Al Qaeda is not happy with the abduction of school girls in Nigeria by Boko Haram as they think it’s unIslamic to attack unarmed children. It’s a long piece. New York Times reports..
As word spread like wildfire on Twitter and Facebook that
Nigerian militants were preparing to auction off more than 200 kidnapped
schoolgirls in the name of Islam, a very different Internet network started
quietly buzzing too.
"Such news is spread to taint the image of the
Mujahedeen," wrote one dubious poster on a web forum used by Islamic
militants whose administrator uses a picture of Osama bin Laden. "I have
brothers from Africa who are in this group," attested another, insisting
that they were like "the Quran walking the earth."
Boko Haram, the cultlike Nigerian group that carried out the
kidnappings, was rejected long ago by mainstream Muslim scholars and Islamist
parties around the world for its seemingly senseless cruelty and capricious
violence against civilians. But this week its stunning abduction appeared too
much even for fellow militants normally eager to condone terrorist acts against
the West and its allies.
"There is news that they attacked a girls'
school!" another astonished poster wrote on the same jihadi forum,
suggesting delicately that Boko Haram may perhaps be killing too many
noncombatants instead of armed enemies. He prayed that God would "hold
them steady to the path" of Islam.
The dismay of fellow jihadists at the innocent targets of
Boko Haram's violence is a reflection of the increasingly far-flung and
ideologically disparate networks of Islamist militancy, which now include the
remnants of Bin Laden's puritanical camps, Algerian cigarette smugglers and a
brutal Somalian offshoot.
"The violence most of the African rebel groups practice
makes Al Qaeda look like a bunch of schoolgirls," said Bronwyn Bruton, an
Africa scholar at the Atlantic Council in Washington. "And Al Qaeda at
this point is a brand — and pretty much only a brand — so you have to ask
yourself how they are going to deal with the people who are doing things so
hideous even the leaders of Al Qaeda are unwilling to condone them."
Boko Haram is in many ways an awkward ally for any of them.
Its violence is broader and more casual than Al Qaeda or other jihadist groups.
Indeed, its reputation for the mass murder of innocent civilians is strikingly
inconsistent with a current push by Al Qaeda's leaders to avoid such deaths for
fear of alienating potential supporters. That was the subject of the dispute
that led to Al Qaeda's recent break with its former affiliate, the Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria.
Nepicity.com
What's more, Boko Haram's recruits and targets have always
been purely local, not international. And the group is centered on a messianic
leader who claims to speak with God and demands that its adherents surrender
all their possessions to the group, resembling a cult, like Uganda's Lord's
Resistance Army, more than it does an orthodox Islamist movement.
But Boko Haram and Al Qaeda's affiliates have both
overlooked those differences to cultivate an alliance of convenience, papering
over disagreements in tactics and values while emphasizing shared principles.
They have reaped the propaganda value of association with each other's deadly
exploits, and in limited instances perhaps even trained or collaborated
together.
Their partnership demonstrates a centripetal force pulling
together even disparate insurgencies against common foes. And, scholars say,
Boko Haram now also represents a growing challenge to Al Qaeda as it seeks to
cultivate more such affiliates among loosely Muslim or Islamist insurgencies
across Africa, almost all of them far more brutally violent than even the
acolytes of Bin Laden can accept.
First formed in the early 2000s, Boko Haram grew out of an
ultraconservative Islamic movement of well-educated students. The group grew
overtly political only later, under the leadership of its charismatic founder,
Mohamed Yusuf.
Its nickname in the African language of Hausa, Boko Haram,
is usually roughly translated to mean that "deceptive" or
"Western" education is "forbidden." But scholars say that
the phrase had a kind of double meaning that was at once religious and social
in the context of northern Nigeria.
Western education was available only to a very small elite
who typically traveled to British universities and then returned to rule from
the capital over the impoverished North, and ending the tyranny of that elite
was the main objective of Mr. Yusuf's movement.
Mr. Yusuf and Boko Haram tapped into growing anger among
northern Nigerians at their poverty and lack of opportunity as well as the humiliating
abuses of the government's security forces, said Paul Lubeck, a professor at
the University of California, Santa Cruz, who studies the group. At first, even
as Boko Haram turned to violent opposition to the government, the group avoided
civilian casualties.
"They generated a lot of support because they didn't
kill many innocent people," Professor Lubeck said.
That changed in July, 2009, after about 70 Boko Haram
fighters armed with guns and hand grenades attacked a mosque and police station
in the town of Bauchi. About 55 people were killed in the battle, according to
an American diplomatic cable about the episodes that was later released by
WikiLeaks.
The next day, Nigerian security forces retaliated with a
brutal crackdown that killed more than 700 people, including many innocent
bystanders. Security officers paraded Mr. Yusuf before television cameras and
then summarily executed him in front of a crowd outside a police station — an
episode that the group's adherents often recall with horror as the decisive
moment in their turn to wider violence.
Three weeks later, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb —
originally an Algerian Islamist insurgency that found advantages in publicly
linking itself to Al Qaeda's infamy — issued a public statement reaching out to
Boko Haram in a public expression of brotherly sympathy.
Boko Haram's remaining members scattered to other African
countries, where many scholars argue they would have received a welcome from Al
Qaeda affiliates. The Algerian government has said that some of Boko Haram's
fugitive members received training in Algerian camps from Al Qaeda in the
Islamic Maghreb. Boko Haram itself eventually circulated video footage that
purported to show some of its members training in Somalia with fighters from
the Al Qaeda affiliate there, the Shabab.
Professor Lubeck said other fragments of evidence have
surfaced as well, such as cellphones belonging to Boko Haram fighters that were
seized in a raid by the government of Niger.
But whether with help from Al Qaeda or other sponsors, Boko
Haram soon returned to Nigeria far more sophisticated and better equipped. In
late 2010, under the new leadership of Abubakar Shekau, formerly the group's
second in command, Boko Haram begun staging more lethal attacks.
Instead of throwing hand grenades or gas-bombs, Boko Haram's
fighters began to conduct a campaign of assassinations by gunfire from
motorcycles. (The government ultimately banned motorcycles form the areas where
they were active.) They also drove pickup trucks mounted with artillery. The
vehicles, Nigerian officials say, were traded out of Libya after the fall of
Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
And Boko Haram became increasingly indiscriminate. Mr.
Shekau, the leader who claimed to be in communication with God, said that the
sole purpose of its violence was to demonstrate the incapacity of the Nigerian
state. "Shekau initiated this brutal killing of innocent people," Mr.
Lubeck said.
Mr. Shekau has also continued to express his admiration for
Al Qaeda and its ideology. But it remained "an overwhelmingly locally
focused group, recruiting locally," Mr. Lubeck said, adding: "To say
that it was part of the international Islamist conspiracy distorts things.
There is no systematic or strategic connection."
On Wednesday, as Western governments prepared to send help
to find the kidnapped girls, there were no reports of any new expressions of
support for Boko Haram from Al Qaeda.
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