Nigeria’s Boko Haram Gaining Control in Northeast, Analyst Says
The Islamist militant group Boko Haram is carving out a territorial base in northeastern Nigeria as the military loses control of rural areas, an analyst said.
The Islamist militant group Boko Haram is carving out a territorial base in northeastern Nigeria as the military loses control of rural areas, an analyst said.
“Boko Haram seems to be taking the first steps in establishing a limited Islamic state that it wants to see instituted across the Muslim-majority north,” Martin Roberts, senior sub-Saharan Africa analyst at IHS Country Risk in London, said today in an e-mailed statement.
“The main purpose is likely to establish a fairly secure zone where militants can receive further training and hold hostages for ransom or exchange,” he said. “This includes more than 200 schoolgirls still missing after being kidnapped from Chibok on 14 April.”
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan imposed emergency rule in the northeastern states of Adamawa, Borno and Yobe in May 2013. Boko Haram has been fighting since 2009 to impose Islamic law on Africa’s biggest economy and largest oil producer. The movement claimed responsibility for Abuja’s worst-ever bombing in April, and killed at least 2,053 people in the first half of this year, according to New York-based Human Rights Watch.
Kano, the north’s biggest city, has been hit by a series of suicide bombs carried out by women in the past week. The most recent, on July 30, killed six students, government spokesman Mike Omeri told reporters in the capital, Abuja.
“The use of suicide bombers, particularly female, is behind a rapidly rising rate of mass-casualty attacks and targeted assassination attempts,” Roberts said.
