3, January 2018
Boko Haram says it carried out Christmas attacks in Nigeria 0
A leader of the militant group Boko Haram has released a video claiming it carried out a series of attacks in north-east Nigeria over the Christmas period.
Abubakar Shekau, the head of one of Boko Haram’s three factions, declared the group active and operational a day after the Nigerian president said the militants had been defeated.
“We are in good health and nothing has happened to us,” he said in the video released on Tuesday. “Nigerian troops, police and those creating mischief against us can’t do anything against us, and you will gain nothing.
“We carried out the attacks in Maiduguri, in Gamboru, in Damboa. We carried out all these attacks.”
There has been a surge in violence in recent months, with dozens of people killed in suicide bombings and attacks on military bases in the region. Authorities have put this down to desperate insurgents trying to find food, weapons and ammunition.
Three people were reportedly burned to death on Christmas Day in Molai, a village near Maiduguri, the birthplace of Boko Haram. On Saturday 25 loggers were killed 13 miles from the state capital.
It is unclear to which Gamboru attack Shekau was referring, but he may have meant an ambush of an aid convoy on the Gamboru road in which four people were killed.
His declaration that the self-styled Islamists are alive and well contradicted the Nigerian president’s new year message which was broadcast the day before.
“We have since beaten Boko Haram,” said Muhammadu Buhari. “Isolated attacks still occur, but even the best-policed countries cannot prevent determined criminals from committing terrible acts of terror.”
In mid-December the government announced it was releasing $1bn from its excess oil account to pay for military equipment and training to fight the insurgency. Later it said not all the money would be spent on fighting Boko Haram alone.
Nigeria has recently announced a plan to combat Boko Haram by making villagers living in insecure areas move to garrison towns – although this was in effect how the military operated for most of 2017.
It is unclear how villagers who have always made their living farming, herding and fishing will be expected to survive when they are living on lands not their own and are not permitted to leave.
It is impossible to build up a clear picture of what exactly is happening in north-east Nigeria and across its borders in Cameroon and Chad.
According to a security tracker set up by the Council on Foreign Relations to monitor deaths reported in the media, more than 30,000 people have died in the conflict since May 2011. There are thought to have been large numbers of unreported deaths in inaccessible regions.
For the past two years, the Nigerian government has insisted it is winning or has won the war. According to the Nigerian army’s latest pronouncement, 700 Boko Haram captives recently escaped to Monguno, one of the local government areas of Borno state, after military operations in the region.
Pouring scorn on declarations of his death or capture, Shekau periodically releases video messages aimed at the government, the Nigerian people or a global audience. In the most notorious of these, he paraded the Chibok girls, a group of 300 schoolgirls kidnapped by his men, and vowed he would “sell them in the market”.
Culled from The Guardian
4, January 2018
Nigerian military rescues one of 270 girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014 0
Nigeria’s military has announced in a statement that its soldiers have rescued one of the 270 schoolgirls kidnapped in 2014 by Daesh-linked Boko Haram terrorist group from the town of Chibok.
The statement declared on Thursday that Salomi Pagu was discovered by troops deployed in the town of Pulka along with another girl and a small child, noting that the second girl was not among the Chibok pupils abducted by the notorious terror group.
“They…are in the safe custody of troops and receiving medical attention,” said the military statement without elaborating on the circumstance of their rescue.
The mass kidnapping of more than 270 female students triggered global condemnation and intense criticism of Nigerian officials in the country as well as an international “Bring Back Our Girls” campaign.
Of the 276 originally abducted students, nearly 60 escaped soon after the incident. Some 100 are still believed to remain in captivity.
This is while the Takfiri terror group released 82 of the young girls last May following a swap deal involving a ransom payment to the terrorists and the release of a number of the group’s imprisoned senior members. Prior to that, 24 of the kidnapped girls had been freed or found in 2016.
While the mass abduction in Chibok attracted international attention, aid groups insist that Boko Haram has kidnapped thousands more adults and children, whose fate have largely been neglected by local authorities.
The development came amid earlier reports that at least 31 loggers were believed to have been abducted by Boko Haram militants after they went missing in northeast Nigeria.
Security sources were cited as saying on Wednesday that the alleged kidnapping took place just days after 30 troops vanished following a raid on a military base in the same area.
Boko Haram fighters still operate in hard-to-reach rural areas where military operations are minimal.
Boko Haram’s eight-year insurgency against the Nigerian government has further spilled into neighboring Niger, Chad and Cameroon, leaving nearly 20,000 people dead and displacing over 2.6 million more.
Most of the displaced rely on food handouts from aid agencies while others have turned to logging in the arid region for firewood which they sell to purchase food.
The Takfiri terrorists have increasingly targeted loggers in their armed campaign, accusing them of spying and relaying information to the military and the local militia battling them.
On Christmas Day, the militants killed 25 loggers at a logging site outside the city of Maiduguri.
Source: Presstv