Nigeria’s “Taliban” sect, which staged a series of attacks in four states in the north of the country since Sunday, made its formal debut in 2004.
Before then elements of extremism started showing in pockets of neighborhoods of Maidugiri, capital of Borno state in 2002.
In January 2004 a band of some 200 young Muslim extremists including women and children set up a camp at Kanamma village in northeastern Yobe, adjacent to Maiduguri state on Nigeria’s border with Niger, which they named Afghanistan. They named themselves Talibans, drawing inspiration from the Afghanistan group of the same. But locals refer to them as boko haram, a hausa expression for “Western education is a sin.”
The Talibans’ current strength is not publicly known.
Their goal is to impose up a strict form of Shariah and set up a “pure Islamic” state in the north of Nigeria.
In an interview with AFP in February 2005, one of the sect’s leaders, Aminu Tashen-Ilimi, said the group’s aim was to establish an Afghan Taliban-styled puritanical Islamic government through armed insurrection and cleanse the society of “immorality” and “infidelity.”
“This a fanatical organization that is anti-government, anti-people. We don’t know what their aims are yet. We are out to identify and arrest their leaders and also destroy their enclaves wherever they are, wherever they may be seen,” Nigeria national police chief Ogbonna Onovo said.
The group regularly targets police stations in its attacks.
At its creation, the group briefly took control of Kanamma and raided several police stations but was bloodily dispersed by government troops after a two-day battle in which scores were killed, many were arrested while the rest went underground. Eight months later, 60 survivors launched a guerrilla attack on a police stations in Borno’s Gwoza, on the Cameroon border, killing some police officers and residents before fleeing to the Mandara border mountains.
Since then the group has waged attacks on-and-off often with long breaks in between.
A two-day battle in 2005 left 28 “Taliban” dead and scores arrested.
Last week on Friday, police in Maiduguri announced the arrest of nine members of the group at a training camp in Borno’s Bama town with 74 empty shells of home-made bombs and other bomb-making components.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
RSS