Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshall Sadique Abubakar, has spoken on the dislodgement of remnants of Boko Haram terrorists in the North-East.
He revealed that the secret was the application of what he called “software approach mechanism” by the Air Force.
Abubakar said without the “winning hearts and minds of the people” approach, the final dislodgement of the terrorist group would not have been possible.
He explained that the mechanism had to do with fostering intelligence gathering within the local communities to assist military operations and efforts to flush out remnants of the insurgents in their hideouts.
Abubakar spoke through Air Vice Marshal James Gbum, Chief of Policy and Plans of the Nigerian Air Force, during presentation of food items to Internally Displaced Persons, IDPs, by a company.
He said: “Soft approach mechanism which we call in the military winning hearts and minds is necessary because you will never make any lead way in fighting terrorism if the people in that environment are not happy with you.
“They will never divulge any information to you and you cannot fight terrorism without having human intelligence, that is having timely reports with those within the environment to help you fight insurgency. And we have build on this in several ways.’’
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