Boko Haram will be defeated in 3 months – Defence Minister

Nigerian defense minister Mansure Dan Ali claims Boko Haram will be vanquished from its final stronghold in the Sambisa Forest within three months. Mansur Dan Ali said on Wednesday that President Muhammadu Buhari had changed the game in the battle against Boko Haram, despite the group having pledged allegiance to ISIS.
Buhari set the Nigerian military a deadline of the end of 2015, by which they were supposed to reclaim all Nigerian territory under Boko Haram’s control.
The president said in December 2015 that Boko Haram had been defeated and was no longer capable of conventional warfare, instead resorting to guerilla attacks on soft targets. Nevertheless, the militants have continued their campaign of violence in 2016, killing more than 200 Nigerians in the first three months of the year. Ali said that the military should be able to expel the militants from Sambisa forest within two or three months.
The defense minister said that Nigeria’s campaign against Boko Haram had benefited from greater international and regional cooperation. “We are all working together and we are sharing information, and the international community is also advising us in the right direction,” said Ali.
Boko Haram’s six-year insurgency has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions. The group’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, appeared in a purportedly new video released last Thursday in his first public appearance for more than a year.