Jean-Louis Messonier's painting shows Napoleon Bonaparte heading a weary party during the defense of France. Insurgent groups seek to defeat stronger opponents by wearing them down.
On Aug. 12, hundreds of Nigerian soldiers mutinied at the airport in the northeastern city of Maiduguri, occupying the tarmac, firing their weapons into the air and disrupting flights. The soldiers were protesting orders that they were to be redeployed to the Lake Chad region to combat the Islamic State West African Province (ISWAP), a group formerly known as Boko Haram , which has been conducting a string of deadly attacks on Nigerian bases in the region. Military officials said the deployment would last less than year, the soldiers told Nigeria's Vanguard News, but the troops noted that they had already served a number of years and were being ordered to the front lines yet again to fight a group whose defeat had been proclaimed — somewhat prematurely — by President Muhammadu Buhari not long after the militants pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in March 2015.
