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.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS