel
would not take part in combat operations and would be armed only for
self-defense.
Nigeria greeted that announcement as a “welcome development.”
President Muhammadu Buhari took office in May vowing to end
the violence that has killed scores and spooked much-needed international
investors.
But US efforts to give him military assistance have been
hampered by concerns about human rights abuses carried out by the country’s
military.
And until now Washington has largely shied away from engaging
its vast military assets to combat Boko Haram, with policymakers wary of
fueling militant recruitment or fusing the group’s ties with Middle Eastern
Islamists.
The group’s leaders have allied themselves with the Islamic
State group, but experts doubt the scale and scope of collaboration.
The US moves come as Boko Haram steadily expands operations
beyond its traditional base in the Northeast, conducting attacks in Cameroon
and Chad that have killed dozens.
An uptick in violence is expected in the coming weeks with
the end of the rainy season and amid growing resistance to a nascent
multi-national joint task force bringing together countries in the region to
fight Boko Haram.
On Thursday and Friday, suicide bombers from the terror sect
slew dozens of people in attacks on Maiduguri ,Borno State. The insurgency has
claimed at least 17,000 lives since 2009.
Cameroon, Chad and Niger, which all have borders with Nigeria
in the Lake Chad region, have formed a military alliance with Nigeria and the
Republic of Benin to battle the extremists, who this year declared allegiance
to the Islamic State.
Nigeria’s neighbours have each been hit by bombers, often
women or adolescent girls, who detonate their devices in crowded places such as
open markets. Bans on concealing clothes, searches and close scrutiny have
prevented some attacks, but others come without warning.
National intelligence services are historically best known
for monitoring the activities of the domestic opposition, rather than tackling
threats from the likes of Boko Haram, whose violence has uprooted about 2.5
million people.
Heads of state in the Lake Chad region have several times
pleaded for international assistance to the multinational task force created
this year to take the war to the enemy.
France already provides some forms of intelligence. Paris has
deployed a strong military presence on the ground, including Operation
Barkhane, with its headquarters in the Chadian capital N’Djamena, set up to
fight jihadists in the Sahel.
Last year, Washington provided Nigeria with intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance expertise in the hunt for more than 200
schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram from their school.
Analysts have seen alleged military abuses such as arbitrary
detention of Boko Haram suspects in both Nigeria and Cameroon as having hit
their ability to gather on-the-ground intelligence from civilians.
The US military is also active in Niger, where it uses drones
to watch over the broad strip of Sahel territory on the southern side of the
Sahara. The pilotless aircraft will now also be monitoring Boko Haram.
The first 90 men out of 300 US soldiers arrived on Monday in
Cameroon, where they will be stationed at the northern town of Garoua, which is
already a base for the Cameroonian air force to fly sorties to bomb Boko Haram
infiltrators.
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