Related: Can't Forget Nigeria
Not when there are rampaging Islamic extremists on the loose and when "Nigeria’s military failed to protect civilians despite being warned of impending Islamist attacks on two northeastern towns where hundreds died this month, Amnesty International said Wednesday."
"Nigeria’s neighbors join to fight Boko Haram" by Michelle Faul and Haruna Umar, Associated Press January 31, 2015
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria — Schoolgirls torn from their families in a mass kidnapping and forced into sexual slavery. Bombs that ripped through bus stations. The slaughter of hundreds of villagers, many with their throats cut.
Nigeria has suffered through years of violence from the Muslim extremist group known as Boko Haram, and now its neighbors are starting to take on the militants, too.
African nations are opening up a new international front in the war on terrorism, discussing Friday the formation of a five-nation force of 7,500 troops to confront the looming regional threat from Boko Haram. The United States promised more technical support, training, and equipment.
On Thursday, neighboring Chad sent a warplane and troops that drove the extremists out of a northeastern Nigeria border town in the first such act by foreign troops on Nigerian soil.
Looks like someone is getting ready to invade!
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Chad’s victory, and the need for foreign troops, is an embarrassment to Nigeria’s once mighty military, brought low by corruption and politics. The foreign intervention comes just two weeks before hotly contested national elections in which President Goodluck Jonathan is seeking another term.
This is a signal that Nigeria better elect the right candidate, and that Goodluck was pressing his with deeper relations with China. That's why this Islamic terror cover is needed.
The offensive by Chad came days after Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau warned Nigeria’s neighbors not to intervene.
‘‘African kings . . . I challenge you to attack me now. I am ready,’’ he taunted in an Arabic video message translated by SITE intelligence monitoring service.
Oh, SITE sighted it, huh?
See: SITE Institute
Jewish Media Group, SITE, is the first to release another Islamic threat video
IS ISRAEL CONTROLLING PHONY TERROR NEWS?
Yup, it's ALL BULL!
Global concern has grown in recent months as the terrorist group known for recruiting across borders launched a series of brazen attacks in northern Cameroon even as it increased the tempo and ferocity of attacks on Nigerian soil.
One video this week showed boys learning to shoot assault rifles, with one child appearing to be no taller than his weapon.
In what Amnesty International called the most deadly massacre of the 5-year-old Islamic uprising, Boko Haram killed hundreds of civilians — some say as many as 2,000 — in a Jan. 3 attack on Baga, a border town with a key military base on the northeastern border with Cameroon. Nigeria’s military said only 150 people were killed.
Boko Haram attracted international outrage in April when it kidnapped 276 schoolgirls at a boarding school in the remote town of Chibok. Dozens escaped on their own, but 219 remain missing. The United States, Britain, France, and China offered help to find the girls, and Jonathan has repeatedly pledged to return them to their parents, but not one has been rescued. He refused to swap the girls for illegally detained Boko Haram suspects.
The whole thing turned out to be a complete fraud and hoax, and yet here it is repeated and regurgitated as real.
Suicide bombings in recent months by young girls — one looked no more than 10 — have raised fears that Boko Haram is using the kidnap victims in its conflict, which has displaced more than 1 million people and killed about 10,000 in the last year, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
The new multinational force proposed Friday would also be mandated with searching for and freeing all abductees, including the Chibok girls, according to a statement from the African Union.
‘‘We will never forget the girls kidnapped from Chibok last April, and I will never stop calling for their immediate and unconditional release,’’ said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a guest at the African summit.
Even as Nigeria’s military is humiliated by the foreign aid, witnesses say it has been ill equipped to defend civilians from a series of vicious attacks. In Baga, Nigerian soldiers fought valiantly for hours, then fled when they ran out of ammunition, witnesses told the Associated Press.
US training of a battalion to fight Boko Haram was inexplicably canceled by Nigeria in its final stages last year.
That's right about when Boko started up, huh?
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