Boko Haram (19 page)

Beyond that, it would lead to Britain saying that Ansaru was likely responsible for the kidnapping, listing it as a banned terrorist group and proclaiming it as ‘broadly aligned with Al-Qaeda'.
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The supposed kidnapping ringleader, Abu Mohammed, would, however, not be able to answer questions on the group. He died in Nigerian custody a day after the operation from, according to the DSS, ‘severe bullet wounds' he suffered during the previous raid that led to his arrest in Zaria.
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In the following months, Ansaru would be blamed for a series of other kidnappings as well as attacks, with the new group's methods becoming more ruthless and its rhetoric increasingly taking on an international tone. It would claim credit for a raid on a police unit in the capital Abuja in November 2012 where a number of Islamists were believed to have been detained in a jail known as the abattoir because it was inside a warehouse formerly used for slaughtering cattle, chains still hanging from the ceiling.
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An attack on a planned contingent of Nigerian troops expected to be deployed to Mali occurred in January 2013, with a homemade bomb exploding as the soldiers' convoy passed near Okene in Kogi state, located in central Nigeria and where a number of extremists tied to Boko Haram were said to be from. The attack killed two of the soldiers to be deployed to Mali, where a French-led offensive had begun targeting Islamists who had taken control of a huge
swathe of the nearby country. Ansaru claimed the attack, and in doing so said it was targeting troops who aimed to ‘demolish the Islamic empire of Mali'.
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One particularly audacious raid in February 2013 saw abductors storm a construction site in the northern city of Bauchi, blow a hole in the gate with explosives, kill a security guard and kidnap seven foreigners, including one Briton, one Greek, an Italian, two Lebanese and two Syrians. An email to journalists purported to be from Ansaru, written in English, said that the attack occurred because of ‘the transgressions and atrocities done to the religion of Allah [...] by the European countries in many places such as Afghanistan and Mali'. It seemed doubtful those were the true motives behind the kidnappings, with ransom money often the ultimate goal, but the statement again showed that the group was seeking to take a more international stance, at least in its rhetoric.
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The following month, on 9 March, another statement would be issued, in both Arabic and English, claiming that the seven hostages taken in Bauchi had been killed. It was accompanied by images of some of the hostages appearing to be dead, and had been distributed by an arm of the Sinam al-Islam Network, which runs an online jihadist forum.
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The process by which the statement was distributed again indicated Ansaru had cultivated some form of relationship with foreign jihadi groups. In the statement, it said it killed the hostages because of attempts to rescue them. It provided a link to an obscure website that carried a story on whether British planes had landed in Nigeria to attempt a rescue, with aircraft having been spotted in Abuja. According to the British government, the planes that were spotted were there to help airlift troops and equipment to Mali and had nothing to do with a rescue bid.
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A shocking kidnapping would occur in February 2013, when a French family of seven were abducted while visiting a national park in northern Cameroon, near the Nigerian border. The victims included the mother and father as well as four children,
aged between 5 and 12, and their uncle. The French government said it was believed the victims were taken across the border into Nigeria after the abduction, and a video emerged later in which Abubakar Shekau claimed responsibility for the kidnappings on behalf of Boko Haram. The video also showed images of the family and included the father, Tanguy Moulin-Fournier, reading a statement for the camera. Shekau and the family were never shown in the same frame and it was unclear if they were ever in the same location.
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It marked the first time Shekau's Boko Haram had taken credit for a kidnapping. In the video, Shekau demanded the release of Boko Haram prisoners in both Nigeria and Cameroon, though there were suspicions all along that what the extremists were really after was money. It was never clear whether criminals had kidnapped the family and sold them on to Boko Haram, whether it was a planned action or if members of the extremist group simply came across them by chance and decided to carry out the abduction. The border with Cameroon in north-eastern Nigeria is porous, and Boko Haram members – like many average residents – are believed to circulate back and forth.

France insisted throughout the ordeal that it would not pay a ransom, though it was an open secret that it had done so to free captives repeatedly in the past in other countries, drawing criticism since the money would obviously provide financing to extremist groups. In the end, someone paid. A Nigerian security source told me the payment was made through the Cameroon government, though the family had been held in Nigeria, but he said he did not know the amount. French news channel iTele reported that 16 detained Boko Haram members were released and $7 million was paid to free the family.
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Another report from Reuters, citing a confidential Nigerian government document, put the ransom figure at some $3.15 million.
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It was never clear who paid the money, whatever the final amount was. The family was released in April after being held for two months through an arrangement
that saw them arrive back in Cameroon. They appeared thin and scraggly, but seemed to be in good health considering the circumstances.

The first half of 2013 felt depressingly brutal. Shekau, wearing a knee-length green caftan with an AK-47 dangling from a strap around his neck, appeared in one video denying rumours of a ceasefire deal that had been circulating. The camera then cut to another shot where a man identified as an informer was pinned to the ground by others who slit his throat. They beheaded him later in the video.
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In Kano, gunmen opened fire on two clinics where polio vaccination workers had gathered, killing 10 people.
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The attack came after a radio programme revived old conspiracy theories that had previously circulated in northern Nigeria about polio vaccines being a Western plot against Muslims. It was never clear whether the attacks were directly linked to Boko Haram, but they added to the nightmare of death and destruction in parts of northern Nigeria.

The situation was also becoming murkier. A US official who spoke to me in February 2013 on condition of anonymity talked of how little was known of the Nigerian extremists and their intentions. ‘Even in painting a picture of where the lines are between these different groups, and how much of the criminal overlaps into it, all of this stuff is very difficult to determine', he said.

Beyond the mayhem in Nigeria, there were reports of Boko Haram members showing up in Gao and elsewhere in Mali to fight with the Islamist extremists who had taken control of the northern half of the country there. There were doubts over whether they were truly Boko Haram members, and such doubts continue to exist for some, but a Western diplomat told me in March 2014 that he believed they were.

‘I think they were probably Boko Haram or Ansaru guys, which wouldn't be all that surprising because we've known since the early 2000s that you have Nigerian extremists travelling in ones and twos and fives and sixes up to northern Mali to train with, first, the
GSPC [Algeria's Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat], and then when it morphed into AQIM.'

The US official I spoke with in 2013 pointed out that foreign jihadists are often attracted to like-minded struggles elsewhere, while also raising an issue that would become salient in later months. ‘You will also probably see a certain number of people go, and a certain number of people come back', he said. ‘A concern is when they do come back, because they can come back with a greater skill set than when they left.' In other words, they would be better fighters.

From his work in previous assignments, the US official was familiar with Algeria's GSPC, and he saw certain similarities in what was then occurring in Nigeria. The GSPC had broken away from the Armed Islamic Group in the 1990s after growing frustrated with the widespread killing of civilians in its insurgency against the government. Later, GSPC declared its allegiance to Al-Qaeda and became known as Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, taking on a more international and especially anti-Western stance. Criminality and Islamist extremism also blended with GSPC and AQIM, with its leaders believed to have made fortunes through various forms of smuggling in addition to kidnappings. Speaking of Ansaru, the US official said that ‘they do seem to have a sort of different approach than (Boko Haram) writ large tactically [...] Kind of reminds me in some ways of how the GSPC originally broke out in Algiers because they didn't want to see so much broad targeting of Muslims, wanted to go in a different direction. So these things are not unprecedented in this region.'

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Dependable information from the Nigerian security forces was in short supply, and by that time, the allegations against them of outrageous abuses were piling up. On a road near the Borno state government compound, a group of women were gathering regularly in 2013 in hopes that the governor would hear their pleas. They had lost their husbands or sons or other family members and, beyond
the sorrow of their loved ones turning up dead, had in many cases also been robbed of their household's main breadwinner. When I was there in October 2013, there were about two dozen women gathered under neem trees along the roadside, and when I began speaking to one, others quickly crowded around, raising their voices and demanding that I interview them as well in the hope that I could somehow help. One woman I spoke with said her husband and son were killed by Boko Haram, but others I talked to in detail as the crowd pressed against me and a colleague, who translated from Hausa for me, blamed the military.

One 30-year-old woman said her husband had been arrested in the restive Gwange neighbourhood of Maiduguri about 15 months earlier during a military sweep. About a week later, the military returned his dead body to her for burial, informing her that he had died in detention. According to her, he had been shot. She denied he was a member of Boko Haram and accused soldiers of killing him. ‘He was taken away, then later they killed him', she said, describing him as a 40-year-old taxi driver. She and her 12-year-old son had since moved back to her parents' home. Another 20-year-old woman said her husband went out to ‘look for daily bread' in 2012 when soldiers arrested him along with others suspected of being members of Boko Haram, later returning his dead body to her, leaving her to look after her two-year-old daughter alone. Those I spoke with denied that their family members were connected to Boko Haram and said their pleas for assistance had been ignored by the government and security forces.
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Their accusations were not a surprise since similar ones had been made repeatedly. Many of the alleged cases tended to follow a pattern: a roadside bomb would explode near a military post or convoy and soldiers would respond ruthlessly, rounding up men from the neighbourhood and setting homes, market stalls and other buildings alight. According to accounts provided to journalists and human rights groups, the soldiers would accuse residents of cooperating with the insurgents.

Beyond the destruction itself, the allegations would limit the kinds of military training Nigeria's foreign allies could provide. The United States was prevented by law from providing training to soldiers whose units were suspected of serious rights abuses. Any soldier who rotated through Nigeria's so-called Joint Task Force operating in the north-east could be barred, no matter if they themselves were guilty or not.

A powerful report from Human Rights Watch released in October 2012 set out a long list of alleged abuses by Boko Haram as well as members of Nigeria's security forces, questioning whether both were guilty of crimes against humanity.
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A few weeks later, Amnesty International issued a report with similar accusations, alleging widespread extrajudicial killings and torture by the security forces, among other abuses.
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Nigeria's National Human Rights Commission would report in June 2013 that it had ‘received several credibly attested allegations of gross violations by officials of the [military task force], including allegations of summary executions, torture, arbitrary detention amounting to internment and outrages against the dignity of civilians, as well as rape'.
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A Nigerian official who has followed the situation closely estimated, when I spoke with him in May 2014 on condition of anonymity, that the number of ‘Boko Haram' detainees was ‘in the low thousands [...] about 3,000 or so detainees'. He said that appalling detention practices may be radicalising some prisoners who may not otherwise have turned to extremism, with ‘lots and lots being held in ratholes'. Many of the abuses of detainees were said to have occurred at the notorious Giwa military barracks in Maiduguri, as described in the Human Rights Watch report:

Untold numbers of young men seemed to have simply disappeared, with no indication of whether they had been killed or if they were being held somewhere by Nigeria's security forces. Since there had been no judicial process, there was no way of knowing whether any of them had anything to do with the insurgency. Human Rights Watch interviewed one former detainee who said he saw other prisoners tortured or killed. His descriptions of what happened to them were stomach-churning: