Nigeria on Monday insisted it would crush Boko Haram militants and avoid another election postponement, even as violence raged and the Muslim extremists’ leader vowed to defeat a regional force hunting them.
Nigerian National Security Adviser Sambo Dasuki’s comments came as Boko Haram launched another attack in neighboring Niger and reports emerged of 20 people kidnapped in Cameroon, with 12 of them executed.
Niger’s parliament voted unanimously on Monday to send troops to join the regional fight against the extremists, who have seized swathes of northern Nigeria in a conflict that has claimed more than 13,000 lives since 2009.
ELECTION DELAY
Dasuki, who over the weekend secured a six-week delay to Nigeria’s presidential elections, vowed that “all known Boko Haram camps will be taken out” by the time of the rescheduled vote.
“They won’t be there. They will be dismantled,” he told reporters in an interview, when asked what gains could be made against the Muslim militants before the new polling date of March 28.
Nigeria has previously set deadlines to defeat the insurgents that have come and gone.
However, Dasuki said that even if the goal was not achieved that “the situation then would surely be conducive enough for elections,” with no need for a further postponement to voting.
CONFLICT EXPANDS
Meanwhile, Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau mocked West African leaders’ multinational force in a new video on YouTube on Monday, saying it “won’t achieve anything.” The extremists last week opened up a new front in Niger after sustained attacks in Cameroon’s far northern region, which led to the deployment of Chadian troops alongside Cameroon forces.
They have widened their offensive in recent weeks in the far northeast of Nigeria around Lake Chad, where the borders of all four countries converge.
Niger, while housing thousands of refugees from the conflict, had been mainly spared the violence until last week. Monday’s unanimous parliamentary vote to send troops to join the fighting is expected to result in about 750 soldiers deployed, a lawmaker said.
Just hours before the vote, militants raided a prison in Diffa, southeast Niger, but were repelled.
A deadly explosion then ripped through a local market, with one local merchant saying: “Everything blew up — I saw bodies everywhere.”
On Sunday, suspected extremists kidnapped 20 passengers aboard a bus going from Koza to Mora in the far north of Cameroon, then killed 12 of them and released the rest.
“Every day citizens are kidnapped in this region,” a security source said. “Some are usually freed when their families negotiate, while others are killed.”
Boko Haram released three new videos on YouTube, one of them a 28 minute speech from its leader Shekau from an undisclosed location flanked by eight masked fighters.
He dismissed the threat from regional forces, stating: “Your alliance will not achieve anything.”
MULTILATERAL RESPONSE
Nigeria maintains that the involvement of troops from Chad and Cameroon is part of an existing agreement to fight the Muslim militants between countries in the Lake Chad region.
On Saturday, Nigeria and its neighbors — Chad, Niger, Cameroon and Benin — agreed to muster 8,700 troops, police and civilians for a wider, African Union-backed force against Boko Haram.
The US estimates Shekau as having between 4,000 and 6,000 hardcore fighters at his disposal, and he mocked regional efforts to defeat them.
“You send 7,000 troops? Why don’t you send seven million,” he asked in Arabic.
“By Allah, it is small. We can seize them one by one,” he said.
Shekau also directly threatened Chadian President Idriss Deby, whose forces have attacked Boko Haram in the northeastern Nigerian towns of Gamboru and Malam Fatori in recent days.
Shekau’s speech appeared to put the Boko Haram insurgency in the wider context of a global jihad, possibly in response to the regional nature of the conflict.
In the last six years, the group has mainly operated in three states in northeast Nigeria, taking over a succession of towns and villages as part of its aim to create a hardline Muslim state.
Boko Haram has been considered to have essentially local aims and is thought to have few direct, operational links to extremist groups elsewhere, although it is believed to include some foreign fighters, most likely paid mercenaries.
However, Shekau has mentioned groups such as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and the leader of the so-called Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
One of the three latest videos shows al-Baghdadi with archive footage and a voiceover recalling a battle between British soldiers and fighters from the Sokoto Caliphate in northern Nigeria.
The Sokoto Caliphate was dismantled by British colonialists who annexed the northern Muslim kingdoms and the predominantly Christian south to form Nigeria in the early 20th century.
In his speech, Shekau appears to broaden the group’s aim: “We never rose up to fight Africa. We rose up to fight the world.”
“We are going to fight the world on the principle that whoever doesn’t obey Allah and the Prophet to either obey or die or become a slave,” he said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to