ISIS' decision to
oust notorious Boko Haram leader is tearing group apart, report says
The Islamic State’s
decision to oust the leader of Boko Haram -- who had a penchant for using
children as suicide bombers – is fracturing the Nigerian terror group as
bloodthirsty militants are divided amid a new push to attack Christian
communities.
The self-proclaimed
caliphate announced in August that Musab al-Barnawi will be
the Nigerian group’s new “governor” after Abubakar Shekau, its notorious former
leader, apparently became too much for ISIS leadership in the Middle East, The
Wall Street Journal reports.
Barnawi, rumored to
be a son of the group’s founder, reportedly told ISIS’ newspaper that jihadists
should shift their focus to Nigeria’s Christians, in a bid to win over public
support after Shekau spent years attacking Muslim villages that didn’t join
Boko Haram’s ranks.
The group, an ISIS affiliate,
should be “booby-trapping and blowing up every church that we are able to
reach, and killing all those we find from the citizens of the cross,” Barnawi
told the newspaper, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Such a move could
exploit existing tensions in Nigerian communities with split Muslim and
Christian populations, the newspaper added.
Under Shekau – who
took control of the group in 2009 – Muslim civilians became the majority of the
casualties in the violence, with militants frequently enlisting children to
carry out suicide attacks.
“You can’t really be
more barbaric and more savage than Shekau,” Issoufou Yahaya, a political
analyst and head of the history department at the Niamey University in Niger,
told The Wall Street Journal. “He’s the pinnacle of barbarism.”
But Shekau has not
recognized Barnawi’s appointment, accusing him of apostasy and saying that
ISIS’ leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has been duped.
The two factions
have been clashing as a result, accusing each other of abandoning their faith,
The Wall Street Journal reported.
A new Boko Haram
video released this week that declared allegiance to Shekau vowed to kill
Nigeria’s president and army chief, according to The Associated Press.
Boko Haram controls
large sections of Nigeria, in addition to territory in neighboring Niger,
Cameroon and Chad.
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