Maiduguri, Nigeria - A shadowy Islamist insurgency that has haunted northern Nigeria — surviving repeated, bloody efforts to eliminate it — appears to be branching out and collaborating with al-Qaida’s affiliates, alarming Western officials and analysts who had previously viewed the militants here as a largely isolated, if deadly, menace.
Just two years ago, the Islamist group stalking police officers seemed on the verge of extinction. In a heavy-handed assault, Nigerian soldiers shelled its headquarters and killed its leader, leaving hundreds dead and outmatched members of the group, known as Boko Haram, struggling to fight back.
Now, insurgents strike at the Nigerian military, the police and opponents of Islamic law in near-daily assaults and bombings, using improvised explosive devices that can be detonated remotely and bear the hallmarks of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, Western officials and analysts say. The fear is that extremists bent on jihad are spreading their reach across the continent and planting roots in a major, Western-allied state that had not been seen as a hotbed of global terrorism.
Boko Haram has met and trained with al-Qaida affiliates outside the country, officials and analysts in the United States and Nigeria say, and the group has begun waging a propaganda campaign that includes conference calls with reporters — another sign of its growing sophistication.
“Where are they getting this knowledge of IEDs?” said Kashim Shettima, the new governor here. “Some of them went as far as Sudan. Why? I believe they are making efforts to reach out to the global terrorism network.”
The government of Nigeria appears to have only a shaky grasp of how to confront the threat, responding with such a broad, harsh crackdown that many residents see the military as more of a danger than Boko Haram. About 140 people have died in the violence since January, according to Amnesty International, including dozens of civilians killed by the military.
Several dozen civilians were killed in June when bombs were hurled into the rudimentary outdoor beer parlors that exist furtively on the Christian-minority fringes here. Shariah law exists in this overwhelmingly Muslim region, but in a relatively loose form. Not all women are veiled, and beer and wine can be obtained — apparently an affront, authorities here say, to the group’s goal of imposing strict Islamic law in this country’s restive and impoverished north.
Boko Haram’s militants fade into the warrens of sandy alleys, protected, officials say, by supporters in the population and even in the security services. The brutal Nigerian military tactics — shoot first, ask questions later — are creating more sympathizers on the ground, analysts and residents here suggest.
“You are Boko Haram!” said Saude Maman, recounting how soldiers yelled at her husband July 9 after a patrol vehicle was bombed and the military cordoned off Kaleri, a district of low cement houses and courtyards.
When her husband denied it, “they dragged him to the courtyard and shot him,” said Maman, sitting with a group of women in front of a scorched house. Four of them said they had lost their husbands that night.
Last year, after dozens of Muslims were killed in the city of Jos, a leader of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb vowed to help train and supply Nigerian Muslims with weapons to “respond against the aggression of the Christian minority,” in a statement published on Islamist websites. He also promised to help avenge the killing of Boko Haram’s leader in 2009.
Andrew Lebovich, a researcher at the New America Foundation who follows AQIM, said the improvised explosive devices that Boko Haram had been using were an AQIM trademark, echoing a common argument made by Western officials.
Another analyst with connections to Western intelligence operatives said that Boko Haram members had even told intermediaries that “our leaders are in Mali,” a country where the group has received training from al-Qaida affiliates, one U.S. official said.
Gen. Carter Ham, the head of the United States Africa Command, told The Associated Press that there were also signs that Boko Haram and AQIM wanted to establish a “loose partnership” with al-Shabab, the militant group that controls much of southern Somalia and bombed World Cup watchers in Uganda last year.
Such a collaboration “would be the most dangerous thing to happen not only to the Africans, but to us as well,” he said.