Nigeria's Abandoned Youth: Are They Potential Recruits for Militants?
Talked about this a while ago.
Quote:
In a small stone, tin-roof building in Regassa in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna, in a room whose walls are decorated with slates inscribed with Koranic verses, Adulai, 15, lies on a mat, feverish with malaria and typhoid. His younger brother, Adamu, tends to him. "He's very sick," says Adamu. Adamu has not eaten since the night before. He says he is hoping for some leftovers from a nearby house, where the family is finishing lunch.
Adulai and Adamu are not orphans, but they might as well be. A year ago, their parents, poor farmers with more children than they can afford, brought them hundreds of miles from Katsina on the edge of the Sahara to Kaduna to study the Koran in a ramshackle Islamic school called a tsangaya. There are just two among millions of boys who have made the same journey in similar situations across the country. Communal rooms in this tsangaya host up to 80 boys at night. Thin, straw mats cover the floor. Filthy bags holding modest belongings are nailed high on the grimy walls. The boys — known as almajiris — are meant to be under the guidance of mallams, or religious teachers. In reality, when the almajiris "break" for the day, they stream out in the scores onto the streets armed with small plastic bowls to begin a long day of begging. "Almajiri is a hausa word meaning 'emigrant,'" explains Dr Khalid Abubakar Aliyu, secretary-general of Jama'atu Nasril Islam, an umbrella Muslim group. "It is someone who is searching for knowledge to make himself a better individual. But it has now become a concept of its own in northern Nigeria, synonymous with begging."
(PHOTOS: Deadly Attacks in Nigeria)
Nigeria's population of 160 million is roughly split between a mostly Muslim north and a largely Christian south. Absolute poverty — defined as people who can only afford the bare essentials of food, shelter and clothing — rose to 60.9% in 2010 from 54.7% in 2004, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. That inequality is widening. And the majority of the poorest states lie in the dusty, arid north. Add into that destitution a polygamous society which can produce dozens of children in a single family and parents, with little means to feed them, willingly send their offspring to tsangayas, often hundreds of miles away in neighboring states or even countries.
In cities across northern Nigeria, the scale of the problem is apparent. Young boys swarm around cars stopped in traffic looking for alms or scraps of food. Kids with painful skin diseases and open sores on their heads and hands stare into car windows. Accidents, even fatalities, are common. Dr Suleiman Shinkfi runs a Kaduna-based NGO helping almajiris. "They are children that assume that they don't have anybody," he says. "They feed on the roadsides, they rush for your scraps when you finish eating. Sometimes they fight dogs for food." Naturally, the children are vulnerable to criminality, says Tayo Fatinikun, State Secretary of the Child Protection Network in Sokoto. "They are living where they don't have families. Some are as young as six years of age. It is an impetus to criminal activities." Arinze Orakwe from the National Agency for the Prohibition of People Trafficking adds: "These children are vulnerable to all sorts of social problems — abuse, violence. [They can be] cherry-picked for any vice that adults want to use them for.
"
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...#ixzz1mneUKc7H
UPDATE 1-Explosion strikes outskirts of Nigerian capital
Seems like Boko Haram again.
Quote:
LAGOS Feb 19 (Reuters) - An explosion struck the Nigerian town of Suleja, on the edge of the capital Abuja, on Sunday, a security source and a spokesman for the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) said.
"NEMA has alerted other response agencies to an explosion reported in Morocco area of Suleja. Public are strongly advised to desist from getting close to explosion and allow rescue workers access to site," the spokesman said in a text message. He added that the casualty toll was not yet known.
The security source said the blast struck near the Christ Embassy Church, on the main Morocco Road, but officials did not immediately confirm this.
Nigerian officials say Suleja and surrounding Niger state have been infiltrated by militants from the Boko Haram Islamist sect which is waging an insurgency against the Nigerian government, usually concentrated in the largely Muslim far north and northeast.
Since last year, the group has radiated from its northern heartlands and struck in or around the capital a few times.
On Christmas Day, a bomb blast claimed by Boko Haram against a Catholic Church in Madala, just outside Abuja, killed 37 people and wounded 57.
That attack heightened sectarian tensions in the country of 160 million, split roughly evenly between Christians and Muslims.
On Wednesday, gunmen stormed a prison in Kogi state in central Nigeria, killing one warden and freeing 119 prisoners, the prison authorities said.
Although the majority of Boko Haram's attacks occur in its home base in the northeastern city of Maiduguri, its threat has spread. At least 178 people were killed in the sect's most deadly attack last month in Nigeria's largest northern city, Kano. (Reporting by Tim Cocks, Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
http://af.reuters.com/article/nigeri...8DJ05220120219
Terror Label for Boko Haram Debated
We get it, terrorists are only terrorists when they attack Americans or directly threaten American interests or when kinetic actions against them can be milked for political purposes.
Quote:
While violence involving Boko Haram extremists occurs on an almost daily basis in northern Nigeria, a debate is taking place in the United States over whether the radicals should be labeled as a foreign terrorist organization.
The U.S. State Department currently designates 49 extremist groups as foreign terrorist organizations. Only one of those groups comes from sub-Saharan Africa, Somalia's al-Shabab extremists.
Peter Lewis is the director of the African Studies program at The Johns Hopkins University in Washington. He calls Boko Haram a violent insurgency, but says it would be a mistake for the State Department to add it to the list of terror groups. "We are short on facts other than the undisputed fact that Boko Haram has become a deadly insurgency, not just a security problem, or a challenge, but an organized, capable insurgency in northern Nigeria," he said.
Lewis says very little is known about the group's leadership structure or possible external ties. He says much more is understood about the context of poverty, corruption, poor governance and religious rivalries within which Boko Haram operates.
"Boko Haram, while it is a small movement, while it is essentially a sect that has a claim on the loyalties and ideas of only a tiny minority of northern Nigerians, nonetheless taps into a broader sense of resentment, of anger, a sense of marginality and a broader catchment and demographic of alienated, unemployed, poorly educated northern youth," he said.
Lewis says alleged Boko Haram spokespeople may even have ties to the Nigerian government and pretend they have links with regional terrorist groups to attract more attention and outside funding in the effort to stop the insurgency.
One analyst in favor of the terror label is former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria, Howard Jeter. He disagreed with Lewis at a recent Washington conference. "It is really a terrorist group. And Peter said let us not designate it [as such]. I would like to hear your explanation as to why. It is a terrorist group. If you kill 28 innocent people worshipping in a church, it is a terrorist group," he said.
Jeter was referring to bombings during Christmas holiday church services last year on the outskirts of the capital, Abuja.
Other Boko Haram attacks have targeted security forces and Muslims. Leaders who have come forward in the media have said they want to impose Islamic Sharia law. The name Boko Haram, which means "Western education is a sin," was initially given by critics of the radicals as a way to make fun of them.
Jean Herskovits, a professor of history at the State University of New York, recently wrote about Boko Haram in an opinion article in The New York Times. Herskovits said that if the United States placed the group on the foreign terror list, it would make more Nigerians fear and distrust America. She also said such a decision could turn the U.S. government into an enemy of many of northern Nigeria's Muslims. Herskovits says pressure is growing from some lawmakers and U.S. government agencies to label Boko Haram as a terrorist group.
John Campbell, from the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, says U.S.-Nigerian ties are extremely important, and that these debates should not be taken lightly. "We face the challenge of developing a policy response to Nigerian developments that reconciles our strategic interests with our abiding goal of promoting democracy and sustainable development in the giant of Africa," he said.
Last year, U.S. lawmakers from the House Committee on Homeland Security also proposed that Boko Haram be added to the list of designated foreign terror groups, but so far officials from the State Department's Africa bureau have disagreed, and the northern Nigerian radicals have remained off the list.
On its website, the State Department says the designation plays a critical role in the U.S. fight against terrorism and is an effective means to curtail support for terrorist activities and for pressuring groups to get out of the terror business.
http://www.voanews.com/english/news/...139892403.html
One thing is for sure, anti-Boko Haram sentiment is rising in Northern Nigeria (especially among the business community). We can assure the USG, that when Nigeria is called upon next to support US strategic interests, the long period of sitting on the fence will not be forgotten.
The internal dynamics/politics of the "terrorist" label does not interest us. We only see a nation sitting on the fence.