Dozens Killed by Multiple Blasts in Northeast Nigerian City of Maiduguri: ISIS On the Move as Boko Haram Asks to Join Islamic State By Drew Hinshaw in Lagos, Nigeria and Gbenga Akingbule in Abuja, Nigeria
http://www.wsj.com/articles/suicide-bomber-kills-10-in-northeastern-nigeria-market-1425731302?mod=WSJ_hppMIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond
Insurgent group Boko Haram formalizes request to join Islamic State
Four bomb blasts on Saturday struck Maiduguri, northeastern Nigeria’s largest city, killing scores on the same day a terrorism monitor said Boko Haram had formalized a long-standing request to join Islamic State.
The fusillade of suicide bombs began around noon, killing and wounding people who were shopping, hawking goods and waiting for busses. The attacks—which hewed to Islamic insurgency Boko Haram’s style of targeting civilians—involved male and female suicide bombers, according to witnesses.
An authoritative estimate of the death toll wasn’t immediately available, but the tally from witnesses suggests several dozen people may have been killed.
One local witness, Ibrahim Ali, said, before the explosion at Monday Market, a bustling commercial strip that has already been bombed three times in the past four months, the suicide bomber had been chatting with the volunteers who had been trying to stop any potential suicide bombers from entering the wrecked market.
Minutes later, a blast struck a bus station on the outskirts of town. The suicide bomber was a young woman, according to bystander Bala Musa.
Nigeria’s police confirmed the incident, but didn’t provide further details.
Two or three years ago, Saturday’s attack would have ranked among Boko Haram’s deadliest, but the past year has set a new benchmark for the insurgent group’s brutality. The group killed as many as 2,000 people in the town of Baga in January, residents who fled that town said, though no authority has been able to confirm that number. It routinely kills hundreds of residents when it takes over towns—part of its bid to instill its mercurial and ruthless vision of Islamic rule—but authorities are rarely able to estimate the dead.
Now Boko Haram appears to be joining arms, at least philosophically, with Islamic State, the Syria-born insurgency that shares that violent vision. On Saturday, an audio recording appeared on a Twitter account that claims to belong to Boko Haram, featuring a man who identified himself as Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau. It was impossible to verify the account or who the man was. But an analysis from the SITE Intelligence Group suggested it was authentic. ”We announce our allegiance to the caliph,” the voice said. “Our gathering under one banner, under one Imam is more heavy to the enemy morality.”
Since August, Boko Haram has been making overtures online to Islamic State. There have been nods in both directions: Islamic State writings have also praised Boko Haram’s methods.
Those methods are remarkable for their sadistic ingenuity. In the latest attack Saturday, soldiers were cordoning off bombed sites when an explosion hit a second bus station in another part of town. That one killed 12 people, said Kabiru Aliyu, another witness. And, around the same time, a bomb killed about 10 more people in the city’s Kola Market—named for nut sold there—said Bana Gana, who sells fish in the area.
A lawmaker for the area said he believes the explosives were of a higher grade than the ones the insurgency has used for half a decade: “These bombs are military bombs,” said Sen. Ahmed Zanna.
“I cannot continue to watch my people die this way,” he added.
Constant blasts in the city of Maiduguri have been a fact of life since Boko Haram turned violent here in 2009. A recent military push to free the surrounding countryside from the grip of the Islamic insurgency hasn’t changed that.
Instead, it may have focused the group’s assault: Maiduguri is the center of military activity in the area, and a town widely opposed to Boko Haram.
More than 20,000 people have died in the war Boko Haram has waged on Nigeria. As the army ramps up its patrols, Boko Haram simply changes its methods. Lately, the group has sent a steady stream of women strapped with explosives into crowded places.
Nigeria is headed into an election on March 28. The vote, originally set for Feb. 14, was delayed by six weeks to give the army more time to chase Boko Haram out of the Belgium-sized stretch of towns it controlled. So far, the army has liberated a number of towns.
Boko Haram, for its part, has killed hundreds of civilians in that time.
On Feb. 22, it killed six people with a bomb at a cellphone store in the city of Potiskum, east of Maiduguri, eyewitnesses said. Two days later, a bomb killed another 16 people there, also according to bystanders.
Another two days after that, on Feb. 26, two suicide bombers killed an additional 16 people in the city of Jos. The next day, at least 12 more died when a bomb struck a market about 40 miles outside Maiduguri.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, Boko Haram fighters swept a series of villages along a country road. They killed dozens there as well, fleeing residents said. But Nigerian police and military authorities have yet to publicly disclose the total number dead.
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