LAGOS, Nigeria - Extremists from three neighboring countries are fighting in Nigeria’s northeastern Islamic uprising, said a purported captured extremist whose account reinforces fears that one of Africa’s most powerful Islamic militant groups is growing closer to al-Qaida affiliates and that radical movements are spilling across national boundaries.
“We do have members from Chad, Niger and Cameroon who actively participate in most of our attacks,” said a young man presented to journalists Friday night by Nigeria’s military as a captured fighter of the Boko Haram terrorist network.
The claim of foreign fighters indicates the growing influence of Boko Haram, which started as a machete-wielding gang and now wages war with armored cars, rocket-propelled grenades and improvised explosive devices in its mission to force Nigeria - Africa’s largest oil producer and a country of 160 million that has almost equal numbers of Christians and Muslims - to become an Islamic state.
Boko Haram poses the biggest security threat in years to the cohesion of Nigeria - already riven by sectarian, tribal and regional divisions that often explode into bloodletting - ahead of elections in 2015 that likely will be contested by the current President Goodluck Jonathan, a fundamentalist Christian.
A harsh military crackdown in three northeastern states covering one-sixth of the country since mid-May has forced Boko Haram out of major cities and towns, but the security forces appear unable to prevent regular extremist attacks on targets such as school pupils, of whom hundreds have been killed in recent months.
Jonathan’s government, which is struggling to control the Islamic rebellion, for the first time presented the purported Boko Haram fighter, a 22-year-old walking on crutches because of a bullet wound suffered when he was captured in a recent attack.
The young man refused to give his name for fear that his family would be targeted. His account sheds new light on life inside Boko Haram, which means “western education is forbidden” in the Hausa language.
The captured extremist member said religion did not figure in his life as a Nigerian Islamic warrior, insisting that his leaders “had never once preached Islam to us.”
He said the name of Allah was invoked only when “we are running out of food supply in the bush. Our leaders will assemble us and declare that we would be embarking on a mission for God and Islam.”
He added: “I did not see any act of religion in there. We are just killing people, stealing and suffering in the bush.”
Recently, Boko Haram has carried out brutal attacks on mainly Muslim civilians. The new assaults “offer vital and disturbing insights” that “not only confirm many of the group’s earlier developments but also al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb’s growing influence over it,” Jonathan Hill, senior lecturer at the Defence Studies Department of King’s College, London, wrote in an analysis published online this month on africanarguments.org.
“These atrocities bear many striking similarities to those carried out by [al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb] and its various forbears in Algeria,” wrote Hill, the author of Nigeria Since Independence: Forever Fragile?
He noted that “despite the extraordinary efforts of the security forces, Boko Haram appears unbowed and its campaign undimmed.”
Justice Minister Mohammed Adoke has claimed that Boko Haram is being influenced from abroad. “Nigeria is experiencing the impact of externally induced internal security challenges, manifesting in the activities of militant insurgents,” he said while defending the country’s record at a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. Boko Haram’s founder,Mohammed Yusuf, received funds from Iran, Sudan and Saudi Arabia in the 1990s, according to Hill.
Adoke did not give any details of the purported external influences. Boko Haram fighters, including current leader Abubakar Shekau, were reported fighting alongside al-Qaida-affiliated groups that seized northern Mali last year. The movement also has boasted that it has fighters trained in Somalia by al-Shabab - the group that claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack that killed at least 67 at Kenya’s upscale Westgate Mall last month.
Information for this article was contributed by Haruna Umar of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 8 on 10/27/2013