Boko Haram Turns Robin Hoods Strategy

on Its Head
Forget oil or gold. West Africas most dangerous terrorist group is
funding its rampages by ignoring the rich and targeting the poor.

BY SIOBHN O'GRADY-MARCH 5, 2015

As a convoy of trucks carrying smoked fish cruised along the border
of Niger and Nigeria last week, a Nigerien Air Force plane swooped
low and opened fire, destroying the trucks and forcing the drivers to
flee into Nigeria on foot.

The ill-fated fishmongers, Nigerien officials said, were collaborating with

Boko Haram to sell their goods in Nigeria, despite Nigers recent ban on
cross-border fish trades. (Residents of Niger are called Nigerien; those from
Nigeria are known as Nigerian). According to the Nigerien government,
Boko Haram taxes goods transported through the territory the group
controls to add to its cash reserves and finance terrorism, and the recent
ban is intended to choke the Islamist groups resources.
This alleged collaboration between rural fish traders and members of Boko
Haram sheds some light on the groups murky funding tactics, which differ
sharply from those of other terrorist groups. In Iraq and Syria, the Islamic
State has profited from illicit oil sales and bank lootings. Al Qaeda weaved
an intricate financial web of sympathetic mosques, fake charities, and drug
sales. In Afghanistan, the Taliban taxes opium and raisins. But in the largely
impoverished Lake Chad basin,Boko Haram is now raising money by
ignoring the rich and targeting the poor, an unusually cruel tactic that takes
struggling innocents and pushes them over the financial cliff.

A senior official at the Nigerien Embassy in Washington told Foreign

Policy that members of Boko Haram recently kidnapped a farmers three
children from the Nigerien town of Diffa and then demanded around $4,000
for their safe return. The farmer sold his cows and emptied his bank
accounts to get his children back, leaving his family with no means of
income or financial reserves to use in an emergency. Boko Haram pocketed

far less than the some $3 million it reportedly negotiated for the safe return
of a French family that the group kidnapped from northern Cameroon in
2013, but managed to grab needed resources and further terrify locals
out of cooperating against the group while avoiding international
attention.
When they kidnap a person from a poor family, they make a trade, maybe
for some animals, the embassy official told FP. When you steal a farmers
children, you will get whatever they have.
Boko Haram has carved out a mass of territory in northeastern Nigeria and
parts of Chad, Cameroon, and Niger since it launched its offensive in 2009.
Although the group was once confined to Nigeria, its strength and scope of
influence were underestimated by the Nigerian government, which didnt
order a sustained crackdown until it was far too late. The group has
displaced an estimated 1.5 million people, has killed almost 20,000 in
recent years, and burst into Western consciousness last year when it
kidnapped more than 200 high school girls. Despite a new multinational
force of 8,700 African troops, police, and civilians created to counter the
group, many experts estimate it still controls an area around the size of
Belgium, where it tries to enforce sharia law.
Nigeria is one of the worlds richest petrostates, but unlike the Islamic
State Boko Haram has no known way of profiting from oil. The senior
official at the Nigerien Embassy said Boko Haram was instead relying

heavily on taxing tradable goods, robbing banks, looting the villages it

attacks, and kidnapping locals to extort their families for whatever small
sum of money the group can get. In a region where most of the population
lives on less than a dollar a day, thats often not much.

Boko Haram has at various times maintained links to al Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb (AQIM), terrorist groups in Somalia, and even the Afghan Taliban.
That flow of money and equipment is particularly dangerous for the United
States and its allies because it could dramatically increase Boko Harams
international reach from the area surrounding Lake Chad to other unstable
African countries nearby.

Last June, J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic
Council,testified before members of the U.S. Congress about the rising
threat of Boko Haram. He pointed to a 2010 Al Jazeera interview with the
emir of AQIM, based in North Africa, who at the time promised that AQIM
would provide funding to the Nigerian extremists. And, Pham said, there is
enough evidence in Boko Harams growth in lethality and sophistication to
back up the widespread belief that the two groups are linked. But, he said,
though the group has expanded its links with al Qaeda affiliates, Boko
Haram remains less an affiliate and more a friend of a friend to AQIM and
other terrorist groups, including al-Shabab in Somalia.
After the French invasion of Mali in 2013, trade routes between AQIM and

Boko Haram were largely cut off. Today, Pham told FP, its likely that Boko
Haram has a significant amount of money stashed in its reserves, but
financially is operating almost entirely independently.
And while the world was focusing on the more than 200 schoolgirls Boko
Haram kidnapped 11 months ago, Pham said it largely ignored the middleclass hostages the group held for ransoms ranging from $10 to $20,000.

Theyre clever people, and theyve hit their sweet spot, Pham said. If you
go for someone really high value, youre going to run across security, but if
you kidnap a doctor or lawyer, you wont have the same international
reaction.

Because the cost of survival is so low in the regions where Boko Haram
operates, the militants can live on just pennies a day, Pham said.

Prior to the trade ban imposed by Niger, collaborating with fish sellers,
herdsmen, and other traders allowed Boko Haram to make a profit and
travel safely in their convoys. But now that the trade has been banned,
some experts worry that civilian traders targeted by the governments
offensive against the group have been left with few options for survival.

E.J. Hogendoorn, deputy program director for Africa at the International

Crisis Group, said his organization has heard credible reports from herders,
fishermen, and farmers about taxes Boko Haram imposes at various trade

checkpoints.

If you live in those areas, you have three choices: You can flee, leaving
everything youve built up behind; you can choose to pay the extortionate
fees that Boko Haram militants impose; or you can die, he said.

So when locals like the fishmongers bombed on the Niger-Nigeria border

last week are left with the choice of collaborating with Boko Haram or losing
their livelihood, its no surprise they would prefer the former.

Not having the ability to fish or to trade for a couple weeks can really push
them over the edge from hunger into something much worse, Hogendoorn
said.

Since Nigers ban on the trade early last week, northern Nigeria has faced a
growing fish shortage, which has in turn led to dramatically inflated fish
prices. According to Agence France-Presse, hundreds of trucks full of dried
fish have been detained on the Niger-Nigeria border, worrying local
fishermen that their goods will be destroyed.
The Nigerien Embassy official said that cutting off funding to the group is
crucial to its defeat, but that in his opinion, a military mission is only a small
part of the solution. The group, he said, can no longer be considered only a
religious movement, but a political and social one as well.

In the area Boko Haram controls, he said, youth are disillusioned,

uneducated, and desperately poor. So while a Nigerien military operation
might push some of the extremists back over the border into Nigeria, it
wont solve the economic crisis that pushed so many to join the group in
the first place.

This is our family; these are our brothers and sons, the embassy official
said. Before we go and kill them, we need to ask what is wrong now, what
can we do to help.

Posted by Thavam