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Boko Haram targets catholics: 100,000 homeless from Islamist insurgency

13 Maggio 2015 By Redazione Islamedianalysis

More than 100,000 Nigerian Catholics have been left homeless by Boko Haram’s six-year insurgency in northeast Nigeria and another 5,000 have been killed, a Christian charity said Tuesday. As a result, there are now 7,000 widows and 10,000 orphans in the Maiduguri diocese, Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) told Premier.

A report by the charity also found some 350 churches have been destroyed in the diocese, which encompasses Borno and Yobo states as well as part of Adamawa. More than half of the Maiduguri diocese’s parish centers, chaplaincies and church-run primary schools have been deserted by Nigerian Catholics and many of them are occupied by Boko Haram militants, who control up to 85 percent of the diocese territory.

“People are very scared, and those who are able to return home find there is nothing left,” Rev. Father Gideon Obasogie, the diocesan director of social communications, told ACN, according to Catholic Herald. “A life lived with much fear is terrible.”

The Nigerian army has declared military victories and territorial gains against the Islamist extremists in recent months. But Boko Haram’s insurgency has practically wiped out villages and communities in the northeast. More than 1.5 million people forced to flee their homes in Nigeria were still living in internal displacement centers as of April. Boko Haram has killed more than 13,000 civilians since 2009, the United Nations refugee agency has said.

Boko Haram has sworn loyalty to the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIS or ISIL. ISIS officially accepted its pledge in March, making Boko Haram the largest and most lethal jihadi group to be inducted into the Islamic State group’s network. The militants seek the establishment of a state in northeast Nigeria based on strict Islamic law.

From Bosnia to Somalia: classifying “involvement” in armed conflict

13 Maggio 2015 By Redazione Islamedianalysis

The laws governing armed conflict may seem simple on the surface. Soldiers can be targeted; civilians cannot. But the line between these groups is blurry and can have life-and-death implications.

Under international humanitarian law, or the laws of war, civilians can be intentionally killed if they “directly participate in hostilities.” But what does direct participation mean? What if a civilian feeds combatants, drives members of an armed group, provides equipment or intelligence, or takes up arms to protect family members? Does it matter if involvement was voluntary or forced? Do such actions mean the civilian can be lawfully targeted?

A new 84-page report, to which the International Human Rights Clinic contributed a case study, takes a fresh look at this contentious issue. The People’s Perspectives: Civilian Involvement in Armed Conflict, released Tuesday by the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC), documents the experiences of people in four former or current conflict zones: Bosnia, Libya, Gaza, and Somalia. It does not seek to come up with a conclusive definition of direct participation in hostilities. Instead, it aims to inform the debate among military commanders, lawyers, academics, and other experts by adding the voices of those who have lived through war.

The report finds that civilians become involved in conflict in a number of ways, ranging from fighting to providing logistical support to membership in civil defense forces or political parties. While sometimes voluntary, their involvement is often motivated by threats from armed groups or the need to survive. The people CIVIC interviewed had varied understandings of who is a civilian and who is a combatant and found it difficult to delineate the difference. They agreed, however, that the legal status that derives from involvement can not only determine whether civilians are targeted but also affect their lives long after a conflict ends.

In 2013, I led a four-person team, including Lara Berlin, JD ’14, Luca Urech, Fletcher ’13, and Nicolette Boehland, JD ’13, on a field mission to Bosnia, where we documented people’s experiences during the war. Later, as a post-graduate fellow at CIVIC, Boehland conducted investigations in three other conflict zones and served as lead author of the final report.

Testimony from those who lived through the Bosnia war of 1992-1995 highlighted the challenge of classifying involvement in a conflict. Some Bosnians told the Clinic’s research team that everyone during the armed conflict was a soldier, while others contended they were all civilians. A 40-year-old gardener from Srebrenica said, “The line between soldiers and civilians in war is invisible. . . . There is almost no line, no distinction.”

Residents of Sarajevo, for example, frequently fought on the front lines on certain days, but took off their uniforms and returned to their families on others. A woman who had lived through the city’s siege captured the confusion about the nature of these people’s involvement: “Many killed [during the conflict] were actually civilians, but I don’t know how to distinguish them. If my uncle is on duty, he’s one thing, but when he’s in line for bread, what is he?”

The stories of Bosnians and others in this report illustrate the modes, motivations, and complexities of people’s involvement in armed conflict. Experts and policymakers would do well to heed these realities as they continue their deliberations about the meaning of direct participation in hostilities.

Sahrawi Army “ready” to take up arms again if Morocco continues to disregard international law

12 Maggio 2015 By Redazione Islamedianalysis

Sahrawi Army is “ready” to take arms to regain independence of Western Sahara “if the Moroccan colonial regime continues to disregard international law,” said Tuesday in Chahid El-Hafed Sahrawi Minister of Defence Mohamed Lamin Buhali.

“The Sahrawi Army, the military wing of Polisario Front and legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people, is ready to take up arms again if the Moroccan regime continues to ignore Sahrawi people’s legitimate rights to self-determination,” Buhali told APS on the sidelines of the festivities marking the 42^nd anniversary of the creation of Polisario Front.

He, however, underlined that the decision to take up arms again “lies with the Sahrawi President, Mohamed Abdelaziz,” adding that “Sahrawis are peaceful people who aspire to regain their independence through negotiations and the holding of a referendum on self-determination.”

The Sahrawi Defence minister also denounced “Morocco’s continuous violation of human rights in the occupied territories of Western Sahara, as well as the sending of weapons and radars to the Kingdom of Morocco by some ally countries in order to end any legitimate resistance of Sahrawi people.”

He said that “contrary to what have been reported by Moroccan media, the Sahrawi military forces are carrying out their duty of protecting citizens in the Sahrawi liberated territories and refugee camps, as well as towards the international delegations on mission to Western Sahara.”

Buhali also denounced “Morocco’s colonial policy aiming at creating tensions between Maghreb countries while flooding them with drugs with a view to destabilizing the region.”

CMA militants kill nine soldiers in Mali’s Timbuktu

12 Maggio 2015 By Redazione Islamedianalysis

At least nine soldiers were killed and 14 others were wounded when militants from the Coordination des Mouvements de l’Azawad (CMA) – a coalition of five Tuareg and Arab groups, including the Mouvement National pour la Libération de l’Azawad (MNLA) – ambushed an army convoy travelling near the town of Tin Telout, 40 km southwest of the city of Timbuktu, in Mali’s Timbuktu region on 11 May.

In claiming responsibility for the attack, a spokesman for the CMA, Mohamed Elmaouloud Ramadane, claimed that they killed 30 Malian soldiers in the attack, although this claim could not be independently verified.

Two army vehicles were purportedly set on fire while the militants themselves lost one of their vehicles.

Inside Boko Haram’s “caliphate” in Nigeria

12 Maggio 2015 By Redazione Islamedianalysis

The first sign that one is entering Boko Haram’s self-declared “caliphate” in north-east Nigeria is that there are no signs. All around the town of Michika, which fell to the sect in September, gunmen have daubed black paint over signs written in English, be it advertising a local church or simply giving directions to the next town.

For a group whose motto is “Western education is sin”, all foreign scripts are deemed “haram” or forbidden – except for the Quranic Arabic with which it writes its own fundamentalist logo. One such logo can be seen on a captured Nigerian army tank, a black circle bearing the inscription “There is no God but Allah” painted just beneath the business end of the tank’s gun.

Today, though, the tank serves not as a symbol of Boko Haram’s triumph, but its defeat. The rusting, Soviet-era T72 now lies abandoned by the road, just one of many wrecked and burnt-out vehicles left by Boko Haram now that the Nigerian army is finally pushing them out.

Sat amid dusty copses of baobab and birch trees, Michika was part of a large chunk of Nigeria’s Adamawa state that was seized by Boko Haram last autumn. In the language of the local Kamre tribe, the town’s name means “creeping in silently”. Boko Haram’s arrival, one Sunday last September, was anything but.

“The day beforehand, a group of soldiers came running past our homes, saying: ‘Get out of here, Boko Haram are coming’,” resident Matthias Andrew, 42, who fled first on foot and then by cattle truck, told The Telegraph.

“The next day, just half an hour after Sunday church service, they arrived in a convoy with their headlights on in full daylight, and when people ran away they shot at them.”

“They slaughtered people like goats,” added Immanuel Gabriel, 34, whose wife and five children were kidnapped by the group. “My wife and kids were released by them four months later, but they killed my father, and step-brother and his two children.”

Now, with Boko Haram cleared from Michika and several other towns near Nigeria’s mountainous border with Cameroon, some of the 400,000 locals who fled south to the city of Yola are coming back, returning to burned-out houses, ransacked banks, and desecrated Christian churches and cemeteries.

Most though, are not going home because they think it is safe, but to plant the crops ahead of the forthcoming rains that provide their only livelihoods.

The threat from further attacks remains high, and when The Telegraph visited Michika with an army escort on Sunday, a local imam who acted as a guide, Dauda Bello, prayed for safe passage before departing. Even with a pick-up truck full of soldiers armed with AK47s and a belt-fed machine gun, it was not considered safe to linger anywhere for long.

On the potholed road north from Yola, the destruction grew greater with every passing town. Barely a single town hall, school or hospital remains intact. Market places and bullet-ridden shop fronts still stand largely deserted, even though four months have now passed since Michika was liberated. Most of the road’s bridges have been blown up by Boko Haram to halt the army’s advance, forcing traffic to forge across rivers that will become impassable during the rainy season.

“People have no choice but to come back, but there is a real risk that they will be cut off,” said Mr Bello, as a group of farmers pushed an ageing lorry stuck in the riverbed.

The prospect of being isolated from outside help explains the nervous looks on the faces of local soldiers, who man a thinly-spread series of sandbagged checkpoints outside each town. Some have tanks parked out of sight down side streets, but others have help only from the Civilian Joint Task Force, the polite name for the local vigilantes, who are armed with sticks, machetes and homemade firearms made by a local gunsmith.

“We are here to protect our towns,” said Samuel Markus, 30, whose gun comprised of an ancient flintlock firing piece bound with masking tape to a wooden stock. The stock had the words “AK47” hand-carved on the side, even though the weapon fired only shotgun pellets.

Nonetheless, army officers say the vigilantes have been useful in helping them track down Boko Haram fighters within the local population, who either sympathised with the group in the first place or joined up opportunistically when they seized control.

The challenge now though is stopping that vigilante force turning into a sectarian revenge squad. For although Boko Haram terrorised both Muslims and Christians in the likes of Michika, local Christians believe they suffered the brunt of it. While a handful of local mosques have been destroyed, there is barely a single church left standing. Many local worship sessions are now held under mango trees.

Mr Bello favours preaching forgiveness, and says that ultimately, efforts will have to made to reintegrate those who joined Boko Haram back into their communities. “They may still have some of the Boko Haram ideas, so they will need careful examination,” he said.

Even he concedes that suspicions are likely to linger, and in the meantime, scores are being settled in a more robust way. While The Telegraph was in Michika, word went round that the vigilantes had caught a “Boko Haram suspect” and were giving him a stiff beating just a block or two away.

Asked if we could investigate further, the officer leading our army escort shook his head and said it was time to move on.

Boko Haram to use guerrilla tactics after losing Nigerian land

12 Maggio 2015 By Redazione Islamedianalysis

A California National Guard Special Forces soldier from Los Alamitos-based Special Operations Detachment-U.S. Northern Command and Company A, 5th Battalion, 19th Special Forces Group (Airborne), poses with Nigerian soldiers on May 31, 2014, during a training mission in Nigeria.

Boko Haram may revert to its strategy of suicide bombings and guerrilla warfare in Nigeria after regional forces recaptured territory from the militants, according to a former captive and analysts.

Since the beginning of April, Nigeria’s military, aided by Chad and Niger, has freed hundreds of people kidnapped by the Islamist insurgents, killing Boko Haram fighters and seizing their weapons. The campaign, aided by troops from neighboring Chad and Niger, has weakened the group, which at one point held control over an area the size of Belgium.

Falmata Kalla, a 31-year-old housewife who was abducted from the northeastern town of Doron Baga and held captive by Boko Haram for eight months, said women and children as young as 12 years old were undergoing training to be used as bombers.

“They are planning heavy suicide bombing attacks in and around the Lake Chad areas and beyond,” Kalla said by phone from Maiduguri, the capital of the northeastern state of Borno, where she fled to last month.

Key to strengthening stability in the region will be reducing poverty and joblessness that may have helped nurture the rebellion. Northeastern Nigeria is the only region of Africa’s most populous nation where people are getting poorer, with more than half of the population in the area living on about $1.40 a day, the World Bank said last year.

For Muhammadu Buhari, the incoming president, raising spending won’t be easy for the government of Nigeria after the price of crude oil, which finances about 70 percent of government spending, plunged 40 percent in the past year. The West African nation’s currency has dropped 16 percent against the dollar in the past six months.

‘Marshall Plan’

“We need a Marshall Plan for the northeast,” Ben Murray-Bruce, an incoming lawmaker who won a seat in Nigeria’s Senate in March 28 elections, said by phone, referring to the U.S. aid program that helped rebuild Europe after the Second World War. “There’s an incredible amount of youth unemployment and youth restiveness. The only way to solve it is through economic development.”

Boko Haram took charge of towns and raising its black flag over territory in Africa’s largest oil producer since last year. That marked a change in tactics in a six-year campaign to impose its version of Islamic law that had previously consisted mainly of attacking communities and then retreating to rural hideouts.

The group “remains a guerrilla-based terrorist organization, rooted in improvised explosive device bombings and raids on rural villages,” Drum Cussac, a Poole, U.K.-based security consultancy, said in a May 6 report. “This may be the strategy it reemerges with in 2015. As such, one-off bombings in northeast cities and towns remain a possibility.”

Among some of its attacks last year, Boko Haram bombed a shopping center in the capital, Abuja, killed more than 100 worshipers at a mosque in the northern city of Kano, and blew up 47 people in a suicide attack on a school.

Final Offensive

Nigeria’s military, which has been aided by armies from Chad and Niger, is seeking a final victory against the group before Buhari takes office as president on May 29.

Soldiers are on the offensive in Borno and only one area there, the Sambisa forest, is still under Boko Haram’s control, outgoing President Goodluck Jonathan said on April 30. Two other northeastern states, Adamawa and Yobe, have been cleared of insurgents, he said.

In one of those states, Yobe, a suicide bomber on Friday injured at least 14 students by detonating explosives at a college in the northeast town of Potiskum.

“You can’t take the insurgency away from poverty, or lack of education,” Philip Obaji, an education and development activist, said by phone from the southeastern city of Calabar. “Buhari has said he will focus on fighting the insurgency and rebuilding affected areas, but it will require so much will and so many resources.”

Buhari, a former military ruler, vowed last month that a keystone of his strategy against the insurgents will be to improve schooling in the region.

Creating Jobs

“Economic underdevelopment has certainly contributed to ongoing support for Boko Haram and will continue to stoke radicalization if left unchecked,” Malte Liewerscheidt, a senior Africa analyst at Bath, U.K.-based Verisk Maplecroft, said in an e-mailed response to questions. The risk advisory company estimates that Boko Haram killed more than 4,700 people last year, double the number in 2013.

“Buhari aims to create jobs in northeast Nigeria through public investment in agriculture and infrastructure, but doubts remain over whether he can secure enough funding to support the initiative,” he said.

Much of the northeast is scrub and sand where millions of people try to scratch out a living from farming. The south is more prosperous, with Nigeria’s oil-producing creeks lining the coast in the southeast and the commercial capital Lagos is located in the southwest.

Infrastructure Gaps

With 58 percent of Nigeria’s 2015 budget earmarked for recurrent spending, such as salaries, that only leaves only $2.7 billion for capital expenditure in a country with infrastructure gaps in electricity, roads and railways.

“If nothing is done, Boko Haram will resurface in another form,” Murray-Bruce said. “Boko Haram is nothing to do with religion. If people have jobs, if children can go to school, then they aren’t going to pick up a gun.”

South African mercenaries’ secret war on Boko Haram

11 Maggio 2015 By Redazione Islamedianalysis

With their roots in South Africa apartheid-era security forces, they do not fit the standard image of an army of liberation. But after just three months on the ground, a squad of grizzled, ageing white mercenaries have helped to end Boko Haram’s six-long year reign of terror in northern Nigeria.

Run by Colonel Eeben Barlow, a former commander in the South African Defence Force, the group of bush warfare experts were recruited in top secrecy in January to train an elite strike group within Nigeria’s disorganised, demoralised army.

Some of the guns-for-hire cut their teeth in South Africa’s border wars 30 years ago. But their formidable fighting skills – back by their own helicopter pilots flying combat missions – have proved decisive in helping the military turn around its campaign against Boko Haram in its north-eastern strongholds.

The Islamists have now fled many of the towns they once controlled, leading to the freeing of hundreds of girls and women last week who were used by Boko Haram as slaves and bush wives.

The role of Col Barlow’s firm in turning around one of the most vicious African insurgencies of modern times has been kept largely quiet by Nigeria’s outgoing president, Goodluck Jonathan, who lost elections six weeks ago to ex-general Muhammadu Buhari.

But last week, Col Barlow discussed his company’s role in a seminar at the Royal Danish Defence College, and in a separate interview with a Sofrep.com, a special forces website, he described in detail the “aggressive” strike force that was created to push Boko Haram onto the back foot.

“The campaign gathered good momentum and wrested much of the initiative from the enemy,” said Col Barlow, 62. “It was not uncommon for the strike force to be met by thousands of cheering locals once the enemy had been driven from an area.”

He added: “Yes, many of us are no longer 20-year-olds. But with our age has come a knowledge of conflicts and wars in Africa that our younger generation employees have yet to learn, and a steady hand when things get rough.”

During apartheid, Col Barlow served with the South African Defence Force, a mainly white military unit that defended the regime against insurrection and fought border wars in neighbouring Angola and what is now Namibia.

In 1989, as apartheid was beginning to crumble, he co-founded Executive Outcomes, a private military company made up of many ex-members of South Africa’s security forces. One of the first modern “private armies”, in 1995 it successfully helped the government of Sierra Leone defend itself against the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front, notorious for chopping off the arms of their enemies.

Another co-founder of Executive Outcomes, which dissolved in 2000, was Simon Mann, the Old Etonian later jailed in Equatorial Guinea over his attempts to plot a coup there.

Col Barlow’s new company is known as STTEP, which stands for Specialized Tasks, Training, Equipment and Protection. It is thought to have sent around 100 men to Nigeria, including black troopers who previously served in elite South African units. Others even fought as communist guerrillas against the South African Defence Force.

It is not known how much the Nigerian military has paid for STTEP’s services. But the fact that the Nigerian government felt it necessary to bring them in raises questions about the level of help that it was receiving from the British and US militaries, who offered mentoring packages in the wake of Boko Haram’s kidnapping last year of more than 200 schoolgirls from the north-eastern town of Chibok.

Describing Boko Haram as “a bunch of armed thugs who have used religion as the glue to hold their followers”, Col Barlow said the initial plan was for his men to train up a team to help free the schoolgirls. However, as Boko Haram continued to run amok across northern Nigeria, massacring hundreds at a time in village raids, the plan turned to schooling Nigeria’s largely traditional army in “unconventional mobile warfare”.

Key to this was a tactic known as “relentless pursuit”, which involved mimicking Boko Haram’s hit-and-run tactics with non-stop assaults. Once the insurgents were on the run and their likely route established, members of the strike force would be helicoptered into land ahead of them to cut off their likely escape routes, gradually exhausting them.

The South Africans even used bush trackers to work out where their enemies were going, an old-fashioned art that proved vital in Boko Haram’s forest hideouts. “Good trackers can tell the age of a track as well as indicate if the enemy is carrying heavy loads, the types of weapons he has, if the enemy is moving hurriedly, what he is eating, and so forth,” said Col Barlow.

While the Nigerian government has insisted the South Africans’ role was mainly as “technical advisers”, Col Barlow suggested his men had been involved in direct combat. His air power unit was “given ‘kill blocks’ to the front and flanks of the strike force and could conduct missions in those areas,” he said. His forces also helped with intelligence gathering, troop transportation and evacuation of casualties.

Mr Jonathan’s decision to hire STTEP came just ahead of March’s elections, when his government’s failure to either tackle Boko Haram or free the kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls was a major issue. He has promised that when Mr Buhari takes over at the end of this month, Boko Haram will be a spent force, although it is not yet clear whether the Buhari government will renew STTEP’s contract.

Col Barlow warned that while the Nigerians had done well within three months that he had been contracted to mentor them, “the enemy was able to flee the battlefield with some of their forces intact, and will no doubt regroup and continue their acts of terror.”

The involvement of STTEP in Nigeria will inevitably reignite the debate over whether private military companies should be used in conflicts. Human rights groups question whether they are publicly accountable, and in South Africa especially, their background in the apartheid-era makes some uneasy.

However, Col Barlow, whose firm has a code of conduct for behaving “in a legal, moral, and ethical manner” said that private companies were often better than UN or Western trainers of African armies. The latter were often hamstrung by political baggage and a failure to understand how either African armiesor their enemies worked, he said. The advisers that Britain and America have sent to Nigeria are also not permitted to take part in operations on the ground, partly because of the Nigerian’s army’s poor human rights record.

Noting that even the US military appeared to regard his firm with distrust, Col Barlow added: “Some like to refer to us as ‘racists’ or ‘apartheid soldiers’ with little knowledge of our organisation. We are primarily white, black, and brown Africans who reside on this continent and are accepted as such by African governments.”

Uganda Army launches de-radicalization campaign

9 Maggio 2015 By Redazione Islamedianalysis

A spokesman for Uganda’s People’s Defense Forces says the army has launched a de-radicalization campaign in an effort to thwart recruitment drives by terrorist groups, including the Somali-based Islamist group al-Shabab.

Colonel Paddy Ankunda says the move came after the Allied Democratic Front – a terrorist group – began recruiting radical youths for al-Qaida in the region.

Ankunda says the military aims to stop the terrorist recruitment by educating the population about activities of the group.

“This is targeting areas where those who have been recruiting terrorists and would-be radicals have been operating, particularly in areas of central Uganda. What we’ve done now is to engage with the public to engage with the communities that are being targeted by the terrorists through campaign in the media to ensure that we show them the dangers of getting involved in radical activities,” he said.

On Tuesday in New York, President Yoweri Museveni met with U.S. National Security Advisor Susan Rice and exchanged views on regional developments. Topics discussed include the importance of cooperation between the United States and Uganda to counter terrorism and prevent violent extremism in the region.

Ankunda hailed the significant support the UPDF receives from the U.S. government in the fight against terrorism.

“The partnership between Uganda and the United States is very critical, considering the role that we are playing in the region to deal with these radical characters. Right from Somalia through to dealing with the Allied Democratic Forces and the Lord’s Resistance Army, operating now in the Central African Republic,” he said.

“With the Lord’s Resistance Army, the partnership has yielded, so far so much including the recent surrender of Dominic Ongwen and his handing over to the International Criminal Court and we appreciate [it]. The united states support I think stands out above all the other countries as being very consistent in supporting those willing African partners to fight terrorism,” he said.

Experts say the terrorist groups in the region have been using various social media platforms to radicalize and recruit young people to join them.

But, Ankunda says President Museveni’s government has embraced social media as well as using traditional media platforms including radio and television in a bid to combat the activities of the terrorist groups.

“We have created several platforms through which we reach out to the public, highlighting on the dangers of getting involved in radicalism. These platforms are very vibrant [and] fortunately, some of them are being managed by people who ordinarily would be involved in some of these vices,” said Ankunda.

“They include people whom we have changed over a time that were part of radicalism and are now being used to help in mobilizing the population, and they are saying this does not take us anywhere, please stop it,” he added.

Ankunda says the Ugandan army seeks to win the hearts and minds of citizens in the troubled spots where its troops are deployed. He also said there is a combined regional effort to confront and combat terrorism in the sub-region.

“What we have done as a region and as a country is create a regional mechanism of networking that brings together regional actors, intelligence agencies in order that we can get actionable time run accurate intelligence about these movements [of terrorists],” he said.

Ankunda says the efforts, led to the capture of Somali-based Islamist extremists who, he says, confessed to preparing to launch attacks in Uganda’s capital, Kampala. He says explosive materials were also recovered from them.

The terrorists, Ankunda said, traveled from Somalia, using Kenya as a transit point to enter Uganda.

“So these mechanisms are working and I think we should strengthen them further and coordinate intelligence across the borders and share it on a timely basis. So that when these characters cross the border they can be tracked,” he said.

Three students killed, 20 injured as Boko Haram attacks Yobe School

8 Maggio 2015 By Redazione Islamedianalysis

Three students were killed with at least twenty others injured when Boko Haram attacked
the college of Administrative and Business Study ( CABS), Potiskum in Yobe State.

Vanguard gathered the insurgents stormed the school around 8:30am Friday.

A reliable source who witnessed the Book Haram onslaught said, the insurgents numbering about five armed with gun entered the school premises through the main gate after killing the security guard and open fire randomly on the innocent students killing three of them in the process.

The source added that, one of the insurgents died as a result of I.E.D strapped to his chest that exploded, and injured over 20 students. As at the time of filling this report, medical workers were busy evacuating the injured victims. Meanwhile, the security have step up their condoned search in Damaturu the state capital and potiskum where the incident occurred.

Somalia’s Al Shabaab Islamist group driven out of major strongholds

8 Maggio 2015 By Redazione Islamedianalysis

A military offensive has driven Somalia’s al Shabaab Islamist group out of major strongholds and deprived it of revenue sources, but its retreat to a southern valley and northern hills still poses a threat, the U.N. envoy to Somalia said.

The African Union’s AMISOM peacekeeping force and Somali soldiers have pushed the group, which wants to topple the Western-backed government, into smaller pockets of territory since launching an offensive last year. But the group has continued to strike Mogadishu and other government-held areas with bomb and gun attacks from bases in the southern Juba Valley and in northern Puntland’s Galgala hills, a region outside the African Union’s area of operation.

“The AU-U.N. have just done a benchmarking review of AMISOM and the Somali national army, as well, and certainly they have recognised that Puntland is an area of concern,” U.N. envoy to Somalia, Nick Kay, told Reuters on Wednesday. He said expanding AMISOM’s region of operations to the semi-autonomous region of Puntland was “under active consideration”, without saying when it might be agreed. The Somali government has said that the Juba Valley, which lies in the far south near the strategic Kismayo port, was the next target for the military offensive, but has not said when.

Puntland, which has been slowly drawing closer to the federal government in Mogadishu, has agreed to integrate 3,000 of its forces into the Somali national army, Kay said.

On the political front, Kay said Somalia was laying the groundwork for a revised constitution, although preparations had been delayed, and for parliamentary and presidential elections in 2016. He said it was still not clear whether they could be on the basis of one person, one vote. He said the government was committed to a process that is “more inclusive and more representative” than in 2012, when elders chose parliamentary lawmakers for their communities and lawmakers then chose the president. One option would be to expand the number of people choosing the president to include elders, civil society, women’s groups and others, he said, adding it was up to Somalia to decide. “We should not worry if the time that it needs to be really cemented takes a bit longer than had been originally anticipated,” Kay said. “This is a country facing many problems and challenges, but they are the problems and challenges of a country coming together, rather than falling apart.”