BokoHaram Is Winning :Africa’s Version of Islamic State is Gaining Ground in Nigeria.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/bokoharamiswinning-1420411934
Radical Islam has had its best year since 2001, and 2015 should be the year the U.S. leads a global counterattack. But you sure can’t detect any progress from events in Nigeria, where the jihadists of Boko Haram are extending their violent reach while cooperation between the U.S. and Nigeria disintegrates.
On the weekend the militant group seized Baga in northeastern Nigeria, the last town in the area that was still under government control. Baga hosted the Multi-National Joint Task Force, which is composed of troops from Nigeria, Chad and Niger who are supposed to fight crime in the Lake Chad region. The task force inevitably confronted Boko Haram, and its rout shows that the jihadists are confident and strong enough to take on even an organized military force.
ENLARGE Boko Haram attacks towns and villages on a daily basis. Their specialty is mass kidnapping—of boys and young men to join their ranks, and of girls to become wives of its warriors. CNN reports that the group abducted 40 hostages on the weekend from the village of Malari, also in the northeast.
Boko Haram—which means “Western education is forbidden” in the Hausa language—is the group that kidnapped more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls to great global consternation last year. The kidnapping prompted Michelle Obama to pose for a photo holding the Twitter hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. The Twitter offensive made Westerners feel good but it didn’t impress Boko Haram.
The girls have never been rescued and are presumed to have been married off to jihadists, like settler girls kidnapped by Comanches in the 1800s on the American plains. Boko Haram shows how little civilization has advanced in 200 years.
The campaign did prompt the U.S. to send advisers and provide intelligence to help the Nigerian military, but that seems to have produced little. The Nigerians want heavy weapons to blast Boko Haram from the air, while the officers of the U.S. Africa Command steeped in counterinsurgency fear that such bombing may create more jihadists if the Nigerians end up killing innocent civilians.
The Nigerian government and military are notoriously corrupt, but the U.S. has no good alternative. In its jihadist regional ambitions Boko Haram resembles Islamic State. A collapse of Nigeria’s military would leave Boko Haram as the dominant force akin to what ISIS has done in Syria and Iraq. The human toll would be horrific.
U.S. officials are right about Nigerian incompetence, and we can hope the shock of losing Baga will concentrate minds in Abuja. But like it or not, the U.S. will need to stay militarily and diplomatically engaged to stop Boko Haram from establishing a de facto caliphate in West Africa.
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