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Fight against Al Shabaab: Lessons for East Africa from Boko Haram war

Saturday February 21 2015
war

When Nigeria postponed its elections two weeks ago, it claimed it had been forced to do so because of the predations and insecurity caused by Boko Haram, the militant group that has made north-eastern Nigeria virtually ungovernable.

Nigerians think that this is a time-buying ploy, to help the flailing President Goodluck Jonathan shore up a stumbling campaign and work out an election rigging strategy to stop the growing momentum of his main rival Muhammad Buhari, former military strongman and bane of the corrupt.

Put aside President Goodluck’s real reason: There is no doubt that Boko Haram is deadly. Since it was founded in 2002, it has killed an estimated 14,000 people.

It is responsible for 80 per cent of all terror attacks in Nigeria and now, so it seems, it has the potential to stall democracy and stump the military in Nigeria. It is a problem that does not interest many East Africans. It should.

First the growth and evolution of Boko Haram mirrors that of Al Shabaab, East Africa’s deadly terror group. Secondly, they are both salafist and jihadist, meaning they believe in a particularly virulent version of Sharia and think that they can achieve it through violence.

By studying Boko Haram, we could learn some key lessons on the right and wrong ways to fight extremists. By understanding Boko Haram’s ideological and political motivations, we could learn why military solutions have so far failed to check its growth.

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Even though the real problem is what the Rand Corporation calls “Al Qaidism,” that is, the global network of freelance extremist groups united by adherence to salafism, studying Boko Haram will, nonetheless, shed light on the ways of such groups.

Who, then, is Boko Haram? It was founded in Maiduguri in 2002 by Mohammed Yusuf, a salafist cleric opposed to both the Nigerian leadership and Western influence.

Its official name translates as the “people committed to the propagation of the Prophet’s teachings and jihad.” Its mantra is the Koranic verse that says that “Anyone who is not governed by what Allah has revealed is among the transgressors.” Yusuf’s army of believers called themselves the Nigerian Taliban and their leaders had, in fact, trained in Afghanistan.

The “boko” in their name has its roots in “book,” which in turn is a reference to writings in the roman script, the basis of Western education. This education funnels people into a corrupt Westernised life style. As such it is “haram” or “sinful” education and so, un-Islamic.

Boko Haram’s ultimate goal, it says, is to restore the Sokoto Caliphate. Founded by Usman dan Fodio in 1804, and destroyed by the British in 1903, the Sokoto Caliphate once reigned across northern Nigeria, Niger and southern Cameroon.

When it was founded in 2002, Boko Haram’s goal was more modest: Provide Islamic education and counter Western influence. The influx of the children of poor Muslims from Nigeria and neighbouring countries enhanced Yusuf’s influence and adjusted his modest goals to match his new ambitions. Now he wanted to root out corruption and stop un-Islamic policies.

In 2009, Boko Haram launched military operations to restore the Caliphate. Yusuf himself was captured and executed during the 2009 riots in Bauchi, Borno, Yobe, and Kano states in northern Nigeria.

In July 2010, Abubakar Shekau, the current leader, took over the group’s leadership and soon launched a series of even more violent attacks: A prison break in Bauchi; the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Abuja and, most famously, the kidnapping of 250 school girls early 2014 and the murder of over 1,500 people by year’s end.

Today, on fatalities alone, Boko Haram competes with the Islamic State for the title of the most deadly salafist group in the world. How did it grow so quickly and so deadly?

The answer is in five parts: National and regional inequalities; desperation and unemployment; a weakening state feeding off widespread corruption; militarisation of Nigeria’s anti-terror strategy and finally, President Goodluck’s cack-handed handling of northern Nigeria.

First, the political and economic realities: Nigeria is a highly unequal country. In the north, 72 per cent of the people live in poverty. In the south, that number is 27 per cent and in the Delta region it is 35 per cent. Though it is the world’s eighth largest producer of oil, estimates are that 80 per cent of the oil revenue ends up in the hands of a small elite, both southern and northerners.

Unemployment is high. Last year, 14 job applicants died in stampedes and, in another case, half a million people applied for only 4,500 immigration jobs.

For many years, these economic inequalities were softened by political inequalities, which favoured the north: Eight out of 14 former heads of state have been northerners. This dominance rests on a myth first nurtured by the British — namely, the idea that the northern Muslim aristocracy were natural rulers.

Based on fabricated census data, that original sin was embedded in Nigeria’s electoral system at Independence in order to guarantee the continuing dominance of the northern elite.

In recent years, a shift has occurred and the north now feels that both economic and political dominance has gone to southerners.

Though the northern elite still has its snout in the federal oil trough, resentment in the north as a whole has deepened. Of course, this does not translate into automatic support for Boko Haram but it does mean lukewarm support or outright hostility to the governing elite — which, of course, weakens the federal government’s ability to fight Boko Haram.

Second, economic stress has created an angry reservoir of desperate, poorly educated Muslim youths in the north generally but in the northeast in particular. There is then a large population from which Boko Haram is able to recruit.

As Nigerian analyst Chris Ngwodo notes, Boko Haram is “an effect and not a cause; it is a symptom of decades of failed government and elite delinquency finally ripening into social chaos.”

Third, the cannibalistic corruption of the Abuja cabal has weakened the state and its ability to confront Boko Haram’s violence.
To begin with, the once invincible Nigerian army, justly famed for leading the Ecowas liberation of Sierra Leone and Liberia, is reportedly ill-equipped, dispirited and ineffectually led. On the other hand, Boko Haram is increasingly well equipped and highly motivated. They re-arm by raiding police stations; stealing Nigerian military stock, buying from the black market and, ironically, buying off some from disenchanted soldiers of the Nigerian forces at crazy discounts.

Fourth, the Nigerian government’s response to Boko Haram has been targeted assassinations and indiscriminate swoops and torture of suspected supporters. Yet brutality and impunity have not worked. On the contrary. Boko Haram has returned with greater force after each round of killings, carrying out ever more ruthless attacks and conducting even bigger massacres.

Finally, the Nigerian government was slow in recognising that Boko Haram had clear political objectives. The government confused what Boko Haram said about itself for what it really was. Instead of recognising it as the insurgency that it was, it presented it as a bunch of red-eyed religious fanatics.

Lessons learnt

What can we learn about fighting Al Shabaab from this thumbnail history?

Like Boko Haram, Al Shaabab has political objectives: It wants to create a fundamentalist state in Somalia. Like Boko Haram, it first mobilised for purely local political goals, fighting the anarchy that state collapse had created in Somalia.

Like Boko Haram, it has forged links with Al Qaeda and is now part of the global network of freelance salafist groups with both local and anti-Western grievances. Like Boko Haram, Al Shabaab now routinely strikes abroad: as it did in the July 2010 suicide bombings in Uganda and as it has done many times in Kenya.

Some quick history first: Al Shabaab rose from the ashes of the failed Somali state. It grew out of Al Ittihad Al Islami (AIAI) — a group led by Middle Eastern-educated Somali salafists that emerged after the collapse of the Siad Barre regime in 1991. The group did not thrive immediately.

AIAI’s message did not find favour with many in Somali, a country whose tolerant religious traditions and vibrant if argumentative secular culture were inhospitable to conformism, a prized value of the salafists.

But by early 2000, unending violence had exhausted the country; immiserised the population and radicalised the youth, on whom the burden of war fell most heavily.

A split about goals and methods between the AIAI youth and its elders in 2003 forced the youth to decamp to the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), a relatively moderate group then trying to restore order in war-torn Somalia.

In 2006, a combined Al Shabaab force and ICU overran the capital Mogadishu and promptly imposed their version of Sharia across the country. A panicked Transitional Federal Government of Somalia (TFG) invited Ethiopia to overthrow the ICU.

In truth, Ethiopia did not need an invitation. It had its own Islamist bogeymen in the outlying regions of Ogaden, Issas and Afar and was afraid that the ICU success might inspire its own dissidents.

The militant Al Shaabab became particularly incensed and ever more impatient with ICU. It fought the Ethiopians, won some victories and then opened links with Al Qaeda. Al Shabaab had come of age.

As Rob Wise notes in his study, Al Shabaab, the alliance with Al Qaeda was mutually beneficial. Al Shabaab gained global standing and Al Qaeda resources, including training. Al Qaeda gained influence over the group, a fact that was soon reflected in Al Shabaab’s ideology and tactics — suicide bombing, for instance and rhetorical posturing that now presents Somalia as a front in a “global war” against the West.”

What have we learnt from the growth of Al Shabaab? Pretty much the same things we have learnt from the history of Boko Haram.

First, extremists groups will not be defeated by military means alone. Ethiopia, Kenya and the African Union Mission to Somalia (Amisom) have tried without success to destroy Al Shabaab since 2006.

Even when its leaders have been killed, as they have been with increasing regularity by American drone attacks, the group has merely been temporarily decapitated, not destroyed. Which probably means that even other violent methods won’t work.

In the case of Boko Haram, collective punishments against Muslims or even targeted assassinations proved ineffective. They will be ineffective against Al Shabaab too.

The rounding up and internment of Somalis from Nairobi’s Eastleigh district last year did not stop the attacks in Mpeketoni on the Kenyan North Coast and Mandera in northeastern Kenya. Swoops and decapitation are both good press for a population thirsty for retribution after an attack, but in truth they are ropey strategies.

If not the military, then what? The lesson here lies in this: Al Shabaab has flourished on the weakness of the Somalia state. Long-term, only a refurbishing of Somali as a viable and legitimate state can erode the social and political base of Al Shabaab.

Last year’s claims by the British ambassador to the United Nations that the Kenya Defence Forces were involved in the multimillion dollar contraband charcoal market in Somali suggests that Kenya went to Somalia without a clear idea what to do after intervention. Unfortunately, military intervention without a political strategy is always a bad idea.

It is clear that the places where extremist groups now flourish — Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia — are all post-intervention countries: In Libya by Nato; in Iraq and Afghanistan by the US and in Somalia by Ethiopia, Kenya and Amisom.

Meaning that we may have slowed down Al Shabaab but what happens if we leave a vacuum behind?

The short of it is that Kenyans should not be smug about large claims of military victory in Somalia. What matters most is that there is no vacuum when KDF leaves.

But even without leaving a vacuum behind, there is future risk of blowback. There are a large number of disenchanted youths from Kenya who have trained with Al Shabaab for years. They will eventually come home even if Al Shabaab is militarily defeated.

We should expect them to be the spearhead of blowback — defined as the unintended harm that a country suffers from the fact of its involvement in another country — and plan accordingly. Most terrorist attacks now happening in the Middle East, North Africa, Somalia, Mali and even northern Nigeria are examples of blowback. They are led by extremists who have trained or fought in Afghanistan and the badlands of Pakistan.

Second, in order to confront the roots of violent extremism, it is critical to understand why their fighters are so motivated, invariably more motivated than those sworn to eliminate them.

The answer lies in the ideology of salafism, sometimes called Wahhabism by the Western media. These extremist groups want to impose a virulent form of Sharia associated with Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya, an erudite 13th century jurist from Damascus.

First a short word on Sharia: Sharia simply refers to a body of Islamic law drawning on a principles laid down in the Koran, supplemented by hadiths, the sayings and teachings of the Prophet as reported by reliable oral narrators who lived after him.
Islam has always had lively debates on the hadiths and their interpretations down the centuries and these have generated different schools of law within the faith.

However, the version of Sharia spawned by salafism has never attracted a mainstream following in Islam, hence the injustice many Muslims feel when salafist interpretations are used to paint all as one. It is if the Branch Davidians’ sick doctrine were labelled Protestant.

We digress, however. In summary, Ibn Taymiyya argued that the correct traditions were those reported from the first three generations of Muslims — the ancestors or “salafs,” and hence the modern word salafism.

The problem, as Sadakat Kadri’s book Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Sharia Law shows, salafist doctrine is by definition almost unassailable: How is one to prove that a claim of the sacred dead is unsound without falling foul of the thought police?

Salafist doctrine is tied to Wahhabism through Muhammad al-Wahhab, a pious 18th century jurist, who claimed a right “to enforce one of God’s own rights.” He so impressed Muhammed ibn Saud, scion of the House of Saud that the two soon partnered to form the first Saudi state. Henceforth, the fortunes of the Saudis would be tied to Wahhabism, ibn Wahhab’s version of salafism.

Salafism claims that its goal is to purify Islam, hence the rigid application of Sharia wherever the doctrine is ascendant.

And herein lies the ideological problem that must be fought. Whenever Sharia is mentioned, the salafist version is assumed and a march of the horribles is conjured up. The image then becomes one of Islamic fanaticism in which, to use Sadakat’s words, all Muslims are presented as “fiery of eye” and “bedraggled of beard.”

This ignorant rhetoric, so beloved of the American media, alienates most Muslims and blocks debate about what to do with extremist groups, who are a danger to all and an even greater one to Muslims.

Third, it is important to remember that these terror groups are networked with Al Qaeda and sometimes with the Islamic State. This means that the global competition between Al Qaeda and Islamic State will influence how both Al Shabaab and Boko Haram evolve in the coming months.

In January this year media spotlight was on Al Qaeda thanks to the Charlie Hebdo murders in France. This month, the public relations coup is with Islamic State, who have just barbarically beheaded 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya and incinerated Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, the Jordanian Air Force pilot.

This competitive display of cruelty between the two groups will escalate. Countries that have proved vulnerable in the past, like Kenya, will be obvious targets.

Fourth, economic factors such as unemployment, low levels of education and inequality have not caused terrorism. However, as the case of northern Nigeria shows, these conditions are fertile soil for the spread of radical propaganda.

Eliminating poverty and unemployment and raising literacy levels won’t eliminate terror but it will make purveyors of extremist agitprop work harder to win hearts and minds.

Finally, a more general point to our allies in the war against terror. They should pursue policies that help rather than undermine the efforts of those closest to the coal-face.

Early this month, in the US the Office of the Comptroller of Currency, OCC, closed Hawala, the system that Somalis in the diaspora use to send money home. The silly justification for this over-broad policy is that hawala transfers could find its way to terrorists.

As George Monbiot of the Guardian notes, one may as well shut down “the phone networks to hamper terrorism.” And while we are at it, “Why don’t we ban agriculture in case fertiliser is used to make explosives? Why don’t we stop all the clocks to prevent armed gangs from planning their next atrocity?”

Such measures are disproportionate and are likely only to alienate the community groups with whom we need to work to fight terror. As Monbiot notes, remittances from the Somali diaspora are $1.2 billion-$1.6 billion a year, roughly 50 per cent of the country’s gross national income, and provides sustenance to 40 per cent of the population. In short, “cutting off remittances is likely to kill more people than terrorists will ever manage.”

More terror funds have probably gone through regular banking than through Hawala, one of the least expensive methods of global funds transfer.

Here is the point. Though it is true that informal remittance — hawala in Somalia and the Middle East, hundi in India, fei chien in China — may lack both formal supervision and transparency, so too do formal institutions, brokerages, private banking and wire transfer companies, as the tax evasion scandal now confronting the Swiss arm of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, HSBC, clearly shows.

Meaning that even though it is essential to interdict the transfer of funds to terror groups to fight terrorism, generic knee-jerk orders are absurd and counterproductive. Improving transparency — not just in hawala and other informal systems — but also in formal banking is likelier to catch illicit transfers.

In conclusion: There has definitely been a lull in Al Shabaab activity but that is not a cause for complacency. Terror groups work in cycles — lulls and peaks — and the only way to anticipate attacks is to strengthen national resilience to minimise the disruption caused by attacks and to develop comprehensive strategies, not merely military ones.

Boko Haram has shown how a relatively small group of committed and violent ideologues can easily spin out of control and eventually imperil a state. Mali underlines the same point.

East Africa needs to put its security experts to work to craft a long-term strategy to limit the ability of groups like Al Shabaab to undermine the state.

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