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Islamic State Faction in Nigeria Follows Boko Haram’s Playbook: Kidnapping Schoolgirls

February kidnapping of 110 girls seems similarly intended to bring funds and fame to a new, more dangerous faction


DAPCHI, Nigeria—As evening prayers resounded across this northeastern Nigerian town last month, camouflage-clad jihadists drove up to a local girls’ school and kidnapped 110 students in a replay of one of the world’s most infamous abductions: Boko Haram’s 2014 seizure of 276 girls, hours away in Chibok.

But the Feb. 19 attack was different in an important and unsettling way, according to U.S. and Nigerian officials. The culprit wasn’t Boko Haram, but a breakaway faction that is allied with Islamic State and, in the eyes of Washington, the biggest terrorist threat in Africa’s most-populous nation.

This splinter group, known as Islamic State West African Province, is better trained and more focused on Western targets, American officials say. It is also in regular contact with Islamic State commanders in Iraq and Syria, according to internal communications reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.



Boko Haram’s Chibok kidnapping sparked a global campaign—#BringBackOurGirls—and ultimately won it a €3 million ($3.7 million) ransom, according to officials involved in the exchange, as well as world-wide notoriety.

The copycat attack seems similarly intended to bring the Islamic State faction funds and fame. The 110 hostages are girls from Dapchi Girls Science and Technology College, the youngest aged 10.

“They’ve learned something: You can make money from taking girls,” said Jacob Zenn, an analyst at the Jamestown Foundation, a foreign-policy think tank, who provided some of the communications between Islamic State and Boko Haram.

Nigeria’s government response this time suggests it may pay again: On Tuesday, President Muhammadu Buhari said he would try to negotiate the girls’ release, rather than risk a military confrontation. Several senior Nigerian and Western officials said backchannel talks were already under way.



“We want to bring these girls back alive,” Mr. Buhari said.

Standing next to him, Rex Tillerson, in his final hours as America’s top diplomat, seemed to back that approach, which contrasts with longstanding U.S. policy discouraging such negotiations. “We hope that’s something that can be worked out and they will be persuaded to release these girls quickly,” he said.

The kidnappers’ group, dubbed ISIS-WA by U.S. officials, is led by Abu Musab al-Barnawi, a young militant so mysterious that Nigeria’s intelligence agencies aren’t sure what he looks like. The thousands-strong faction uses sophisticated communications technology and has kidnapped foreign workers and threatened to go after Western targets.

The Barnawi faction hasn’t publicly claimed responsibility for the attack, but Nigerian and Western officials and sources close to the group confirmed it is holding the girls and may have taken some across the northern border into Niger.

The faction’s rise shows how Islamic State’s legacy lives on, despite the group’s defeats in its Middle Eastern strongholds.

“There’s now a reason to be very concerned. They have significant capabilities,” said a senior U.S. official. “When this group clashes with the Nigerian military they consistently come out on top.”

Nigeria this week closed dozens of boarding schools in its northeastern-most state, and has dispatched jets and drones to search for the girls. U.S. drones—which were used in an effort to find the 276 schoolgirls kidnapped from Chibok in 2014—remain active in the region.


Nigerian and U.S. officials stress the divided Boko Haram remains much weaker than four years ago, when it held a swath of territory the size of Belgium. But an uptick in attacks from both factions in the past year has shown the resilience of the insurgency.

In Dapchi, a dust-caked town of 15,000, a period of mourning has mutated into anger.

Parents gather daily for protests that have spread to some of Nigeria’s biggest cities. Government officials have been chased out of town by seething crowds. Despite military reinforcements, many parents refuse to let their daughters leave their homes.

Inside the pastel-colored dormitory of the Dapchi girls’ school, sandals and patterned shawls lay strewn across the floor, discarded in the chaos of the abduction.

Outside the school, parents have assembled a billboard of 110 passport photos of the missing. On each is scrawled a name and age: Hassana, 14; Leah, 12; Fatima, 18.

“How could the government let them do this?” asked Alhaji Ali Kaumi Dapchi, whose daughters Hajara and Fatima were seized from their classrooms. “We can’t sleep. We can’t eat,” he said, thumbing one his daughter’s textbooks. “When we hear the mention of their names, we are thrown to tears.”

Last year, ISIS-WA kidnapped workers of a Nigerian oil company. It later abducted staff of the United Nations, according to U.N. and Nigerian officials.

Boko Haram has also abducted high profile targets, kidnapping policewomen in what officials see as a fundraising race by two leaders on different ends of a generational and tactical divide.

On one side is Abubakr Shekau, the bellowing Boko Haram warlord whose scorched-earth tactics have included strapping suicide bombs to young women. He threatened in a YouTube video to sell the Chibok girls “in the markets, because they are our slaves.”

On the other is Mr. Barnawi, the roughly 23-year-old son of Boko Haram’s deceased founder, Muhammed Yusuf, who has remained quiet. His troops have opted for more surgical, commando-style attacks and quick kidnappings of security services and civilians working with Western groups.

The abduction of the Chibok students helped push them into different camps.



After the April 2014 kidnapping saw celebrities and Michelle Obama join the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, Mr. Shekau and his deputies quarreled over what to do with their prisoners, according to intercepted communications. Nigerian officials say Mr. Shekau repeatedly raised his price for the hostages, frustrating deputies who wanted to trade them for members in prisons.

Mr. Barnawi and other senior deputies were livid after Mr. Shekau rejected a 2015 deal to swap dozens of Chibok girls for a group of the most senior Boko Haram commanders in Nigerian custody.

In intercepted audio recordings, Mr. Shekau’s deputies complained bitterly of his intransigence. When one of them publicly challenged his decision to abandon the swap, Mr. Shekau had him executed. Soon after, Mr. Shekau dissolved his Shura Council, the governing body that formally guided the group, according to Nigerian officials.


“That single incident became the biggest crisis that led to the Boko Haram split,” a person familiar with the situation said.

As Boko Haram quarreled, Islamic State reached out.

For months, the two sides exchanged online, and often mundane, missives, the Nigerians complaining about the difficulty of their country’s internet connection. Mr. Shekau was hesitant, until other West African terror groups began competing for the prestige a connection with Islamic State brought.

“We are following every new issue of the beloved Islamic State,” Boko Haram wrote in one exchange. Then, on March 2015, seven months after Islamic State announced its caliphate, Mr. Shekau declared allegiance to the sect and its leader Abubakr al-Baghdadi.

But within months, Islamic State had grown tired of Mr. Shekau. It ignored eight consecutive letters from the Nigerian warlord, Mr. Shekau complained in one statement. Instead, top Islamic State clerics in Iraq and Syria began to cultivate Mr. Barnawi, the founder’s son, who had become a powerful Boko Haram commander.

Mr. Barnawi felt Mr. Shekau’s methods were hurting the insurgency, and many followers agreed, according to Nigerian, West African and Western officials.

By 2016, rifts inside the terror group exploded into a violent feud. Top commanders were forced to choose between factions, and turned their guns on each other. At least 400 Boko Haram fighters have died battling each other since the split erupted in late 2016, officials estimated.


In August, Islamic State announced in its magazine al-Naba that it had anointed Mr. Barnawi the leader of jihad in Nigeria and the region.

Mr. Shekau responded in an audio message that he was victim of a coup and that Mr. Barnawi was an infidel teaching “false creeds.”

The two sides began to argue over the one asset Mr. Shekau still held, the Chibok students. A group of Islamic State delegates traveled to his camp and demanded he hand the girls over.

Mr. Shekau refused. Finally, in May 2017, he completed a swap of 103 girls for five junior commanders and €3 million in cash, according to officials involved in the exchange.”

Weeks later, ISIS-WA kidnapped a group of oil workers scouting the parched northeast. The abductions of U.N. personnel followed.

Then, shortly before 6 p.m. on Feb. 19, Mr. Barnawi’s militants rolled into Dapchi in nine trucks.

In a copy of the Chibok kidnapping, militants dressed in army fatigues came into town in a hail of gunfire, told terrified students they were Nigerian soldiers, hoisted them onto trucks and drove them into the surrounding scrubland. No one was killed in the raid.

Saadia Hashimu, an 18-year-old senior was eating rice with a fellow senior when they heard the bullets whizzing past the canteen. They ran for their lives, losing sandals in the melee. “It was pandemonium,” said Ms. Hashimu. “My sandal fell off and a fighter picked it up. Luckily, I was too far away.”

Her friend, Fatima Gaidam, also 18, is still missing.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/nigeria-mass-abduction-seen-as-copycat-attack-1521403236?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1

lalasticlala

Mr VP it's being 3 years, we don't want to hear about Jonathan anymore. 3 years is enough to dismantle all his wrongdoings but because you and your boss have nothing to offer the people you keep calling his name. Or is Jonathan still secretly the President.

If IMO people like let them believe all this lies and vote for this Okorocha stooge.

OneCorner:
expecting to see someone write diz.
everything must be done by d government for u lazy Africans

The government is responsible for drawing up plans that will move the nation forward or what else is their job. When a government leads the people follow

#ReplaceOrtom2019

You people should not get worked up over any post by members of the BMC crew, even their overlord knows he has nothing to offer. BMC said GEJ was clueless but he remains their yardstick for every of their achievement. If they manage to tar 1km of road or increase power by 1MW, they come here to scream bullshit. Nigerians cannot settle for mediocrity anymore. Mere looking at the points, you will know the OP is simply flogging a dead horse. #BackToDaura2019 is in FULL FORCE. He talked about corruption, job scams , Book Haram, Borrowing, Release of chibok girls. Have we not heard of the Police and CBN backdoor recruitment, the missing $25bn, Mainagate, Babachir Lawal, Dapchi girls, Funding of Terrorists with $5m. So don't bother over BMC posts just sit back, relax and watch how we vote out mediocrity from our nation

Donate 20m out of the 362m una dey collect every year for their head. Smh

The wedding President

Shame on you Okowa, the fact that you can even say this in public is a big embarrassment to you government

peterswagg:
na him now

Hahahaha...lwkm...them don roast the guy 4 twitter.... airfoce1 try dey use picmix for ur pictures next time

peterswagg:
Idiot...this is funny asf

This guy resemble IamAirforce1 abi na him?

These kind of people are the real Feminists. The ones who fight for human rights

This is a deathblow to the BMC crew. I bet none of them(yarimo, sarrki, madridguy) can come up with an intelligent response to defend their overlord. If they can even counter 5 points raised here it would be a miracle. #BackToDaura2019 is a project that must be done

madridguy:
Bravo Sen. Shehu Sani. The then CBN Governor, now Emir of Kano said the Nigeria senate need to be scrapped as their consuming more than 25 % of our national income. The rogues almost eat him raw then.

#ScratchNationalAssembly

Can't believe I have to agree with a member of the BMC crew but you have said the truth. This point SLS raised years ago was what made me respect him a lot

akeentech:
Can any good news come from Delta? NO

Come to Delta and See

Ortom is more dangerous to Benue people than Buhari...Benue people must get him out first. Instead of the clueless ortom to take Buhari to the grave and show him the result of his actions/inactions he even has the guts to smile with him. Shame on you Ortom

madridguy:
Tackling national security matter like village matter won't lead us to anywhere rather than more attacks upon attacks.
You keep negotiating with terrorists by giving them large amount of money and also releasing their top members under the army custody is an archaic ways of doing things.
No serious country negotiate with terrorists.

Wow... so BMC crew can reason like this?..Wow...abi this Boko matter don penetrate una BMC thick skull

Why the guy head be like pear

sarrki is conspicuously absent from this thread with his "baba and boiz comment"

anibirelawal:
You can imagine that ? had it been PMB is not visiting the state, that road would have remain Unrepair till enternity.

Bro nothing like repair there, it's just patching, after a few weeks everything is back to a worse state than it was b4. Venue's biggest problem is not Buhari but that ineffectual, confused-looking man called Ortom

Barrister Kingsley Otuaro ....Deputy Governor Delta State

No space for you in Asaba Mr. Keyamo

adisasegun:
Some people from a particular part of the country will not like this.... Let me be going before they start stoning me

People from that part of the country are well represented in the meeting. so what's your point exactly?

A dialogue imaginatively ascribed to what would ordinarily pass as an innocuous photograph from a routine official event opens perhaps the best aperture on the festering culture of political degeneracy. (The author of the mischief that trended in the social media is understandably anonymous.)
Face lit up with his trademark fawning smile, Rochas Okorocha is shown drawing close to President Buhari, whispering in Oriental pidgin English for green-light to “nack” (erect) the general’s statue “free of charge” in Owerri, obviously now the playground of the Owelle’s perverse theatrics.
More in superstitious fear than any sense of modesty, Buhari would decline, thundering instead in Arewa-flavored cadence: “Shege (unprintable), you nack (Madam Johnson) Sirleaf (of Liberia) she waka, you nack (Alex) Ekweme him kpai (died), you nack(ing) (Jacob) Zuma (of South Africa) don pursue am, you think I want to retire to (the other room)?”
In all of this, what confounds is not that Okorocha advertised a lack of scruple by, for instance, erecting at Imo taxpayer’s expense a monument to a man later crucified for monumental graft in his native South Africa. Rather, the great puzzle is why all the political elders in his party appear to oblige him with the conspiracy of silence as he slides from one sacrilege to another. What else, if not contempt for urban dwellers, would have made the proverbial bushman stroll into town in loincloth.
Without shame, Okorocha had dragooned the cartel of “warrant” chiefs to crown visiting Zuma “The People’s Warrior”. When did public stealing become a communal virtue in Igboland?
Yet, some of the finest political giants the Igbo have bred in history hail from Imo.
Alas, the latest in Okorocha’s career of political infamy is the ongoing attempt to finally degrade the egalitarian castle they toiled hard to build to a monarchy in which the Owelle seeks to pass the gubernatorial baton to his son-in-law while he hands himself the senatorial staff of Orlu zone. It means his daughter is being positioned too to take over from her mum as the queen, the First Lady.
A spoilt brat, the heir apparent had been a suckling in Okorocha’s diapers, shedding his milk teeth all the while - first as Lands and Housing Commissioner and later Chief of Staff to his doting father-in-law.
As for the murmuring deputy governor Madumere coveting the high stool, the great king is magnanimous enough to offer to compensate him with the senatorial ticket of Owerri zone. To leave other pretenders in no doubt, he actually publicly decreed this with a ring of magisterial finality.
Imo’s nominee in the Federal cabinet, Anthony Anwuka, the Minister of State for Education, is also Okorocha’s in-law, married to Okorocha’s second daughter.
Since the kingdom must mirror the king’s shadow even if grotesque, not a few of the public buildings built by Okorocha ended being named after the Okorochas.
Having groomed his younger sister as deputy Chief of Staff under his son-in-law, Okorocha recently decided not only to elevate her but also allocate her an entirely novel portfolio - Commissioner of Happiness. Not surprising, on assumption of office, one of her radical proposals to ending the social menace of prostitution is a challenge to Imo men to consider marrying more than one wife, promising government’s generous incentives to those converted.
Grapevine has it that another sister of the king retains the exclusive franchise of supplying all food and drinks to the Government House from her fast food joint tucked somewhere in Owerri. Just as the head of one of the state-owned higher institutions is said to be the governor’s aunt.
In short, democracy has been turned to family business in Imo. What perhaps remains now is to issue a certificate of incorporation in Okorocha’s name.
Taken together, it is a sad commentary on Buhari’s political guardianship that democracy is being given a bad name in Imo. But who knows, maybe loquacious Okorocha will soon tell us he is only following PMB’s example by only appointing “trusted” people.
In the north, Okorocha’s alter ego will be Abdulaziz Yari, the Zamfara potentate. Of course, just like the former, he is among the party zealots seeking to stampede Buhari into second term. But unlike the Owerri clown who has outlined an incestuous secession plan by sharing governorship and senatorial tickets among himself and family members obviously as his own bargain for backing Buhari, Yari’s personal agenda is yet unclear.
What is however certain is that he, just like Okorocha, won’t mind an opportunity to coronate his clone to sustain the heritage of filth.
Yari’s poverty of ideas has ensured that, even after almost seven years at the helm in Gusau, Zamfara today has more or less remained stunted, stuck at the bottom of all development indicators including education and access to healthcare. It is a measure of Yari’s toxic development model that a state with 3.8m population boasts of 23 doctors manning 24 public hospitals.
In the security sector, while it is true that a number of northern states are infected by the contagion of AK-47 herders spiced with armed banditry, Zamfara’s own trauma is compounded by leadership sterility.
The latest massacre of 50 no doubt bore the hallmark of bestiality. A wedding party was waylaid. The driver’s throat was slit and the gunmen wiped out with gunfire the passengers including bride-maids and traders. Not content with taking the lives in cold blood, the savages set fire on their bodies. Thereafter, they proceeded to the market and shot at everyone indiscriminately.
But while the state floats in the blood of innocents slaughtered by marauding beasts, Yari only seems obsessed with gallivanting outside. Though he answers Zamfara Governor, it seems more appropriate to describe him as governor-in-self-exile, Abuja being his hideout.
Yari’s Zamfara would only appear to be making phenomenal advance in the unlikely sector. In a BBC documentary aired recently, Iheoma Obibi, a sex doll merchant, appreciatively listed Zamfara as her next biggest market in Nigeria after Lagos and Abuja.
So, the old Sharia enclave now seems condemned to stew in the truancy of a power eunuch. So much that when concerned outsiders arrived the state capital recently on a sympathy visit following another round of bloodletting, they met empty Governor’s office as Oga had jetted out again.
When eventually he found time to lead a pack of visiting brother governors on a condolence visit to the monarch of grieving Zurmi council, Yari chose to enact a comedy of errors in the moment of tragedy. By disclosing that his administration had intelligence report of impending attack 24hours prior, he only exposed himself as accessory before the fact of a pogrom. The question: since he knew ahead, what practical steps did he make to avert it?
Tellingly, on the day the gunmen struck, he was said to be ensconced in the luxurious comfort of Abuja.
It is lame for Yari to explain his failing away by saying that he passed information to the relevant security agencies 24 hours before the attack. A wise governor would not have stopped there; he would also rally the communities to a red alert, apart from he being at his desk to monitor development.
Later in Zurmi, apparently to ingratiate himself to the locals he had failed, he would parrot the populist line that killings by herdsmen has escalated under PMB: “I feel let down facing the people of this state whenever I remember the promise I made to them that when they elect President Muhammadu Buhari into power, these killings will end. But unfortunately, things are now getting worse.”
While such confession must have helped disarm the mob outside the Emir’s palace that day who might have been tempted to stone the fumbling governor in annoyance and frustration, he alas only ended up projecting his party, APC, as not just a failure but also clueless on the challenge of securing people’s lives and property.
Worse, after pontificating at the Emir’s palace obviously for the television cameras, Yari failed another leadership test by refusing to visit the community affected, if only to comfort the bereaved in Birani. (Maybe, he was scared the people might stone him for failing them as a leader.) Thereafter, he was said to have zoomed off to Katsina before flying to Abuja and, by some accounts, again jetting abroad.
With characters like these, democracy is indeed imperiled.
‘Dining’ with Kongi
To be mentioned in the same breath as immortal Prof Wole Soyinka is, to me, enough honour, let alone having one’s writing featured in his latest book entitled, “Green Cards and Green Gods”, as well.
My bewilderment could, therefore, only be imagined last week when I received a correspondence from the book’s publishers announcing that, on Kongi’s insistence, a generous portion of his royalty from the book will be paid to me for even my little effort in the book unveiled in December 2017.
As a writer, material reward is never one’s primary motivations. Rather, it is more about questing for that inner peace kindled only by the consciousness of truth or the defence of its province.
To now be compensated by the Nobel laureate on top is gratifying indeed. The cheque’s size is beside the point; much more invaluable, in my view, is the very spirit behind the gesture - the willingness to share and the sense of accountability.
From my interaction with Kongi and learning at huge feet over the years, I can almost swear his thunderous aversion to publicity of this nature. But I’m willing to risk his wrath, if only for an opportunity to bear testimony to his uncommon generosity of not just spirit, but in material terms as well.
Members of my generation grew up hearing stories of how Kongi quietly gave away most of the cash of the Nobel Prize in Literature he won in 1986 to the needy. And when unable to meet excessive material demands from those who have access to him even till date, he would sometimes pass on invitation to lucrative speaking engagements as another form of “donation”.
Well, on a jovial note, having thus made full disclosure, here is earnestly hoping prospective freeloaders and scavengers milling the nation’s space won’t now suddenly consider me a goldmine or easy target of 419 schemes, even before the cheque is cashed.

http://saharareporters.com/2018/03/07/imo-zamfara-monarchy-trumps-democracy-louis-odion


mynd44
lalasticlala

Lagos is a private estate that is meant to serve a few people.

madridguy:
Wailers wailing as usual.

Stale

Election time you won't see any of those people mentioned. It is some very foolish so called youths amongst us that will become foot and online soldiers for a failed government. They have made Nigeria there personal estate, it's not any different from what has happening overtime only that this administration makes their nepotism an open show. Looking forward to the day I leave this mere geographical contraption called Nigeria.

The headline is misleading. Mods should try to read b4 moving to FP

So that Boko Haram will kidnap another set of workers

It seems the $5m ransom FG paid to BH has strengthened them. We now hear about them on a daily basis. This govt is already the worst in history

If it's Delta State Government House he has his eye on, Sorry for him.