Posts Tagged ‘Abubakar Shekau’

Remember Boko Haram?

Tuesday, December 15th, 2020

Hey, remember Boko Haram, the west African jihadist group notorious for eluding the Nigerian military and carrying out kidnapping and murder sprees?

Well, they just kidnapped 300 boys:

Boko Haram asserted responsibility Tuesday for laying siege to a secondary school in northwestern Nigeria and abducting more than 300 boys, marking a striking leap from the extremist group’s usual area of operation.

Hundreds of gunmen on motorbikes surrounded a boarding school in Katsina state Friday night and opened fire on police, witnesses said, before rounding up students and dragging them into the woods.

Abubakar Shekau, the group’s leader, said in an audio message released in the early hours of the morning that militants stormed the school to discourage “Western education,” according to Nigerian media outlets and researchers who reviewed the recording.

Boko Haram, which roughly translates to “Western education is forbidden,” has fought since 2009 to rule the country’s northeast with an extreme form of Islam — one that Muslim leaders in the nation condemn. The group has killed more than 36,000 people and displaced millions.

Boko Haram is only the short-form name. The full original name is Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’Awati Wal-Jihad (People Committed to the Prophet’s Teachings for Propagation and Jihad). However, in 2015, they pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, so they were briefly known as Islamic State in West Africa. But since the Islamic State designated Abu-Musab al-Barnawi as the leader of the group, it splintered (as jihadist groups are wont to do), with Shekau continuing as leader of the faction still known as Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’Awati Wal-Jihad/Boko Haram. (Supposedly Abu-Musab al-Barnawi was replaced as leader of Islamic State in West Africa by Abu Abdullah Idris ibn Umar al-Barnawi, but for all we know other splinter factions may have arisen; African jihadist groups don’t tend to send out regular press releases on such things…)

“What happened in Katsina was done to promote Islam and discourage un-Islamic practices,” Shekau said in the audio.

The Nigerian president and other officials in Africa’s most populous nation initially blamed bandits for the mass kidnapping. Gangs in the area are known to abduct people for ransom. But Friday’s attack bore the hallmarks of a Boko Haram raid, signaling that Shekau’s reach has shifted nearly 500 miles west.

The Katsina governor told local reporters Tuesday that he had made contact with the abductors but did not provide details. It was unclear whether gang members had participated in the kidnappings.

Shekau — a commander known for bloodthirstiness even among the world’s deadliest extremist organizations — seemed to be sending a message, said Bulama Bukarti, a Boko Haram specialist at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in London.

We now pause for an aside that I do not think I’ve previously seen mention of “The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change,” and that the moniker inspires in me an immediate sense of distrust. However, Bukarti is not wrong; like the Islamic State itself, Boko Haram is particularly bloodthirsty and ruthless.

“He wanted to make a big political statement that we are attacking you in the northeast, we are abducting your children in the northeast, and now we are doing it in the northwest,” Bukarti said. “This is a huge announcement — an audacious demonstration of capacity.”

The Science School in the town of Kankara is now empty. More than 800 students studied there before the attack — all boys.

Now they risk being forced into Shekau’s army.

Boko Haram has swollen its ranks over the years by striking towns, kidnapping children and ordering them to join or die. Those who escape often speak of killing people against their will, leaving the children traumatized and subject to state punishment. They tend to face months of military detention after fleeing Boko Haram to return home, as authorities investigate them for signs of loyalty to the group.

Indeed, conscripting teenage boys into the army seems standard operating procedure for African insurgent groups, jihadist or otherwise. (Remember the inordinate attention paid to Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony back in 2012? He’s still out there in the Ugandan bush, albeit leading a much-diminished force.)

Following the defeat of the Islamic State as a land-holding caliphate and the killing of leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Jihad didn’t go away, and remains particularly active in Africa.

See also: Islamic State Affiliated Groups And Their Current Status (current as of 2017).

(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

Boko Haram Kills 100 Nigerian Soldiers in Base Attack

Tuesday, November 27th, 2018

Continuing our tour of ongoing wars the American media isn’t paying attention to, Boko Haram, AKA the Islamic State in West Africa, AKA Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’Awati Wal-Jihad (People Committed to the Prophet’s Teachings for Propagation and Jihad), attacked a Nigerian army base over the weekend, killing up to 100 Nigerian soldiers:

The claims by Nigeria’s government that terrorist group Boko Haram has been “defeated” continue to ring hollow.

An attack by the terrorist group on an army base last Sunday led to as many as 100 soldiers being killed, Reuters reports. The attack has been attributed to Islamic State West Africa (ISWAP), a breakout faction of Boko Haram that’s affiliated with the Islamic State terror group. The attack is one of the deadliest by Boko Haram since president Muhammadu Buhari took office in 2015.

The brazenness of the attack on a military base raises questions on the lack of equipment for Nigeria’s soldiers in the front-lines—a recurring theme since the Boko Haram insurgency began in 2009. Several reports have previously suggested Nigeria’s army lacked the necessary gear to combat the terrorists. Last year, Nigeria purchased arms valued at nearly $600 million from the US to boost its army.

The timing of the attack is also crucial given Nigeria’s upcoming elections in February. Insecurity was a prominent factor in the last elections as president Muhammadu Buhari strongly campaigned on his strengths as a former army general. Indeed, under his administration, Nigeria’s army quickly made gains on Boko Haram, winning back seized territory, rescuing some abductees and sacking the militants from their Sambisa Forest stronghold.

But regardless, the government’s claims of victory have proven premature. Boko Haram has continued to launch attacks in Nigeria’s northeast notably bombing the University of Maiduguri, once described as the safest place in the city at the peak of the insurgency. The group has also began increasingly targeting aid workers with two nurses abducted and executed in the last two months.

This is reportedly a splinter group, but remember that Boko Haram itself pledged allegiance to the Islamic State back in 2015. The split occurred when the Islamic State backed Abu Musab al-Barnawi over Abubakar Shekau in 2016.

Some reports say the attackers were foreign fighters:

The Nigerian Air Force (NAF) responded with brute force following the attack on a military base in Metele, Borno State by Boko Haram terrorists, amid reports that the attackers were foreigners who spoke Arabic and French as they dished out deaths to a hapless unit by the hundreds.

A faction of Boko Haram led by Abu Musab al-Barnawi, is affiliated to ISIS and is now known as the Islamic State West Africa (ISWA).

On Monday, November 19, 2018, members of terrorist sect Boko Haram, stormed the 157 Task Force Battalion in Metele and killed over 100 soldiers.

According to PRNigeria, an agency that dispenses information on behalf of the federal government of Nigeria, the latest air-strikes from NAF in the wake of the Metele attack, destroyed a convoy of vehicles linked to the Boko Haram fighters who wreaked havoc and deaths on the military base.

Boko Haram reportedly used rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and AK47 rifles to raid the base before destroying a slew of armored vehicles and killing every army officer in sight.

The foreign fighter angle may be true, or it may by a CYA face-saving measure to explain why Nigerian troops were taken unawares.

A South African mercenary lays the fault at the feet of President Buhari for cutting his group’s contract short:

Jihadist group Boko Haram’s continued killings and assault on Nigeria should be placed squarely at the door of its president, Muhammadu Buhari, former South African Defence Force commander and mercenary Eeben Barlow said at the weekend.

In a Facebook post, Barlow also criticised Buhari for claiming that Boko Haram had been technically defeated, adding that the militants were causing numerous casualties and capturing massive amounts of equipment and ammunition, the Premium Times reported on Monday.

The former mercenary said that Buhari’s government had cut short his contract after his company STTEP (Specialised Tasks, Training, Equipment and Protection), helped reclaim swathes of territory back from Boko Haram at the peak of the nine-year Islamist insurgency in 2015.

“Pressure forced only a small part of the campaign to be successfully implemented before we were ordered to pack up and leave.

“Many of the men we trained as part of 72 Mobile Strike Force have remained in contact with us (STTEP), pleading for our return to Nigeria,” he said.

“They have also told us that they have been used to a point of exhaustion,” Barlow said.

That statement sounds both very self-serving and quite possible, given that the South Africa had the best military in Sub-Saharan Africa and that the SADF conducted a successful counterinsurgency campaign against SWAPO in Southwest Africa/Namibia in the 1980s, and even kicked the asses of Cuban troops in Angola during operations Modular, Hooper and Packer.

Insurgencies are notoriously difficult to put down, and African nations are relatively poor, even if Nigeria is the wealthiest state in west Africa. My guess is that the STTEP was effective, but also benefited from the factional split, giving a false impression of Boko Haram’s defeat rather than a mere pause while they regrouped.

Boko Haram doesn’t have the strength to take over Nigeria, but they can probably continue to wreck havoc on outlying areas for years to come.