Alliance of death: Gangs and bandits cooperate with ISIS
ISIS is
seeking to expand its influence in the African continent by allying with
criminal gangs in order to help in its desired goal of establishing a caliphate
in Africa.
Official warning
A memo seen
by AFP and dated July 23 from Nigeria’s immigration chief, Muhammed Babandede,
warned of “a large movement of bandits from Zamfara in the northwest of the
country towards Borno with the aim of intensive training by Boko Haram.”
Boko Haram,
which is affiliated with ISIS, is fighting almost alone in West Africa since
May 2021, when its leader, Abubakar Shekau, was killed in clashes with ISIS
militants, and now its extremists have strengthened their control over the
northeastern region.
Close
alliances
According to
AFP’s security sources, ISIS has forged close alliances with criminal groups in
northwestern Nigeria.
For years,
northwest and central Nigeria have witnessed the activity of criminal gangs
that attack villagers, loot and kidnap them, steal their livestock, and burn
their homes.
The
deployment of the army and the signing of peace agreements failed to end the
attacks of bandits hiding in camps in the Rogo Forest, which stretches
throughout the Nigerian states of Katsina, Kaduna and Zamfara.
Since
December 2020, these armed groups have clearly moved to mass kidnappings of
high school students for ransom.
These
thieves are motivated primarily by greed and have no known ideological motives,
but have links to extremist groups. In most of these alliances, extremists make
a fortune selling weapons to bandits, who then use them to attack villages and
carry out kidnappings for cash.
“It is not
surprising that the bandits are moving to the northeast to benefit from the
organization's training,” a security source in the region involved in combating
criminal gangs told AFP.
“The more
bandits increase their alliances with extremists, the greater the risk of their
radicalization, which reduces the possibility of making peace deals with the
authorities,” he added, noting, however, that the exchanges between criminal
groups and extremists in Nigeria are not new.
Rapprochement
In 2019,
Nigeria’s Minister of Defense warned of a rapprochement between Boko Haram and
the groups deployed in Zamfara State. AuwalunDaudawa, the leader of one of the
groups responsible for the kidnapping of 300 schoolchildren in Zamfara in
December 2020, was a source of arms for Boko Haram. He was killed in May 2021
in clashes with a rival group.
Another
security source stated that another extremist group affiliated with al-Qaeda,
Jamaat Ansar al-Muslimin fi Bilad al-Sudan (Ansaru), is stationed in Kogi and
Kaduna states and cooperates mostly with bandits.
On the other
hand, local sources with good knowledge of these groups stated that for several
years ISIS extremists have maintained strong ties with the bandits of Zamfara
and have camps in the forests of this state.
In 2018, for
example, ISIS assassinated the leader of a criminal group in Zamfara that it
considered an obstacle to the expansion of its influence.
With the
elimination of Shekau, cooperation between ISIS extremists and the bandits
could intensify, according to the same sources, with one of them saying,
“Shekau was a major obstacle, and now the road is open after his death.”
FACT
alliance
The Front
for Change and Concord in Chad (FACT) allied itself with ISIS in 2018 for the
benefit of the Brotherhood militias and the former government of Fayez
al-Sarraj in Libya, as they raced to win these militias to help them plunder
the wealth of southern Libya for the benefit of Turkey, especially as it is
stocked with the richest wealth of oil, gas and gold mines.
