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Good
enough to rate a mention. No scandal and wall-to-wall coverage of
this though. Are 200 Nigerian lives worth 12 French?
Again it's all about - you guessed it! - OIL
It seems to have taken three days to reach Sky News - for a 30 second segment
Islamic extremist attack in Nigeria named the ‘deadliest massacre’ in history
14
January, 2015
HUNDREDS
of bodies — too many to count — remain strewn in the bush in
Nigeria from an Islamic extremist attack that Amnesty International
suggested Friday is the “deadliest massacre” in the history of Book Haram
Mike
Omeri, the government spokesman on the insurgency, said fighting
continued Friday for Baga, a town on the border with Chad where
insurgents seized a key military base on January 3 and attacked again
on Wednesday
“Security
forces have responded rapidly, and have deployed significant military
assets and conducted air strikes against militant targets,” Omeri
said in a statement
District
head Baba Abba Hassan said most victims are children, women and
elderly people who could not run fast enough when insurgents drove
into Baga, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles on
town residents.
This
photo from April 2013 shows a young girl standing amid the burned
ruins of Baga, Nigeria. (AP Photo / Haruna Umar file ) Source: AP
“The
human carnage perpetrated by Boko Haram terrorists in Baga was
enormous,” Muhammad Abba Gava, a spokesman for poorly armed
civilians in a defence group that fights Boko Haram, told The
Associated Press.
He
said the civilian fighters gave up on trying to count all the bodies.
“No one could attend to the corpses and even the seriously injured
ones who may have died by now,” Gava said.
An
Amnesty International statement said there are reports the town was
razed and as many as 2,000 people killed.
If
true, “this marks a disturbing and bloody escalation of Boko
Haram’s ongoing onslaught,” said Daniel Eyre, Nigeria researcher
for Amnesty International.
In
Washington, U.S. State Department Spokesman Jen Psaki condemned the
attacks.
“We
urge Nigeria and its neighbours to take all possible steps to address
the urgent threat of Boko Haram. Even in the face of these horrifying
attacks, terrorist organisations like Boko Haram must not distract
Nigeria from carrying out credible and peaceful elections that
reflect the will of the Nigerian people,” Psaki said in a
statement.
This
photo from April 2013 shows a photo of a man trying to cool down
another man burnt during fighting in Baga, Nigeria. Picture: AP
Photo/Haruna Umar. Source: AP
The
previous bloodiest day in the uprising involved soldiers gunning down
unarmed detainees freed in a March 14, 2014, attack on Giwa military
barracks in Maiduguri city. Amnesty said then that satellite imagery
indicated more than 600 people were killed that day.
The
5-year insurgency killed more than 10,000 people last year alone,
according to the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations. More
than a million people are displaced inside Nigeria and hundreds of
thousands have fled across its borders into Chad, Cameroon and
Nigeria.
Emergency
workers said this week they are having a hard time coping with scores
of children separated from their parents in the chaos of Boko Haram’s
increasingly frequent and deadly attacks.
Just
seven children have been reunited with parents in Yola, capital of
Adamawa state, where about 140 others have no idea if their families
are alive or dead, said Sa’ad Bello, the co-ordinator of five
refugee camps in Yola.
He
said he was optimistic that more reunions will come as residents
return to towns that the military has retaken from extremists in
recent week.
Suleiman
Dauda, 12, said he ran into the bushes with neighbours when
extremists attacked his village, Askira Uba, near Yola last year.
“I
saw them kill my father, they slaughtered him like a ram. And up
until now I don’t know where my mother is,” he told The
Associated Press at Daware refugee camp in Yola.
Trouble
Brewing: West Turns Blind Eye to Boko Haram’s Bloody Massacre
While
the world’s been focused on ISIL’s reign of terror in the
Mideast, it’s largely neglected the rise of its de-facto
counterpart in West Africa, Boko Haram. Now that over 2,000 people
have been killed over the past few days and a 10-year-old suicide
bomber has been used, that may be changing.
12
January, 2015
Boko
Haram first rocketed to international notoriety last spring
after they kidnapped nearly 300 female students from their
traditional area of operations in northeast Nigeria. This
led to widespread global backlash and the social media campaign
#BringBackOurGirls. In the meantime, internet activism has obviously
proven to be no replacement for on-the-ground operations,
and the Nigerian military has had severe difficulty in battling
the terrorists. The expanding chaos has finally become transnational,
with militants spilling over into Cameroon and refugees
fleeing by the thousands into Chad. As Boko Haram begins
to look more and more like the West African version
of ISIL, the international community’s reaction to the
two couldn’t be more different.
Different
Continents, Same Terror
ISIL
and Boko Haram are located relatively far away from one another,
but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t anything alike. Both
groups are fundamentalist Islamic organizations that want
to violently impose their views on others, and they’ve
been fighting tooth and nail over the past few years to do
so. No means are off limits in achieving their ends, be it
suicide bombings or the mass killing of civilians, and their
tactics are almost identical. They appear to blend in almost
seamlessly with the local population before launching
surprise guerrilla-like attacks on soft and hard targets. Their
fighting style is a blend of the conventional and asymmetrical,
and they resort to the seizure of military bases to procure
valuable assets such as arms and vehicles.
Probably
the most important similarity, however, is that both terrorist groups
are the direct result of Western destabilization in their
respective regions. NATO and its allied partners in the Gulf
have been feverishly trying to overthrow the democratically
elected government in Syria for the past four years,
and they assisted ISIL while it was still in its infancy
in order to empower one of the many proxy groups they
were using to achieve this goal. As pertains to Boko Haram,
the group’s capabilities were drastically improved after the
2011 War on Libya and the subsequently related intervention
in Mali led to an influx of weapons and fighters
to Nigeria. In both cases, neither ISIL nor Boko Haram would
have become as troublesome terrorists as they are today had
it not been for fertile conditions that the West created
for them.
Not
All Terrorist Victims Are Equal
Seeing
as how they’re both so inherently alike, one might think that
the West would respond to each terrorist group in almost
the same way, which is actually not the case at all. While
they’re bombing ISIL positions in Iraq and Syria, they’re
doing nothing of the kind (or even publicly contemplating it)
in Nigeria, and despite rendering assistance to the
Iraqi government, they’re treating the Nigerians in a similar
pariah fashion as they are the Syrians by withholding their
support. The US unsuccessfully attempted to use its
special forces to rescue kidnapped American journalist James
Foley over the summer, but no such operation ever occurred
to free the nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by Boko
Haram as sex slaves.
After
the Paris terrorist attacks that killed 17 people, world leaders
marched in opposition to terrorism and more than three
million people across France took to the streets to join
them. Likewise, when Boko Haram slaughtered more than 2,000
people over the weekend (a number comparable in scope
to the nearly 3,000 people who died during 9/11), no such
global condemnation or solidarity marches occurred. American
activists have lately become fond of saying that
#BlackLivesMatter, but apparently not those in Africa that
perish due to black-on-black violence. So what is the
explanation for the obvious double standards being applied
to Boko Haram?
Energy
Trumps Ethics
The
US has a long habit of engaging in dangerous geopolitical
games (e.g. the Taliban in Afghanistan, Islamists in Libya,
ISIL in the Mideast, etc.), and the case of Boko Haram is
no different. Although not supported to the same degree
as the previously mentioned examples are (if directly at all),
the US does stand to make relative strategic gains as a
result of Boko Haram’s successes, however unethical this may
sound, provided that the group’s destabilization can be
‘controlled’. One may understandably doubt whether the US can
in fact control or indirectly corral Boko Haram’s actions,
seeing as how they ultimately failed to do so with the
Taliban, Libyan Islamists, and ISIL, but what is undeniable is
that Nigeria is a valuable piece of geostrategic real estate
whose importance has lately been rising with both the EU and
China.
EU:
Nigeria
is in the top ten for global gas reserves, while its
production and export remain minimal. This shows that it has enormous
potential to become a major gas player in the future,
especially since it is already the fourth-largest LNG exporter
according to the US’ Energy Information Agency. At a time when
the EU is looking to diversify away from Russian sources,
the prospects of a Trans-Saharan Pipeline to the
Mediterranean appear more attractive than ever. If Nigeria can
remain in a state of semi-controlled chaos due to Boko
Haram, then whoever can influence the group can indirectly affect the
security of the EU’s probable Trans-Saharan pipeline, thereby
leveraging influence over Brussels.
China:
Nigeria
is also a major oil exporter and member of OPEC, being the
largest producer in Africa (and number ten or eleven in the
world) and containing the second-largest reserves. It used to be
one of the top five suppliers to the US in 2012,
but since then, fracking has led to the country being the
first to no longer sell any oil at all to America,
according to an October 2014 article from the Financial
Times. Filling the void has been China, which is also engaged in a
continental competition for influence with the US
over African resources and markets. It provided a $1.1 billion
loan in 2013 to what some have described as Africa’s
largest economy (it’s long been the most populous one) and
announced an investment in early 2014 of over $10 billion
for hydrocarbon prospecting in the north-central part
of the country very close to Boko Haram’s traditional
attack zone.
What
Nigeria’s geostrategic importance to the EU and China amounts
to is that the US may be engaged in a delicate balancing
act of trying to contain (but not eliminate) Boko Haram
in order to gain indirect influence over Brussels and
Beijing’s interests. This would explain why it is reluctant
to fight against the group and enacts double standards
in addressing its violence. The thing is, this dangerous policy
is fraught with the risk of blowback, and it could be that
the next major terrorist attack against the West is cooked
up not in the Mideast, but in West Africa.
Another
‘Islamic State’? Boko Haram’s captured area about size of
Slovakia
13
January, 2015
Boko
Haram has grown from a small terror group to a mini-country with its
own territory, which can be compared to gains made by the Islamic
State (IS). Boko Haram now controls an area the size of Costa Rica or
Slovakia.
The
militant group's territory now totals about 52,000 square kilometers,
according to an estimate released
by The Telegraph.
One
of the latest towns to be captured by the group was Baga in the
northeastern Nigerian state of Borno, close to Lake Chad. According
to witness estimates,
Boko Haram militants killed at least 2,000
people there, although the Nigerian military later put the figure at
150.
Amnesty
International said the attack could be the deadliest by the group
since it surfaced in 2009.
“For
five kilometers, I kept stepping on dead bodies until I reached Malam
Karanti village [near Baga], which was also deserted and burnt,” a
surviving fisherman told AFP.
The
militants currently control over 11 local government areas with more
than 1.7 million people, The Telegraph estimated. Their territory
stretches from the Mandara Mountains, on the eastern border with
Cameroon, to Lake Chad in the north and the Yedseram River in the
west.
The
group seems to be copying the moves of the Islamic State, which began
capturing territories in Syria and Iraq in June 2014.
Now
the area controlled by IS is between 39,000
square kilometers (the size of Switzerland) to 90,000 square
kilometers (about the size of Portugal), according to
various reports.
After
the Islamic State proclaimed its caliphate in June 2014, Boko Haram
did the same in the northeastern Nigerian town of Gwoza, which was
seized by the extremists in August.
“There
is a copy-cat element at work here,” Andrew
Pocock, the British high commissioner to Nigeria, told The
Telegraph. “If
ISIL [now Islamic State, also known as ISIS] can declare a Caliphate,
then so can we.”
According
to Pocock, the group wants “to
be seen by their peers as grown-up jihadis” and
to show "we
can control territory, we can control a Caliphate.”
“You
need a place where you can base yourself and keep equipment and
supplies and, indeed, captives. It means that you’ve got to hold
territory,” he dded.
Boko
Haram's attacks are not limited to Nigeria; neighboring Chad and
Cameroon are also among the militants' targets. In December, the
group approached Cameroon's Far North region. However, the
Cameroonian army managed to repel the attacks.
AFP Photo / Book Haram
Sixty
girls managed to escape. The remaining 219 were converted to Islam
and “married
off,” said
the extremists.
According
to the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations, Boko Haram
killed more than 10,000 people in 2014 alone. The violence has
displaced more than one million Nigerians.
According
to UN estimates released on Tuesday, at least 11,000 people have fled
into Chad in a matter of days.
Boko
Haram says it wants to enforce Sharia law throughout the country.
Nigeria’s population is both Christian and Muslim, approximately
50/50.
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