Word: biafras
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Dates: during 1967-1967
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...This is a war we must fight to win," he told the Biafran soldiers. "Anyone who runs away will be shot. You are better than the Northerners, all of you." To aid the Ibo regulars, more than 50,000 of the civil defense volunteers poured in from all over Biafra to fight at the front. Among these were the warrior Abam people, whose rites of manhood included until recently the acquisition of at least one human head-and whose only complaint was that they were not issued bags to hold the federal heads they hope to take...
Teen-age girls and Teddy boys in tight pants, neatly dressed middle-class merchants and shoeless old men in tattered togas last week formed civil defense groups in besieged Biafra, the secessionist Nigerian state that is under attack from federal forces. Largely Ibo tribesmen, they joined together to resist an invading army that was made up mainly of the rival Hausa tribe, whose members last year slaughtered thousands of Ibos in Northern Nigeria. The Biafran volunteers searched automobiles at roadblocks, practiced grenade throwing and ambushing. At a Port Harcourt automotive assembly plant, Biafran engineers rolled out their first homemade tanks...
...this activity went on behind the lines, the fate of troops at the front was still shrouded in a mist of claims and counterclaims. First, the federal troops of Major General Yakubu Gowon announced that they had captured the university town of Nsukka on the wooded northwestern plateau of Biafra, after days of shelling it with heavy mortars and howitzers. Radio Biafra grudgingly conceded the federal victory but accused the federals of using "white mercenaries who were painted black"-though no unprejudiced observer has spotted any such creatures. Then, next day, it proclaimed that Nsukka had been recaptured, a claim...
...truth seemed to be that the fighting had moved some 15 or 20 miles beyond Nsukka deeper into Biafra, and that the federal troops had simply moved through the city without bothering at first to garrison it. It was probably largely deserted anyway, since thousands of Nsukkans had fled the federal attack in trucks, taxis and mammy wagons, joined in the first retreat by large numbers of Biafra's inexperienced soldiers. The Biafran army consisted at secession of about 7,000 men, only 2,500 of them trained in the federal army-and those chiefly in supporting service roles...
...NIGERIA. Far more serious, and likely to last far longer, is the battle between the Nigerian Federal Government of Major General Yakubu Gowon and the energetic Ibos of Eastern Nigeria, led by Lieut. Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, who declared their independence two months ago and proclaimed the Republic of Biafra. Since federal troops attacked the dissidents two weeks ago, both sides have tried to keep foreign observers out of the battle zones, enabling each to report glowing daily accounts of success in the fighting...