Anka, Nigeria – December 11, 2020, more than 300 boys kidnapped from a boarding school in Kankara, a small community in Katsina state, northwest Nigeria, of gunmen on motorcycles.
The incident fits the pattern of Boko Haram, and the group’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, has claimed responsibility for the attack. an audio message, before the release of the video of the kidnapped children.
This lends more credence to the assumption by Nigerian politicians and experts that the group waged war in the northeast. for more than a decadewas a brazen attack orchestrator.
Within a month, the victims were released.
But in March 2021, Auwalun Daudawa, a notorious boss of one of the gangs responsible for kidnapping the sprees in the northwest, has claimed responsibility for Kankara. “I did it in Katsina for the governor [Aminu Masari] he told the local newspaper Daily Trust.
According to local media reports, the kidnapping was a joint operation by seven different gangs, who sent a video to Shekau demanding he take responsibility. They know that the government is “more afraid of Boko Haram than they are” and is ready to respond to requests quickly.
The plan was successful. Follow the boys and girlsan unspecified amount was paid as ransom within days, although the government repeatedly denies this.
Mislabeled and underrated
Since 2010, gangs of robbers have been rioting in large swaths of northwest Nigeria, but it is only in the last few years that the crisis has gained national notoriety in the most populous country. Africa.
Data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) shows that the robber was responsible for more than 2,600 civilian deaths in 2021 – far more than the number of deaths caused by Boko Haram and the Islamic State of West Africa (ISWAP) in the same year – and nearly triple the number in 2020.
But The debate was heated on many details about the robbers, including their ability to shake the state and whether they are petty criminals or more high profile gangsters. In January 2022, the government declared them “terrorists”.
On March 28, several men were heavily armed attack a moving train between the Nigerian capital Abuja and the neighboring state of Kaduna. They detonated an explosive device to stop the train before firing on the carriage, killing at least eight people and kidnapping an unspecified number of passengers.
This happened days after an attack on an international airport and before another attack attack on a military facility – all in Kaduna.
The train attack was one of the most famous to date in northern Nigeria and sparked controversy. But on social media and even in the corridors of power, the episode is once again attributed to Boko Haram.
Since the Kankara school abduction, Nigerian government officials and public commentators have been quick to attribute responsibility for major robberies to “jihadists”.
However, experts say this persistent misrepresentation represents a long-held underestimation of northwest armed robbers and the complex dynamics of conflict developing in the region.
Deadlier than Boko Haram?
A close examination of the activities of these groups reveals that they pose a unique and perhaps even more complex threat than Boko Haram and its factions, including ISWAP.
The key to their growing reputation and proliferation has been their increasingly easy access to sophisticated military-grade weapons, primarily across the many porous borders of West Africa and the Sahel more broadly.
However, the high number of civilian casualties is also due to the disparity between the modes of operation between armed robbers and so-called jihadists.
For example, ISWAP, arguably still the most influential armed group in Nigeria today, focuses on attacking government forces and facilities. Its commanders also tax and govern rural communities instead of terrorizing them, said James Barnett, a researcher at the Institute of African and Diaspora Studies, University of Lagos.
But bandits consisting of dozens of unaffiliated groups often vie for territory or loot from raids and have no unified chain of command or single goal, complicating state efforts to reached disarmament agreements.
“There is no single leader or group of leaders that the state can negotiate with who has real control over the thousands of armed robbers operating in northern Nigeria,” Barnett said.
Unlike armed groups operating in northeastern Nigeria, robbers in the northwest are more numerous, mainly due to economic opportunism and lack of clear political ideology, said Fola Aina, a member Fellow at Britain’s Royal Institute of Defense and Security. Research (RUSI), in London.
But the possibility that they will soon adopt – or even synergize between the two groups – cannot be ruled out.
Most of the bandits were ethnic Fulani and had grievances stemming from being seen as socially marginalized in their predominantly Hausa status.
They are therefore “a potential prime target for manipulation and co-options by jihadists operating in the region, who have more clearly defined political goals and want to increase troop numbers.” their feet, after the deaths of many at the hands of the Nigerian Security Forces,” said Aina.
A layered conflict
And now the government can also recognize the signs.
Following the attack on the Abuja-Kaduna, sources in the Nigerian government blamed Boko Haram for these attacks and suggested that the armed robbers lacked the coordination and strength to plan. for such an attack.
But in a recent interview, Nasir El-Rufai, governor of Kaduna, one of the states hardest hit by the crisis, said the attack bore the mark of cooperation between robbers who could armed and Boko Haram elements.
This view was reinforced on 13 April by Information Minister Lai Mohammed who said had “an unhealthy handshake” while playing.
Seven nights before the airport and train attacks, a mid-level bandit based at Aja in the forest of Zamfara receives a call from a crime boss in another forest closer to Kaduna.
The former footballer told Al Jazeera that it was an offer to work in Kaduna but he turned it down because “just got a new bride” and wanted to spend time with her and enjoy Ramadan at home.
He implied that the attack in Kaduna was financially motivated and carried out by many armed robbers from Zamfara, the epicenter of the crisis, along with a few members of Ansaru – another group of Boko Haram.
But it was also “because the army raided the settlement of the armed bandit leader, Ansaru’s best friend a few weeks ago, killing 8 of his people, taking away nearly 30 motorbikes and collecting recovered 11 rifles,” he told Al Jazeera.
The robber also said his comrades were willing to give Ansaru members “credit for impressing Boko Haram and scaring the government more, but the Fulani there only care about money.”
In addition to avenging the military operations and air raids that led to the arrest of some of their own, the bandits had a motive for revenge against the Hausa ethnic vigilantes, whom they denounced. forced to kill their wives and children. This has led to attacks against host communities by vigilantes.
Al Jazeera also learned that Ansaru had made several attempts to reform the bandits – but the ideological differences caused those moves to disappoint.
From 2019 to 2020, Ansaru members held a series of training sessions in towns such as Munhaye and Dandallah, both in Zamfara. In these sermons, they instruct robbers not to steal, smoke, drink, commit adultery, and fast and pray.
The robbers ignored this, resulting in the deaths of 5 armed robbers and the planting of an explosive that exploded, resulting in the death of a high-ranking bandit leader.
This severing relationship between some armed bandits and Ansaru, with those even before issue an ultimatum At a few points. This could jeopardize any future cooperation, except for commercial purposes.
A January study published by the US Military Academy’s Journal of Terrorism Research, based in part on interviews with armed robbers and “jihadist” defectors, concluded that: Nigeria’s armed robbers have grown to such an extent that they do not need to cooperate with jihadists, let alone convert to jihadism. ”
For the Nigerian government at all levels, understanding the layered dynamics at play can be helpful for any counter-insurgency operation.
