Challenging Boko-Haram
"...Over time this pledge of allegiance might lead to the internationalization [of a threat ranging beyond Nigeria spilling into neighbouring countries]."
"[International support representing anti-Boko Haram from the U.S. France, the U.K.] may render the Nigerian militants' fight all the more attractive to these foreign jihadists."
"The upcoming Nigerian elections and potential post election upheaval provide too rich of a target environment for the jihadists to pass up."
Peter Pham, director, Atlantic Council's Africa Centre, Washington
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| Chadian troops participate along with Nigerian special forces in an hostage rescue exercise at the end of the Flintlock exercise in Mao, Chad, Saturday, March 7, 2015. The U.S. military and its Western partners conduct this training annually and set up plans long before Boko Haram began attacking its neighbors Niger, Chad and Cameroon. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay) |
"We announce our allegiance to the Caliph of the Muslims [Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS leader] ... and will hear and obey in times of difficulty and prosperity, in hardship and ease, and to endure being discriminated against, and not to dispute about rule with those in power, except in case of evident infidelity regarding that which there is a proof from Allah."So what accounts for the fact that Africa's largest, oil-wealthy, most populous country, divided between Christians and Muslims, is incapable of adequately addressing a six-year-old insurgency that has seen thousands of Africans slaughtered, countless girls raped and women taken as slaves, and the once-best-equipped, largest military in Africa, has been incapable of challenging their spread, and rescuing Nigerians from their depraved assaults?
Abubakar Shekau, video pledge of ISIS allegiance
"The fact of the matter is that Nigeria and its neighbours are rooting Boko Haram out of its strongholds and degrading its combat abilities."
Mike Omeri, Nigerian government spokesman
Corruption at the government executive level all the way down to the military leaders in the field who have steadily milked the funds meant for enlisted men and their equipment into their personal bank accounts. If there is no conscience at the local level of the military machine, it takes its cue from the executive branch of a government that has proven itself singularly disinterested in one of the first and most vital duties of any government; security and the protection of its people.
There is an estimated seven thousand members of the terrorist group Boko Haram. The jihadis, newly pledged to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, as a regional group in a spreading caliphate, have raided nearby Chad and Niger, spreading chaos there, and adding to the million and a half refugees who have fled their villages in northern Nigeria seeking haven elsewhere and finding 'elsewhere' no haven at all, as Boko Haram militias spread their presence.
Just as the 300 schoolgirls abducted from the remote town of Chibok and taken into slavery/concubinage have never been recovered, others have since shared the same fate. And the jihadis act with impudent insularity, secure in their belief that they are untouchable; certainly not by the Nigerian military which has proven pitifully inadequate to that very elemental task.
Boko Haram's brutish atrocities eclipse even those of the ISIS atrocities in beheadings and enslavements; certainly they're of an earlier vintage, before ISIS even came on the scene in Syria and Iraq as the force they've since become. But it is hypothesized by Mr. Pham that the link between ISIS and Boko Haram may not work to the advantage of the Nigerian jihadists since it is tribal-based with its militants of the Kanuri tribe influenced to join the brutal marauders.
Residents of the Niger border town of Bosso saw hundreds of vehicles packed with soldiers from Niger crossing into Nigeria, followed by heavy combat detonations informing them that Boko Haram was taking some heavy hits. At an African Union summit in January leaders of African countries had agreed to send 7,500 combined troops to fight Boko Haram, the number increased by another thousand latterly.
Chadian Brig.Gen. Zakaria Ngobongue spoke of the extremism that Boko Haram represented as a "cancer" which one nation's military alone could not be expected to defeat. "They are bandits and criminals who have nothing to do with religion", he averred, as though repeating the political correctness so current in Western societies battling their own versions of Islamofascism.
Labels: Jihadis, Nigeria, Terrorism
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, March 10, 2015
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