Nigeria’s “Taliban” sect, which staged a series of attacks in four states in the north of the country since Sunday, made its formal debut in 2004.
Before then elements of extremism started showing in pockets of neighborhoods of Maidugiri, capital of Borno state in 2002.
In January 2004 a band of some 200 young Muslim extremists including women and children set up a camp at Kanamma village in northeastern Yobe, adjacent to Maiduguri state on Nigeria’s border with Niger, which they named Afghanistan. They named themselves Talibans, drawing inspiration from the Afghanistan group of the same. But locals refer to them as boko haram, a hausa expression for “Western education is a sin.”
The Talibans’ current strength is not publicly known.
Their goal is to impose up a strict form of Shariah and set up a “pure Islamic” state in the north of Nigeria.
In an interview with AFP in February 2005, one of the sect’s leaders, Aminu Tashen-Ilimi, said the group’s aim was to establish an Afghan Taliban-styled puritanical Islamic government through armed insurrection and cleanse the society of “immorality” and “infidelity.”
“This a fanatical organization that is anti-government, anti-people. We don’t know what their aims are yet. We are out to identify and arrest their leaders and also destroy their enclaves wherever they are, wherever they may be seen,” Nigeria national police chief Ogbonna Onovo said.
The group regularly targets police stations in its attacks.
At its creation, the group briefly took control of Kanamma and raided several police stations but was bloodily dispersed by government troops after a two-day battle in which scores were killed, many were arrested while the rest went underground. Eight months later, 60 survivors launched a guerrilla attack on a police stations in Borno’s Gwoza, on the Cameroon border, killing some police officers and residents before fleeing to the Mandara border mountains.
Since then the group has waged attacks on-and-off often with long breaks in between.
A two-day battle in 2005 left 28 “Taliban” dead and scores arrested.
Last week on Friday, police in Maiduguri announced the arrest of nine members of the group at a training camp in Borno’s Bama town with 74 empty shells of home-made bombs and other bomb-making components.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS