Collusion between the shadowy northern Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram
and al Qaeda
in the Islamic Maghreb is raising the specter that internationally
linked Islamic terrorism may be reaching deeper into the heart of Africa
than the Obama
administration is willing to acknowledge.
A clash between Boko Haram
and Nigerian security forces killed nearly 200 people this month, and
foreign policy insiders say the group has become increasingly
sophisticated and is making more use of such military hardware as
rocket-propelled grenades from jihadist smuggling networks tied to Mali and Libya.
The
State
Department has designated three Boko Haram
leaders as “global terrorists” with “close links” to al Qaeda in
the Islamic Maghreb. But the administration
appears to be acquiescing to Nigeria's
government, which is accused of committing human rights abuses
while attempting to negotiate with Boko Haram.
State
Department officials have become engaged in an internal debate
about how to publicly define the Boko Haram
threat and how the U.S. should be responding to the violence in Africa’s
top oil-producing nation.
“There is cooperation between Boko Haram
and [AQIM],” one State
Department official told The Washington Times last week. “But we
should be careful not to conflate the groups. Most individuals who call
themselves Boko
Haram are focused primarily on local Nigerian issues and respond
principally to political and security developments within Nigeria.”
Although
U.S. authorities are “of course concerned about the growing
sophistication and lethality of attacks ascribed to Boko Haram,”
the official said, “we are equally concerned about the continued
heavy-handed response of Nigerian security forces.”
Some analysts
say the administration
may be in denial of the extent to which Boko Haram
is linked, ideologically and now logistically, to North Africa’s top al Qaeda
outfit — al
Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb — which seized control of a large swath
of nearby Mali
before it was ousted by French military forces this year.
“The
fact that AQIM became a leader in the coalition that ruled northern Mali for almost a
year and had free rein to operate in northern Mali, and store
very high-powered weapons that originated in Libya, and had
the ability to move them south and west, into Nigeria
through Niger
— that’s huge,” said Jacob Zenn,
who has written extensively on Boko Haram
for the Jamestown
Foundation.
“Once AQIM took power with a coalition in
northern Mali,
you saw more rocket-propelled grenade attacks in Nigeria,” said
Mr. Zenn,
presently a legal adviser at the International
Center for Not-for-Profit Law. “So there was a link between the two
chronologically.”
It is not clear whether
a sea shift is occurring in the way others in Washington perceive Boko Haram.
“A
year ago, those of us who were watching closely, we were cautious about
what we could reasonably say about the external links with what was
called ‘Boko
Haram,’” said Peter M.
Lewis, who heads the Africa Studies Program at Johns
Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
“Now
there’s clear evidence that some elements of this group or this network
definitely have operational and ideological ties with some elements of
AQIM and possibly other Salafist armed groups operating in the Sahel,”
said Mr.
Lewis, referring to the vast geographic tract that runs west to east
across Africa just south of the Sahara.
Despite such ties, Mr. Lewis
defended the Obama
administration’s unhurried posture, asserting that the situation in
northern Nigeria
is complex because Boko Haram
remains as much an ill-defined label used by petty local criminals as it
is a hard-line, internationally connected Islamic terrorist group.
“If
you slap a foreign terrorist organization designation on Boko Haram,”
he said, the result may galvanize an otherwise local conflict into more
of a pitched battle between jihadists and the West.
Furthermore, Mr. Lewis
said, the U.S. is not in a position to “dictate terms” to Nigeria's
government about how to deal with the situation. Although the State
Department provided roughly $3 million in law enforcement assistance
to Nigeria
in 2012, the funds were minute compared with the tens of billions of
dollars Nigeria
generates in annual oil revenue.
As a result, the Obama
administration has appeared willing to quietly back efforts by
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan to create an amnesty program in
which Boko
Haram members might avoid prosecution in exchange for laying down
their weapons.
A similar approach in recent years succeeded in
taming militant activity in Nigeria’s
Christian south. But the effort has not yielded significant results in
the predominantly Muslim north.
It also is complicated by claims
that the Jonathan government’s security forces are running rampant in
northern Nigeria.
A
Human Rights Watch report in October cited the implication of the
security forces in such “serious human rights violations” as
execution-style killings of detainees.
Such claims were punctuated
by the high number of casualties after a two-day battle between the
security forces and members of Boko Haram
in the fishing town of Baga on April 19 and 20. Some reports suggested
that the death toll soared to nearly 200 after security forces began
burning down homes and killing civilians in response to a smaller attack
by Boko
Haram.
The incident appeared to cause irritation at the State
Department, where Secretary of State John F. Kerry engaged in
pre-scheduled talks last week with Nigerian Foreign Minister Olugbenga
Ayodeji Ashiru.
Before the meeting, a State
Department official told The Times that “heavy-handed tactics by
security forces reinforce a perception that the government
is unjust and abusive, which extremists have capitalized upon.”
“We
recommend the Nigerian government employ a comprehensive security
strategy that is not predicated on a force-based approach, [but] also
addresses the economic and political exclusion of vulnerable communities
in the north,” the official said.
With regard to specific
activities of Boko Haram,
however, neither Mr. Kerry nor Mr. Ashiru made mention of the group by
name during public remarks Thursday.
The rhetorical sidestep may
be explained by their desire to avoid lending legitimacy to the group,
but also might stem from a general agreement that Boko Haram’s
activities — violent as they may be — are unlikely to disrupt Nigeria’s oil
operations.
The nation is one of the top foreign oil providers to
the U.S. and a growing provider of oil and liquid natural gas to key
U.S. allies, most notably Japan. The oil operations are centered along Nigeria’s
southern coastline, far from Boko Haram’s
base in the north.
By Guy Taylor.
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