Boko Haram: Recruitment, Financing, and Arms Trafficking in the Lake Chad Region By Jacob Zenn

In July 2014, Cameroon’s Defense Ministry announced that Boko Haram[1] was a growing threat in the Lake Chad region and now has approximately 15,000 to 20,000 members.[2] A Nigerian journalist with longstanding contacts with Boko Haram, however, says that Boko Haram has up to 50,000 members.[3] Even the lower estimate of the two would mean Boko Haram has similar manpower as militant groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria and pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine.[4] The higher estimate may be correct if “members” include not only armed militants but also individuals who cooperate with Boko Haram, whether intentionally or coerced. Using this inclusive definition of “members,” two of Boko Haram’s newest recruitment profiles are of forcible conscripts, especially teenage boys and girls, and financiers, who are primarily businessmen, arms traffickers, and kidnappers in Cameroon.

This article reviews Boko Haram’s recruitment from the time its leader, Abubakar Shekau, declared jihad against Nigeria and the United States in 2010 until the present. It then discusses the role of forcible conscripts and financiers in Boko Haram operations in 2014. The article finds that the strategic shift of Boko Haram’s armed militants to seize and hold local government areas (LGAs) in its self-described caliphate in northeastern Nigeria explains why it increasingly requires forcible recruits and financiers in its membership network.[5]

Ideology, Economic Vulnerability, and Infiltration
After Nigerian security forces killed Boko Haram founder Muhammad Yusuf in clashes with his followers in July 2009, Yusuf’s deputy, Shekau, emerged as his successor.[6] Shekau’s loyalists included Yusuf’s disciples who found inspiration in al-Qa`ida’s style of militancy and Yusuf’s and Shekau’s call for a “pure” Islamic state in Nigeria. Boko Haram also attracted criminals that members recruited in prison and were freed in rescue operations, including the first attack under Shekau on Bauchi prison in September 2010.[7]

Boko Haram’s operations in late 2010 required minimal training, such as drive-by assassinations of local politicians and religious leaders, who were “guilty” of mixing Islam with “infidel” notions of democracy, secularism and Western education. Boko Haram also paid small fees to fruit sellers and al-majiri[8] boys to scout on security forces and burn down churches and schools.[9] However, when Boko Haram began carrying out sophisticated bombings, such as on churches on Christmas Day in 2010 and the Federal Police Headquarters and UN Building in 2011, and kidnapping foreigners in 2012, it relied on Nigerians who received funding or training from abroad with al-Qa`ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and who were part of Ansaru’s[10] shura (leadership council).[11]

Ansaru, in particular, acquired inside information to carry out key attacks, including the ambush of Nigerian troops in Kogi before they deployed to Mali in January 2013, the rescue of several dozen Boko Haram members from the Special Anti-robbery Squad prison in Abuja in November 2012, and kidnappings of foreign engineers in northwest Nigeria in 2012.[12] Boko Haram similarly has cooperated with several rogue customs officers in northeastern Nigeria, who turn a blind eye to cross-border arms trafficking because they (or their families) are threatened or bribed by Boko Haram, or sympathize with its ideology.[13]

Forcible Conscripts: Chibok as a Turning Point
The kidnapping of more than 250 girls, mostly Christians, in Chibok, Borno State, Nigeria on April 14, 2014, brought international attention to Boko Haram’s forcible recruitment. Yet that incident was neither the first nor last time Boko Haram employed the tactic. Boko Haram militants and their wives began kidnapping young girls in early 2013 to use as assets to trade in prisoner exchanges, use as decoys to lure troops into ambushes, and serve as porters and cooks.[14] Two days before the Chibok kidnapping, on April 12, 2014, Boko Haram took several girls from a college in Dikwa, Borno State. In addition, on April 19, May 5, and June 10, 2014, the militants took more than 40 girls from towns near Chibok, and on October 20, 2014, took 45 more girls from Wagga, Adamawa State and “married” the young ones after the Nigerian government reported an agreement with Boko Haram on releasing the Chibok schoolgirls, which did not materialize.[15] Internally displaced people (IDPs) who fled Borno estimate that Boko Haram may have abducted between 500 and 2,000 women since 2013, but most incidents go unreported.[16]

Only after the Chibok kidnapping did Boko Haram start using women in operations, including the wives of slain or arrested militants and beggars who were offered a “few naira notes.”[17] During the month of Ramadan in June 2014, there were six female suicide bombers, all under 16-years-old, who carried out four attacks at universities and fuel stations in Kano, a military barracks in Gombe, and a fuel station in Lagos. In addition, one 10-year-old girl was detected with a suicide vest in Katsina in July 2014.[18]

The explosives were placed under the girls’ hijabs or clothing and detonated remotely, possibly without them knowing.[19] There was media speculation that they were from Chibok. However, it appears more likely they were among the dozens of girls recruited by Boko Haram’s “female wing” in Kano, which was led by Hafsat Bako. She is the widow of a deceased Boko Haram commander and was based in Borno’s Sambisa Forest, where some of the Chibok girls were initially held, and her arrest in June 2014 coincided with the end of the series of female suicide bombings.[20] Her role in the female wing and in Sambisa Forest therefore suggests an operational link between the kidnapping in Chibok and the deployment of the female suicide bombers, even though the schoolgirls were likely not the bombers.

Legitimizing the Chibok Kidnapping via Historical Manipulation and ISIL
The future of many of the schoolgirls kidnapped in Chibok and other towns in northeastern Nigeria is likely as “wives” of militants (“slaves” in Shekau’s own words). As “wives,” their value to Boko Haram is greater than as bartering chips in an increasingly improbable deal with the Nigerian government because of Boko Haram’s dispersal of the girls into multiple groups and their inability to reconvene all, or even half, of the girls if a deal were reached.[21] Even if Boko Haram returned 90% of the Chibok schoolgirls, the militants would still have more than 20 girls from Chibok and hundreds of other girls to leverage in future negotiations or keep enslaved. In a potential deal, the militants would also likely demand territorial concessions from the Nigerian government that would guarantee Boko Haram sovereignty in dozens of LGAs in northeastern Nigeria under its control. Shekau, who praised the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant’s (ISIL) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a July 2014 video statement, declared these LGAs as “part” of an Islamic State in a separate video statement released in October 2014.[22] The video featured ISIL’s rayat ul-uqab flag behind Shekau and played ISIL’s signature nasheed, My Umma, Dawn Has Arrived, as background music while Shekau made the declaration, signaling that Boko Haram sees its caliphate as part of al-Baghdadi’s.[23]

Boko Haram will legitimize the “slavery” of the Chibok schoolgirls based on a textual interpretation of the Qur’an and the support the kidnapping received from ISIL as well as al-Shabab.[24] ISIL cited the “Nigerian mujahidin” in the October 2014 edition of its magazine Dabiq as precedent for ISIL’s own kidnapping of several hundred non-Muslim Yazidi women in northern Iraq, who ISIL forced to become “sex slaves” of militants.[25] Boko Haram therefore may not be carrying out kidnappings of women in 2014 for the same purposes it kidnapped women in 2012 and 2013.[26] Rather, Boko Haram, like ISIL, may be seeking to revive practices that were virtually non-existent since the end of the last caliphate era in Nigeria (and Iraq and the Levant) in the early 20th century. Such practices include kidnapping mostly non-Muslim girls to “contribute their children to the next generation” of the caliphate and hadd punishments, such as beheading, stoning, whipping, and hand-cutting of “criminals,” which Boko Haram carries out in LGAs under its control.[27]

Forcible Recruitment of Teenage Boys
Since the Chibok kidnapping in April 2014, Boko Haram has increasingly kidnapped teenage boys in northeastern Nigeria and “re-educated” them at Qur’anic schools that are often in Cameroon.[28] Signposts in Arabic language that Boko Haram erected in Cameroonian border towns with ISIL’s rayat al-uqab insignia on them say, “It is a crime and treason not to join jihad.”[29] This is likely Boko Haram’s justification for the forcible conscription and killing of boys (and girls) who refuse.

The militants use untrained boys to acquire intelligence and carry out the first wave of attacks on villages or barracks. When they gain experience, they can be part of the second wave designed to overwhelm the security forces after the first wave weakens their positions and morale.[30] Boys may also be given a quota of how many security officers or “high value targets” they must attack, and risk death at the hands of their commanders if they fail or show “cowardice.”[31]

Boko Haram also appears to be focusing on Cameroon for its non-forcible recruitment of men, possibly because the destruction of villages in Nigeria has alienated youths and caused them to flee to IDP camps outside of Borno or join the anti-Boko Haram Civilian Joint Task Force (JTF) vigilante group. In Cameroon, which until 2014 was spared from large-scale attacks, locals often consider Boko Haram “just another religious group” or “the boys.”[32] According to Cameroonian police, there have been more than 500 new recruits in villages along the border with Nigeria, some of whom were “drugged or manipulated” in training camps.[33] They provide Boko Haram with the ability to use Cameroon as a rear base for attacking Nigeria, to raise money through kidnapping foreigners, and to traffic weapons into Nigeria from Cameroonian border towns.

Financiers, Arms Traffickers and Kidnappings in Cameroon
When Boko Haram was an above ground movement before 2009, it had wealthy members who served as intermediaries between financial sponsors, such as local government officials or wealthy Salafists abroad, and Muhammad Yusuf.[34] Now officials have distanced themselves from Boko Haram, while mainstream Salafist and al-Qa`ida funding decreased as a result of Boko Haram’s massacres, the break-up of Ansaru’s shura in Kaduna in 2012, and the French-led military intervention in northern Mali in 2013, which disrupted the AQIM supply line to Boko Haram.[35] However, Boko Haram has made inroads with new financiers, who are from Borno and bordering areas of Cameroon’s Extreme North Region and are often ethnic Kanuris like Yusuf, Shekau and most Boko Haram members. These financiers provide Boko Haram with weapons and a route to negotiation with the Cameroonian government in kidnapping-for-ransom operations.[36]

One Cameroonian financier, Alhaji Abdalla, is a vehicle exporter based in Amchide whose business operations extend to Qatar (the vehicles likely move from Doha to other ports in Asia).[37] He served as a key negotiator for Boko Haram in talks with the Cameroonian government for the release of the French Moulin-Fournier family of seven, which was kidnapped by Boko Haram (likely in coordination with Ansaru) in Waza (a town 16 miles east of Amchide) in February 2013.[38] The government paid a $3.14 million ransom and released Boko Haram prisoners in April 2013 in exchange for the family.[39]

In July 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped from Kolofata (a town three miles from Amchide) the town’s lamido (local ruler) and his family and the wife of Cameroon Deputy Prime Minister Amadou Ali, who represented the Cameroon side in negotiations for the Moulin-Fourniers and ran programs to prevent recruitment of Cameroonian youths to Boko Haram (Amadou Ali was outside of Kolofata so he avoided being kidnapped).[40] The kidnapping was reportedly motivated in part by Cameroon’s failure to pay the full ransom for the Moulin-Fourniers.[41]

In October 2014, however, Boko Haram released the wife of Amadou Ali and the lamido and his family, along with 10 Chinese engineers who were kidnapped in April 2014 from Waza, after the Cameroonian government paid approximately $600,000 in ransom to cover the remaining payment for the Moulin-Fourniers.[42] In addition, Cameroon released 30 prisoners, including some who were imprisoned in Maroua in July 2014 after being caught stockpiling weapons in the town of Kousseri on Cameroon’s border with Chad.[43] Others released from prison included a leading Boko Haram recruiter, the mastermind of a kidnapping of two Italian priests and a Canadian nun in a town north of Maroua in June 2014, and the top Cameroonian Boko Haram commander, Abakar Ali. Abakar Ali had been arrested in September 2014 in Kousseri and revealed under interrogation that he coordinated arms trafficking with the mayor of Fotokol (a town on Cameroon’s border with Nigeria at Gambarou-Ngala), who was subsequently arrested with stockpiles of weapons at his residence.[44] Cameroon also reportedly returned to Boko Haram some of the weapons and ammunition it confiscated from Boko Haram in Kousseri.[45]

The pattern of Boko Haram kidnappings of foreigners in exchange for ransoms and the release of weapons traffickers occurred in several other instances. When Boko Haram kidnapped a French priest in “coordination” with Ansaru in November 2013 from a town 16 miles south of Amchide, the militants released him weeks later for a multi-million dollar ransom and a Kanuri weapons trafficker.[46] Boko Haram also released the two Italian priests and Canadian nun after several weeks in captivity in June 2014 in another prisoner exchange and ransom deal.[47]

The tie between arms traffickers and Boko Haram commanders was also highlighted in key arrests in Cameroon. One Chadian weapons trafficker was arrested in Waza in June 2014 working on behalf of a Maroua-based Boko Haram commander and possessed $15,000 from deals that he made in Chad.[48] Days before his arrest, Cameroon uncovered weapons stockpiles in Maroua’s central market.[49] In addition, in June 2014, Cameroon discovered travel documents from Libya (Africa’s largest arms market since 2011) and Qatar and receipts from car exports to Qatar in a Boko Haram camp, which suggests a possible link to Alhaji Abdalla, who was Boko Haram’s negotiator in the Moulin-Fournier and other kidnappings.[50]

Across the border in Nigeria, one of the financiers of the Chibok kidnapping and a plotter of the assassination of the amir of Gwoza was a Kanuri named Babaji Yaari, who runs a lucrative cart taxi business.[51] He coordinated the Chibok kidnapping with the leader of Boko Haram’s female wing, Hafsat Bako, who was discussed above. Bako was arrested based on the Nigerian security force’s interrogation of Yaari.[52] The transfer of many of the schoolgirls to Cameroon and Chad after the kidnapping suggests that Bako’s and Yaari’s network and the network of kidnappers, financiers, and arms traffickers in Cameroon likely overlap.[53]

Conclusion
This article reveals several new trends in the Boko Haram insurgency. First,…read full: https://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/boko-haram-recruitment-financing-and-arms-trafficking-in-the-lake-chad-region

What do you think about this? Share your thought with others in the comment section below.

Don’t miss the news as it happens. Follow us on Twitter @abusidiqu and on Facebook at Facebook/abusidiqu

To contact us for Article Submission and Advertisement or General inquiry, send a mail to info@abusidiqu.com