More than 800 hostages have been freed from Boko Haram, the Nigerian army said.

The military launched operations at the same time in various sites in Borno state, freeing 520 in Kusumma village and another 309 prisoners from 11 other locations.

It has been hailed as a significant success in the fight against the terrorist insurgents who have taken over large parts of northern Nigeria and sowed devastation across communities.

‘The gallant troops cleared the remnants of the Boko Haram terrorists hibernating in Kala Balge general area,’ army spokesman Sani Usman said in a statement. He added that 22 terrorists died in the operation.

metro.co.uk

About 20,000 people have been killed in the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria’sBorno state, This Day reports citing a report for the World Bank that puts the cost of destruction at $5.9 billion.

The report lays bare the extent of the damage since the insurgency began in 2009 and which, at one point, saw the Islamists control swathes of territory across the northeast.

It is part of a Post-Insurgency Recovery and Peace-building Assessment, an intervention program involving the World Bank, European Union and the UN with six northeastern states.

In Borno, sources with knowledge of the report said that some 20,000 citizens are thought to have been killed during the violence — a higher figure than previous estimates. In addition, the majority of the more than 2.0 million internally displaced persons came from the state, This Day says.

The report also estimated parks, game, forest and grazing reserves, orchards, river basins and lakes have been poisoned in 16 of the 27 areas, and 470,000 livestock killed or stolen.

The source close to the Borno state government said the report has yet to be approved by the bank and a decision was expected soon on funding.

But given the cost of the damage — about $5.9 billion — and Nigeria’s struggling economy caused by the global oil shock, matching external funding for reconstruction could be problematic, the source added. The World Bank in Nigeria declined to comment.

panarmenian.net

Cameroonian troops have killed at least 70 residents while chasing Islamic insurgents in the Gwoza area of northeastern Nigeria, fleeing villagers said.

Troops entered Kirawa-Jimni village asking where Boko Haram insurgents were and started shooting, residents said.

“We didn’t know what was going on”, said Muhammed Abba, a resident of the village.
“Before we could say a word, they started firing. That scared most of us and we began to run.”
Abba said that when people returned to the village, they found 70 corpses littering the ground.

Kirawa-Jimni is a border community near Cameroon, located around the area where Boko Haram insurgents once held sway.

Many Gwoza residents who had fled to Maiduguri and Yola say the insurgents are still very present in the area.

thebreakingtimes.com/

A Cameroon court has sentenced 89 Boko Haram terrorists to death.

The sect members were convicted on terror charges by a military court for their roles in several attacks in Cameroon’s northern region, which borders Nigeria.

Cameroon passed an anti-terror law in 2014, which introduced the death sentence.

This is the first time the death sentenced has been used since that law was passed.

The 89 are among 850 people arrested in Cameroon on charges of links to Boko Haram.

Following the death sentences, a local human rights group has called for reforms to Cameroon’s justice system.

Hundreds of people have been killed in a spate of attacks in Cameroon since it joined a regional force set up to tackle the militants last year.

dailypost.ng

Ghana’s government has put the nation on high alert in the wake of Sunday’s deadly terror attack in neighboring Ivory Coast.

Ghana’s national security chiefs say they have intelligence of a credible terrorist threat in the country.

They made the announcement Wednesday following a meeting with Ghana’s President John Mahama to review their readiness. In a statement, the government called on Ghanaians to pay attention and report anything unusual to security agencies.

The terror alert is a first for the West African country.

West African capitals targeted

Since November, al-Qaida militants have attacked hotels in two other regional capitals, Bamako and Ouagadougou, and a beach resort outside Abidjan.

Despite the government assurances, many here wonder: Is Ghana next and how prepared are we?

“We have very porous borders and they are not properly policed, there are a lot of unapproved routes. I think that we should have been proactive. But this is the disconnect I worry about,” said one woman.

A man says he has not heard about the alert. “It’s serious but it doesn’t worry me until it happens,” he added.

“We should look at our movements,” says a woman. “If you have nothing to do in certain areas, don’t go there. If you’re a terrorist and you hear that Ghanaians are really aware, they are preparing to combat anybody who comes into their land, then obviously you also want to hold back a bit.”

The United Kingdom has advised its citizens in Ghana to be cautious. And on Wednesday, the U.S. military restricted travel by its service members to Ghana and four other West African countries.

voanews.com

Over the last six months, there have been three attacks in West Africaperpetrated by a group that calls itself Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). These attacks, the group said in a statement yesterday (Mar. 15), were geared towards forcing the withdrawal of French forces in the region. France deployed troops in Mali in 2012 to fight off a militant uprising in the north of the country, and has established a 3000-strong military presence in the region to combat violent extremism.

But the recent attacks by AQIM are actually a reaction to the rise of the extremist group the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, which is challenging al-Qaeda’s position in the region, some analysts (paywall) and local correspondents believe.

“Both organizations want to claim north and, increasingly, western Africa as their own sphere of influence,” Jason Burke, who has written extensively on al-Qaeda, wrote earlier this week in The Guardian. “AQIM is currently the most tenacious and effective of al-Qaida’s affiliates. If it fades definitively from the scene, so would its parent organization.”

AQIM seems to be rearing up to prevent this. The shootings on Sunday (Mar. 13) in the resort town of Grand Bassam in Cote d’Ivoire that left 18 people dead were the group’s latest attack. In November, gunmen killed 21 people at a hotel popular with foreigners in Mali. And earlier this year a similar attack took place in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, where 28 people died at the hands of militants. In all three instances, AQIM claimed responsibility for carrying out the attacks.

The move by AQIM to ramp up attacks in West Africa, targeting countries that are historically not known as hotbeds of militant activity despite recent political instability, may be a way for the group to re-assert itself in the wake of ISIL’s rise in the region, analysts including Richard Barrett, the former head of counter-terrorism operations at MI6, believe. “The guys in Mali saw a big opportunity to remind everyone that they are still relevant,” he told The New York Times.

Libya is ground zero for this rivalry. Ever since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, the fight for power between rival groups has led to chaos in the North African country. With no discernible national authority to guarantee security, militant groups, including ISIL, have infiltrated, using it as a hub to launch attacks and sell weapons in West Africa.

“Libya appears to be emerging as a safe haven where terrorists, including al-Qa’ida and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant-affiliated groups, can train and rebuild with impunity,” general David M. Rodriguez, the head of the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM),told US senators last year.

A United Nations report released last December estimated the number of ISIL fighters in Libya to be 2,000 to 3,000. And despite resistance from the local population, the group sees Libya as “as the ‘best’ opportunity to expand its so-called caliphate” from Syria and Iraq, the UN’s experts said at the time.

In the region, ISIL has prompted the defections of AQIM fighters and splits between allies. Last May, for example, the Nigerian extremist group Boko Haram, which analysts believed had been affiliated with al-Qaeda, pledged allegiance to ISIL.

Alliances and recruitment are not the only thing that AQIM has to worry about with ISIL emerging in its backyard. The rift between the two groups, which goes back to 2014, means that they now have to compete for funding. North and West Africa is highly lucrative for al-Qaeda through its kidnapping of tourists for ransom, weapons selling and smuggling of stolen goods. ISIL’s emergence could challenge al-Qaeda’s operations in the region.

The attacks in West Africa could be a harbinger of what’s to come as the groups ramp up attacks to show that they are credible flag-bearers of jihadism.

“The world is now threatened by parallel, competing jihadist networks and a host of upstart terror groups on three continents attempting to outpace one another through spectacular attacks,” Clive Watts, a senior fellow with the national security program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, warned last November.

qz.com/

Militants linked to al-Qaida are broadening attacks across West Africa from their base in the desert to the coast. Their goal is to present themselves as the champions of resistance to France’s military in the region and prevent Islamic State’s expansion.

Two groups — al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb and al-Mourabitoune — have claimed joint responsibility for assaults in Mali, Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast that killed more than 65 people, many of them foreigners, since November. The weekend attack on a seaside town in Ivory Coast was the first strike hundreds of miles from the Sahel, an arid region below the Sahara where French soldiers have been fighting militants since 2013.

The French presence in former colonies from Mali to Niger to Ivory Coast is being used by al-Qaida as a justification for its high-profile assaults on West African cities. The two groups recently reunited to compete with Islamic State, which has bases to the north in Libya and is trying to recruit fighters and expand in the Sahel, according to Mathieu Guidere, an analyst of Islamist groups in West and North Africa at the University of Toulouse II.

“Al-Qaida has changed strategy and is competing with Islamic State in the region,” Guidere said by phone. “They are presenting their actions as resistance to the new colonialist movement of France in Africa. There is a consistency in their attacks and this means that their fighters no longer want to leave for IS in Libya.”

France has deployed 3,000 soldiers in the Sahel following the seizure of northern Mali by Islamist rebels in 2012. Even after French fighter jets pushed them back, militants kept bases near desert towns like Kidal and regularly carry out hit-and-run attacks on United Nations peacekeeping troops. The UN says its mission in Mali has suffered the highest death toll of any of its operations globally.

Kidal is about 2,200 kilometers (1,367) miles from Grand Bassam, the site of this weekend’s attacks. That’s about the distance from Paris to Kiev.

Ivory Coast, the world’s biggest producer of cocoa, had been on high alert since November, when gunmen stormed into a luxury hotel in Mali’s capital, Bamako, killing more than 20 people. Authorities thwarted several militant plots before Sunday’s assault, Interior Minister Hamed Bakayoko said Monday. A mobile phone found at the scene should shed more light on the perpetrators, he added.

Even with increased security, it will be extremely difficult to prevent future attacks, said Bjorn Dahlin van Wees, an Africa analyst at the Economist Intelligence unit.

“The Ivory Coast attack was new in the sense that it was so far away from the core areas of these groups,” he said. “There’s certainly a risk of more attacks: they use simple weaponry, the borders are porous. Cities with a large western or French presence are the main targets.”

Analysts agree that Senegal is likely to be targeted next. Senegal, formerly the seat of the French colonial administration in Africa, has beaches that attract thousands of European tourists, as well as the biggest population of French citizens in West Africa, with 20,000 residents. The predominantly Muslim country has so far been spared militant violence.

Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb surfaced in the early 2000s as an offshoot from an Algerian militant group and gained notoriety through kidnappings of tourists in West Africa. It was based in desolate areas for years and appeared mainly interested in collecting ransom and smuggling in the Sahel, according to the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.

Today’s anti-western rhetoric from al-Qaida sympathizers is spread easily across social media, and sending more troops to patrol the region isn’t going to be effective, Guidere said.

“The combination of their expanding ideology and the anti-colonialist trend within the population makes it very difficult to stop militants from making these kinds of attacks,” he said. “You need a strategy to counter radicalization, an awareness campaign to explain to people why the French are there.”

stripes.com

After more than a decade of covert operations, U.S. activity in Somalia sprang into life this week with two high-profile assaults on the militant group Al-Shabab.

First, the Pentagon confirmed a series of drone and manned air strikes on an Al-Shabab training camp in Hiran, south-central Somalia, on March 5. The U.S. claimed that at least 150 militant recruits were killed in the strikes, though Al-Shabab disputed the death toll. The strikes were quickly followed up by a daring helicopter raid overnight on Tuesday, when joint U.S. and Somali forces assaulted a base held by the militants in Awdigle, south of Mogadishu. Again, the death tolls were a matter of dispute, with Somali government officials claiming as many as 15 fighters were killed but the armed group saying there was only one casualty.

Even if the U.S. does not carry out another single operation in Somalia in 2016, these two incidents make it the deadliest year in terms of casualties inflicted by American forces in the Horn of Africa state in almost a decade. But Washington plainly has many other pressing foreign policy engagements—the U.S. is leading a grueling bombing campaign against the Islamic State armed group (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq (and, increasingly, in Libya) and is also providing tactical support in the fight against Boko Haram in West Africa. So why is the U.S. bothering with Somalia at all?

Part of the answer lies with the African Union (AU). The body’s military force in Somalia—AMISOM—is looking increasingly incapable of dealing with a resurgent Al-Shabab by itself. The 22,000-strong multinational force successfully drove the militants out of major cities in Somalia, including the capital Mogadishu in 2011. But in the past year, the momentum appears to have shifted, in particular with three instances of Al-Shabab fighters overrunning AMISOM bases in Somalia.

In June 2015, militants killed at least 50 Burundian soldiers and took control of their AU base at Leego, 130 kilometers (81 miles) south of Mogadishu. A few months later, the group overran the AU base patrolled by Ugandan soldiers in Janale, southern Somalia, claiming to have killed 70 soldiers in the process. Finally, in January, Al-Shabab militants besieged the El Adde base in the Gedo region of Somalia, close to the Kenyan border. Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud recently admitted that Al-Shabab may have killed up to 200 Kenyan soldiers in the raid, which would constitute the one of the single greatest losses of life in Kenyan military history. (Kenya has so far declined to give a definitive death toll for the attacks.)

“The U.S. are increasingly getting involved because of perceived AMISOM weakness, and the Americans are seeing that Al-Shabab are growing in strength and can manage these type of attacks,” says Stig Jarle Hansen, an Al-Shabab expert and author of Horn, Sahel and Rift, about African armed groups.

Hansen cites an incident in February, when Al-Shabab took control of the Somali port city of Marka with zero resistance from AMISOM troops, who reportedly withdrew from the town before the militants arrived. (AMISOM denied that its forces had withdrawn, saying that troops occasionally “readjust their positions,” and also denied that Al-Shabab took control of Marka.)

The incident, according to Jansen, highlighted a lack of coordination between AMISOM and Somali armed forces and police. “That’s quite shocking and it shows something very negative about the state of the Somali police and the state of the Somali army. It has improved, but it’s not good enough to be efficient,” he says. His comments echo those made by General David Rodriguez, head of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), to the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. Rodriguez said that AMISOM’s effectiveness was being limited due to its troops being “overstretched,” and that the weakness was exacerbated by “endemic deficiencies” within the Somali National Army, which Rodriguez said is “challenged by leadership, logistical support, and clan factionalism.”

Al-Shabab’s broader affiliations have been a matter of much dispute in recent months. The Somali group officially pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda in 2009 but has been the subject of repeated overtures from ISIS, which has tried to convince the group’s leadership to switch allegiances. In the main, Al-Shabab has resisted, and only a small number of fighters have pledged their loyalties to ISIS.

According to Hansen, Al-Shabab remains one of only three noteworthy Al-Qaeda franchises in a global militant landscape increasingly dominated by ISIS, the others being the North African branch (Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM) and the branch active in Yemen (Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP). “By hitting Al-Shabab, you are also hitting the image of Al-Qaeda internationally,” says Hansen, who also points out that, in January, the Somali group used a propaganda video to try to incite U.S. Muslims to violence. The film featured comments by Republican presidential contender Donald Trump, who proposed a total ban on Muslims entering the country, and told American Muslims that their country would eventually turn on them.

So does the U.S.’s recent flurry of activity in Somalia mean it will now engage in a sustained campaign against Al-Shabab? Not likely, according to Roland Marchal, an expert on Al-Shabab at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (known as Sciences Po). The U.S. has been carrying out covert operations in Somalia since at least 2007, but the most drone strikes it has launched in one year was 12 in 2015, according to data gathered by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Somalia is “not high” on America’s list of priorities, says Marchal, and the recent interventions represent less of a strategy and more of a “way to do something big” to intimidate the group. “They [the U.S.] will try to repeat that. Not so much 20 strikes a year, but often enough to scare Al-Shabab fighters and maybe push members to disband,” says Marchal.

newsweek.com

At least four Al-Shabaab militants were killed and five others wounded on Friday evening after locals launched assault against the insurgents at Wabho neighborhood close to Elbur town in Galgudud region in central Somalia.

Somalia intelligence officials and residents said the fighting between armed angry residents and Al-Shabaab militants which was sparked by the militants’ move to collect zakawat (levy) from the locals.

“The residents organized ourselves and decided to fight Al-Shabaab militia because they forcefully took Zakawat (levy) for our livestock and daughters. We could not tolerate more, we killed four of the group members in Wabho wounding five others,” said one of the residents who did not want to be identified.

National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA) officials in the region said the angry locals lost patience after several incidents from Al-Shabaab militants to collect illegal levies from them.

NISA said it encouraged the move by community members towards defending themselves and from terrorists.

Al-Shabaab militants have been facing a major onslaught from U.S. Special Forces backed by Africa Union peacekeeping troops recently and seem to have lost ground especially in southern Somalia.

xinhuanet.com