Members of the House of Representatives Committee on Army have made their concerns known about Operation Positive Identification which the military begins nationwide, Friday.
Meanwhile, the reps members had earlier called on President Muhammadu Buhari to stop the army from embarking on the exercise by which Nigerians are required to move about with means of identification.
However, Tukur Buratai, on Thursday told the lawmakers that the president and the Minister of Defence, Bashir Magashi, were in support of the operation.
The army boss revealed that the program which was first launched in the northeast in September would be conducted nationwide to intercept Boko Haram insurgents who had relocated from their enclaves to other parts of the country.
Buratai, who was represented by the Head of Civil-Military Affairs, Army Headquarters, Major-General U.S Usman, said the program doesn’t entail the movement of troops or their presence in communities — Nor did it involve mounting of checkpoints or military incursions into communities
He stated however stressed that the exercise is a special operation fused into ongoing operations.
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Burutai described the operation as an intelligence-based operation to intercept insurgents and other criminal elements relocating from the army’s theatres of operations to other parts of the country.
He said this was just a way to check the security challenges in the country, adding that soldiers had been deployed to 34 states of the federation because of the increased rate of insurgency, banditry, kidnapping and other crimes.
