They Brought Mercenaries To Kiill Us. We Refused To Die.

They Brought Mercenaries To Kiill Us. We Refused To Die.

They Brought Mercenaries To Kiill Us. We Refused To Die.

There is a history they do not teach. There is a chapter of the Nigeria-Biafra war that has been deliberately buried under the noise of “One Nigeria” propaganda and the comfortable silence of those who benefited from our defeat. But the truth does not disappear because it is hidden. It only waits.
Let us talk about the mercenaries.

When Nigeria went to war against Biafra in July 1967, it was not a straightforward military contest between two sides. It was a coordinated extermination campaign backed by foreign powers, foreign weapons, and foreign killers. Nigeria deployed mercenaries in the form of Egyptian pilots who flew their MiG-17 fighters and IL-28 bombers against Biafra. These were not soldiers fighting for any conviction. These were hired instruments of death, deployed specifically to crush a people demanding the right to live.

And what did these Egyptian mercenaries do when they took to the skies over Biafra? They frequently attacked civilian rather than military targets, bombing numerous Red Cross shelters. Read that again. They bombed Red Cross shelters. They targeted the dying, the wounded, the hungry children lying in medical tents. This was not an accident of war. This was a deliberate message: there is no safe place for you. Not even mercy will protect you.

President Gamal Abdel Nasser dispatched pilots of the Egyptian Air Force to fight for Nigeria in August 1967, and the tendency of these Egyptian pilots to indiscriminately bomb Biafran civilians proved counterproductive in the propaganda war, as the Biafrans did their best to publicise cases of civilians killed by the Egyptians. Even in the middle of genocide, our people fought back with truth, documenting what was being done to them and carrying that documentation to the world.

But Egypt was not alone in this wickedness. The British government covertly supplied Nigeria with weapons and military intelligence and may have also helped it to hire mercenaries. Britain. The same colonial power that created Nigeria by force and handed us to our oppressors on independence day. The same Britain that drew the map that caged us. They supplied the weapons. They fed the war machine. They kept Nigeria going when it should have collapsed under the weight of its own injustice. Shell-BP even gave Nigeria £5.5 million to buy more British weapons. Our oil. Our land. Used to purchase bullets to kill us.

Nigeria’s hostile aircraft were flown by mercenaries who taunted humanitarian airlift pilots over the radio and used call signs such as “Genocide.” They called themselves Genocide. That is the level of contempt with which our lives were regarded. They were not hiding what they were doing. They were celebrating it.

Meanwhile, the Nigerian Federal Military Government blocked the Biafran region from air, land, and sea, which led to widespread famine in 1968. They did not just send mercenaries to shoot us. They sealed us off and waited for starvation to finish what the bombs started. Over two million of our people died. Half of them were children.

Now here is what they never want you to hear alongside that horror. Here is the part of the story that should fill every Igbo chest with a pride that no defeat can take away.

The Biafrans refused to be exterminated.

Outgunned, blockaded, bombed by Egyptian mercenaries, betrayed by Britain, abandoned by the Organisation of African Unity, reduced from their original territory to a tenth of its size, the Biafran people kept fighting. They improvised. They built things from nothing. They managed to set up a small yet effective air force. A people under total siege, with no state backing, created an air force.

Even as Nigerian federal troops whittled Biafra down to one-tenth of its original area and closed in on Umuahia, Biafra’s last major town, they held on. Umuahia would have long since fallen had it not been for the exploits of the best unit in Ojukwu’s small army, the 4th Commando Brigade.

Some of the remaining mercenaries fighting alongside Biafra appeared to have developed a personal or ideological commitment to Biafra’s cause, which is a rare trait for mercenaries. Think about that. Men who fought wars purely for money, battle-hardened veterans of the Congo who had seen everything, ended up believing in Biafra. The justice of the Biafran cause converted hired soldiers into committed men. That is the power of a people whose struggle is righteous.

In June 1969, the Biafrans launched a desperate offensive against the Nigerians in their attempt to keep them off-balance, supported by mercenary pilots who attacked Nigerian military airfields in Port Harcourt, Enugu, Benin City, and Ughelli, destroying or damaging a number of Nigerian Air Force jets used to attack relief flights, including three of Nigeria’s six IL-28 bombers that had been bombing Biafran villages and farms daily. Desperate and surrounded, Biafra struck back. Even at the end, our people refused to simply accept annihilation.

They brought the Egyptian Air Force. They brought British weapons and intelligence. They brought mercenaries who called their own mission “Genocide.” They imposed a blockade designed to starve every last child. They had the full weight of the Nigerian state, oil money, Cold War geopolitics, and the quiet approval of the United Nations machinery behind them.

And it still took them thirty months.
Thirty months to defeat a people who had nothing but their will, their intelligence, and their conviction that they deserved to live free.

That is the Igbo spirit. That is the Biafran spirit. It cannot be bombed into submission. It cannot be starved into silence. It rises. It improvises. It endures. And one day, it will prevail.

The war of 1967 to 1970 did not end the Biafran question. It only deferred it. And every generation that learns this true history, the full history, the history of mercenaries and blockades and bombing of Red Cross shelters, becomes more determined that what was taken from us must be restored.

Know your history. Teach it to your children. The truth is the first weapon of liberation.