The government of Cameroon this week began rolling out an unlikely weapon in the fight against Boko Haram militants, like reported by voanews.com.

Authorities are distributing thousands of goats and sheep to young Cameroonians in villages along with border with Nigeria.

The program aims to providing livestock for a basic income in order to stop the Islamist militant group’s recruiting tactics. The hope is that the livestock will empower thousands of vulnerable families and stop them from joining the extremists, who promise jobs.

In the village of Salak, 17-year-old Oumar Nafisatu received four sheep.

Nafisatu says she is looking forward to having baby sheep so she can sell them to pay for her school fees. She is the only one to take care of herself, she says, after her father and mother passed away.

Boko Haram fighters killed Nafisatu’s parents, along with 21 others, when they attacked her village in 2017, forcing her to flee.

Just a week later, Nafisatu’s only sister was killed in a suicide bomb attack in a mosque at Kolofata. Boko Haram had recruited her with promises of a job as a house cleaner, then forced her to carry out the attack.

Cameroon’s government plans to distribute 60,000 goats and sheep by the end of the year.  The minister of livestock, known only as Dr. Taiga, said the animals will go to those who have suffered in the fight against Boko Haram.

He said the initiative is to help families who are vulnerable by providing animals that are fruitful and enable them to have money. They will provide for their basic needs, said Taiga, take care of their families, and help to avoid temptations that can jeopardize peace and bring chaos.

The Lake Chad Basin Commission, with eight member nations in the region including Cameroon, says some areas attacked by Boko Haram have unemployment rates as high as 90 percent.

Midjiyawa Bakary, governor of Cameroon’s Far North region, notes there have been no major Boko Haram attacks in the past year but says the militants are still recruiting, and the military remains on alert.

He said people should be vigilant because Boko Haram is recruiting jobless youths with promises to improve their living conditions.  Village militias, known as self-defense groups, should be reactivated to work in collaboration with the military, officials, traditional rulers and the clergy, said Bakary. He said they can share information on any suspected activities that may upset the peace that has been returning to villages and towns.

Hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing their homes in Mali, where deadly attacks on villages are destabilising an already critical situation in the country’s centre, like reported by theguardian.com.

More than 200,000 people have fled since the start of the year, almost six times the number that were displaced in the same period last year, according to the Rapid Response Mechanism, a tracking and alert system that helps humanitarian organisations respond to vulnerable people.

Nearly 600 civilians were killed in the first half of 2019, most of them in the central region of Mopti, where villagers including many women and children have borne the brunt of gruesome attacks attributed to ethnic militias.

Herdsmen from the nomadic Fulani ethnic group and hunters from the more settled Dogon have been blamed for these attacks, though neither side has claimed them.

Though there are constant smaller-scale attacks, the most deadly of them were in March, when at least 157 people in Ogossogou lost their lives, and in June, when the mayor of Sobame Da said 95 people had been killed, before the governor revised it down to 35. The true total is still unknown, though an unverified list of 101 names of the dead was circulated on Wednesday.

Civilians say communities are attacking each other, while the military and armed groups are also fighting. The result is a perfect storm in which those mostly affected are the most vulnerable, such as women and children.

“The first victims of this cycle of violence are civilians,” said the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Hassane Hamadou. “They are killed, they are maimed, they are threatened; and their only chance of survival is to flee. Today, people are caught between armed groups, self-defence militias and military forces.”

In a centre sheltering more than 800 women and children in Bandiagara, the mayor of Doucoumbo, Bogo Kassogué, called on the government to respond to the crisis so that everyone could go home and carry on with their lives.

“We have enormous difficulties in this centre – difficulties concerning food, water and hygiene. Each day, more villagers arrive,” he said. “The people arrived here on 20 June so they’ve been here for one week now. There isn’t even enough space to sleep and move.”

There are two other centres in Bandiagara, where conditions are dire, with families huddled in the shadow cast by a wall in the centre, which has only one latrine.

But Yadigné Djiguiba, a 35-year-old mother of five, said there was no way she could go home, considering what she had seen and experienced.

“We fled because it wasn’t safe. There were killings, gunshots and also the presence of armed men,” she said. “As long as they are there, we do not want to go back.”

The attacks in the centre are adding to a crisis in the north that began in 2012 and led to the government losing control of vast swathes of the desert. The humanitarian situation across the country remains critical. Nearly 550,000 people are in urgent need of food, and more than 900 schools are closed.

The UN’s peacekeeping mission in Mali has just had its mandate renewed, and although it pledges to protect civilians, researchers say in practice it does not allow its troops to pre-emptively disarm communities.

Meanwhile, the Fulani accuse the government of supporting the Dogon militias, although there is no concrete evidence they are providing funding.

Yvan Guichaoua, a specialist in rebellions and the rise of jihadism in the Sahel, said the Malian government was creating monsters it could not control.

“The government doesn’t have the capacity to impose its own will,” he said. “So they somehow use loyal groups, but these loyal groups then become something else and start making political claims. What happened in the north, with all the mushrooming of different armed groups, is now also happening in the centre. And this is not about to end.”

Hundreds of terrorists from the Shiite Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN) this week reportedly attacked the National Assembly in the Sunni-dominated African country, triggering a violent confrontation with authorities that left at least two militants dead and some police officers injured, Western and local media reported.

Legit, a Nigerian news outlet, described the assault by the anti-West IMN as an attempt to overthrow the government.

Reporting on the deadly incident, Nigeria’s Punch newspaper, revealed:

Our correspondent learned that the dreaded Shiite members overpowered the policemen at the gate, collected one of their guns and shot the two security operatives.

They entered the main entrance popularly known as MOPOL gate and vandalised the gatehouse. They also burnt three vehicles and destroyed many others.

The sect members unleashed terror on other security operatives when tear-gas canisters were fired to disperse them.

An IMN spokesman claimed the attackers were trying to enter the National Assembly peacefully to rally against the continued detention of their pro-Iran leader, Sheik Ibrahim el-Zakzaky, who has been under arrest since 2015, facing murder charges, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) think-tank in Washington reports.

Zakzaky’s arrest has triggered several protests across the country by the Shiite minority. IMN claims to be peaceful, CFR points out, adding that the group’s leaders do not advocate violence. Nevertheless, the Shiite group has carried out violent attacks in recent years.

The Africa Report notes:

If the Shia departed from their usual peaceful stance to shoot at law enforcement on Tuesday, then the dynamics of the conflict is changing. The government could seek to inflict more harm on the IMN and its leadership, possibly leading to an escalation.

Both the security forces and the Shiite group claim they lost two of their members each, but the claims have not been independently verified CFR points. Nigerian police officers asserted that they used “minimum force.”

Although there are no specific figures for the size of the Shiite population in Nigeria, Breitbart News, using data from the CIA World Factbook and non-governmental sources, determined that between two and five percent (4-10 million) of Nigerians identified as such.

There is also a significant Lebanese Shiite diaspora in the country.

Nigeria is roughly split between Christians (47 percent) in the south and Muslims (52 percent) in the north, the CIA World Factbook reports.

As the most populous (203.5 million) country in Africa, Nigeria houses the fifth largest Muslim population in the world and the largest on the continent, according to non-governmental organization (NGO) group World Atlas, which monitors the religious population across the globe.

Inspired by the Iranian revolution, the currently imprisoned cleric Zakzaky founded IMN to establish a similar Islamic republic of Nigeria.

In July 2018, the Middle East Institute (MEI) reported that Iran’s narco-terrorist proxy Hezbollah may be training Shiite Nigerian militants in Lebanon to expand its influence in West Africa, home to Nigeria.

An unnamed source told MEI:

Iran has told Hezbollah that it needed to recruit and train Nigerians to establish a stronghold there so that it could serve as an operational base for the rest of Africa, mainly to thwart Israeli and western ambitions in the region.

In June, the Daily Telegraph revealed Iran has expanded its terrorist activities to Africa where it has recruited an estimated 300 militants to attack the United States and other Western targets in retaliation for American sanctions against Tehran.

CFR suggested that Teran may be funding IMN.

Iran’s proxy, the Lebanese Hezbollah, is known to traffic illegal drugs from Latin America to Europe, via Western Africa.

Although Hezbollah is reportedly struggling financially as a result of the crippling U.S. sanctions, early last year Forbes deemed the group as the wealthiest terrorist organization, citing its lucrative narcotic operations.

The Sunni groups Boko Haram and its offshoot the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) branch in West Africa remain the most prominent groups in Nigeria. MEI, however, notes that the Shiite movement is growing in Nigeria, mainly due to the increasing sectarian tensions and its repeated clashes with the Sunni-majority nations’ federal police force.

Britain plans to extend its involvement in France’s security mission in Mali and neighboring countries by at least six more months, until June 2020, the Ministry of Defence said on Tuesday.

It has been supporting French forces with three Chinook heavy-lift helicopters and 100 security personnel since July 2018.

Parts of northern Mali remain beyond the control of security forces and violence has spread to other areas of country, AFP has reported.

“It is right that we extend our commitment to the counter-terror operation in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger,” Secretary of State for Defence Penny Mordaunt said.

Around 20 European nations have a military presence in the west African region. Some are involved in the regional UN peacekeeping force, known as MINUSMA.

At least 8,000 children have been recruited by the Boko Haram terrorist movement across the Lake Chad region in Central Africa since it launched its violent campaign in 2009, the UN said in a statement.

Sylvester Tunde Atere, national project officer of the UN Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC), stated in a statement that the children were used by the group in combatant and noncombatant roles, Anadolu Agency reported.

“Recruitment and exploitation have a long-lasting impact on children’s lives,” the statement noted, adding, “Today, rehabilitating and reintegrating these children pose significant challenges, not only in view of their number, but also due to the intense and lasting traumatic effects.”

The UNODC accused Daesh-affiliated Boko Haram of raping or forcing teenage girls into marriage.

Somali militant group al-Shabab has executed 18 people since Wednesday, an unprecedented rate of executions for the group, which is under pressure from U.S. airstrikes, like reported by voanews.com.

Militants put to death four people in the southern town of Jamame on Sunday, immediately after the judge in an al-Shabab court declared them guilty.

Firing squads shot and killed two men accused of being Somali government soldiers and a woman accused of being a spy for Kenya.  The militants identified the woman as 20-year-old Iqra Abdi Aden.

Afterward, an 18-year-old man, Nur Bakar Jirow, was publicly stoned to death for allegedly raping a 16-year-old girl.  The man argued the sex was consensual, but the judge said he deserved the death penalty because he was married at the time.

On Saturday, al-Shabab firing squads killed three men accused of being Somali government soldiers in the town of Kurtunwarey in the Lower Shabelle region. In Buale town of the neighboring Middle Jubba region, the militants executed a man accused of practicing sorcery.

On July 3 and 4, al-Shabab shot and killed 10 men in two separate executions in Hagar and Salagle towns in southern Somalia.  The group accused the men of spying for the Somali government, Kenya and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

All of the victims were convicted by militant courts, according to al-Shabab affiliate media sites.

Al-Shabab courts do not allow lawyers to represent the defendants, and the evidence largely relies on alleged confessions. Critics believe that al-Shabab’s militias torture the accused to force the confessions.

The group did not give a reason for the surge in executions, but has been the target of dozens of U.S. airstrikes over the past two and a half years.  The airstrikes are often ordered on the basis of ground-level intelligence collected by Somali government sources.

In other violence, at least seven people were killed and 22 others were injured in Mogadishu on Monday in two separate attacks, witnesses say.

The first attack took place near a civilian hospital when Mogadishu police stopped a vehicle loaded with explosives. The driver refused to exit the vehicle, forcing police to open fire. Moments later the vehicle exploded killing two people and injuring 18 others.

Separately, a suspected militant vehicle attempted to pass through a security checkpoint on a crowded road in Mogadishu. Security forces responded killing two militants. A member of the police and two civilians were also killed according to witnesses. Four others were injured in the attack.

Seven years ago separatists from the Tuareg ethnic group and jihadists allied to al-Qaeda took over most of the sparsely populated north of Mali, like reported by economist.com. France sent more than 4,000 troops to stop the rebels’ southwards advance on the capital of their former colony, Bamako, and drove them out of the larger cities. The UN has about 15,000 soldiers and police in the country at present, one of its biggest peacekeeping forces in the world. But the jihadist groups, who are sweeping across much of the Sahel, have reformed, rearmed and recruited new fighters. A new cycle of violence has begun. Among the UN alone, 200 personnel have been killed, making it the most deadly such mission since its start in 2013.

The government of Mali, a country of about 18m people, has shown little interest in re-establishing control in the north or providing social services there. It tends to focus on the country’s gold-rich south-west. This has allowed drug traffickers, militiamen and jihadists—often the lines between them are blurred—to flourish in the populous central regions. The insecurity has spilled over the country’s long borders and destabilised other weak states including Niger and Burkina Faso, which are now also battling jihadist insurgencies.

Recent violence in Mali has an element of inter-ethnic rivalry that did not previously figure so strongly. The country’s most powerful jihadist group, Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin, has concentrated recruitment efforts on the Fulani ethnic group, many of whom are impoverished, disenfranchised, semi-nomadic herders. Fulani relations with two primarily farming-focused groups in central Mali, the Dogon and the Bambara, are becoming increasingly strained. In the past two years Dogon and Bambara militiamen, claiming to be anti-jihadist, have massacred hundreds of Fulani men, women and children. In response, Fulani groups have armed and now carry out their own killing sprees.

The litany of killings is horrendous. In March Dogon militiamen butchered more than 170 people in Ogossagou, a Fulani village in central Mali. The outcry forced the government to resign. In June dozens of gunmen suspected to be from a Fulani “self-defence group” killed 35 people at a Dogon village. (The local mayor claimed the number was almost 100.) And a week later another 41 people were reportedly massacred in two more Dogon villages.

The murders are part of a cycle of tit-for-tat attacks that are also often linked to conflicts about land or theft of cattle. The government has done little to resolve them. Some soldiers have even given Dogon and Bambara militiamen official passes to get through checkpoints, and been on patrols with them. The resulting sense of impunity has had tragic consequences. In seven years more than 1,800 people have died. Mali’s army has proved woefully inadequate for re-establishing governance. Its support for the Dogon and Bambara militias has backfired spectacularly and fuelled the conflict. This year intercommunal violence overtook jihadist violence as the leading cause of violent death in Mali, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, an NGO. To make any sort of progress the new Malian government needs to do more to provide security to all communities, while also encouraging dialogue between militia leaders and helping to settle disputes over land and cattle that fuel some of the violence. Without that, there seems little reason to hope that the bloodshed will end.

The Network Against Cyber-Terrorism, NACT, has alerted Nigerians on the latest antics being deployed by the Islamic State of West African Province, ISWAP, to divert attention from the fact that they have been decimated, like reported by dailypost.ng.

NACT disclosed that members of the sect had resorted to manipulating videos to show that they were still occupying some communities in the country.

Addressing newsmen yesterday in Maiduguri, Borno State, President of the group, Jackson Mefor, said ISWAP has “now resorted to psychological terrorism by floating fake footages to create the impressions that they have recently carried out successful attacks.”

Mefor warned the general public against falling for the tricks of the defeated terrorists.

He said: “The intensified onslaughts on these vermin have seen them roundly dealt with in Doron Naira, Ngouma in Cameroun, Arege, Malkonory and Tumbun Rego as well as Goniri, Nbaga and Gero. The losses inflicted on the terror infrastructure from the encounters in these battles have been shown to the world and they clearly confirm that ISWAP is getting the correct dose of the medication being administered for its madness by sovereign states.

“There are enough pictorial and video evidences to the effect that the projected ascendancy of the terrorist organization in the Lake Chad Basin is not just being halted but ISWAP is increasingly going into disarray. In the span of the previous few weeks, the terrorists have lost caches of weapons and ammunition to the military operations in the region. They are also losing commanders on a scale they never thought possible since they recently had injection of experienced terrorists from the Middle East.

“These series of losses on battle will naturally attract certain responses that fit into the established pattern that the cowardly terrorists are known to have repeatedly adopted. The first is the resort to resume attacks on populations that they know to be incapable of fighting them as exemplified by the weakness demonstrated when they attacked framers in Ngamgam village, Mobbar Local Government Area of Borno state. The attack was motivated by the bitterness they felt over their serial losses which they, in part, attributed to the farmers providing actionable intelligence to government forces.

“The second response from the beleaguered terrorists is to revert back to deploying propaganda with intent to mislead the public, their sympathisers and sponsors that they continue to be relevant. These terrorists, after suffering monumental defeats, have now resorted to psychological terrorism by floating fake videos to create the impressions that they have recently carried out successful attacks.

“These videos often trend and they become rallying points for those that are cheering the terrorists on to commit more crimes against humanity. The media so published often get repeated and looped several times over to an extent that finding out the truth becomes a difficult task especially for publications that do not have the resources for on the ground verification of the claims made in such clips.

“After carefully reviewing videos purportedly showing the occupation of military bases and other footages meant to depict ISWAP as regaining relevance, we have concluded that the videos were manipulated to create the wrong impressions. The videos are old clips re-published to create the impression of currency at a time when the terrorists are taking heavy causality. We also found that the ones that are genuinely recent among the video were staged at locations other than they were claimed to be.

“However, we observed that some people continue to fall for this cheap trick, ostensibly because the online assets of the terrorist group are able to whip up sentiments around the videos by trolling the Nigerian Military and the MNJTF to the benefit of ISWAP. This development fits smugly into the intention of the terrorists. Their objective is to terrorise the population using the fake video by making people believe that they are in control of key military facilities in the Lake Chad Region when in reality they are taking flight owing to recent successes being recorded by the Nigerian military in its counter terrorism operations.

“This attempt at lying about occupying military bases become exceptionally comical when one of the places they claim to be in control of is where the Chief of Army Staff, Lt. General Tukur Buratai has been in the theatre of operations, personally leading the troops to carryout various operations, boosting troops’ morale in a rare act of patriotism that have made them to continue to display uncommon gallantry. For terrorists that can lie about being in control of such location it is apparent that every other thing they have claimed in recent weeks is a lie.

“Because we realize that the lies of the terrorists might have done untold damages to the psyche of the civilian population before they are properly addressed, the Network Against Cyber- Terrorism has resolved to actively track the propaganda being pushed out by the terrorists and their online supporters. It will promptly brief the public of such development as the need arises in order to curb the panic that ISWAP/Boko Haram want to spread among the populace. A population that is being saved from and has been saved from terrorists’ attacks does not deserve to be terrorised with terrorist propaganda as the ISWAP videos intended.

“The Network nonetheless charges those that legitimately work in disseminating information – journalists, editors, bloggers, and social media influencers etc. – to take exceptional care in treating multimedia contents emanating from ISWAP. They should bear certain things in mind in this regard. The first is to be mindful of unknowingly helping to spread lies and propaganda for the terrorists. The second reason to be circumspect is the need to not assist the terrorists in spreading weaponized messaging that terrorize members of the public.

“We are convince that the cyber space is a key battleground where a timely defeat of ISWAP will translate into a conclusive dismantling of its terror infrastructure and a resounding defeat in the physical battles in the various theatres of military operations against the global menace.”

Islamic terrorists have killed 16 soldiers in an attack on a military camp in western Niger, local residents and security sources said to reuters.com.

The raid occurred on Monday afternoon near the town of Inates, close to the border with Mali, where Islamist militants are active, and in the same region where an ambush by Islamic State’s West African branch killed 28 soldiers in May.

Niger hosts the African Union summit from July 6-9 less than 200 km (125 miles) away in the capital Niamey. In the run-up, the European Union has been training Nigerien forces to respond to militant attacks.

Zakari Insa, the brother of one of the soldiers killed in Monday’s attack, and Souley Marou, a local villager, both said 16 soldiers had died.

Two security sources confirmed the death toll, and one of them said about a dozen vehicles had been stolen. Jihadists have previously launched attacks using vehicles stolen in previous raids.

An army spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment.

Security has deteriorated in recent months across West Africa’s Sahel region, a semi-arid strip of land south of the Sahara. France and the United States have deployed thousands of troops to the region to counter jihadist groups linked to Islamic State and al Qaeda.

The attacks have also helped to stoke ethnic violence between rival farming and herding communities, particularly in Mali and Burkina Faso.

Militants loyal to Adnan Abu Waleed al-Sahrawi, the leader of Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, operate along Mali’s border with Burkina Faso and Niger.

In 2017, they killed four members of U.S. special forces and four Nigerien soldiers in an ambush near the village of Tongo Tongo.

Troops of 26 Task Force Brigade have neutralized two fleeing of terrorists, who were operating along Gwoza axis in an ambush conducted in Sobon Gari and Jirawa villages of Borno State, like reported by dailypost.ng.

The ambush was carried out based on information divulged to the troops by some good citizens in the area.

A statement issued on Monday by the Acting Director, Army Public Relations, Colonel Sagir Musa, also indicated that the ambush, which is in continuation of Operation Halaka Dodo, was conducted in conjunction with some members of the Civilian Joint Task Force.

“The terrorists were said to be scouting for soft target especially vulnerable farmers to disrupt their faming activities with intention of kidnapping women and children to be enslaved as labourers on farmlands belonging to the terrorists.

“At the end of the encounter, the troops recovered: 1 Ak 47 rifle without a butt, 1 Bajaj Motorcycle, as well as clothing and laundry items,” he added.

According to the Army Spokesperson, troops are currently on aggressive clearance patrols in the general areas with a view to flushing out other fleeing terrorists.