Ansaru Islamists: The Rise of a New Nigerian Militant Group

Nearly four years into Nigeria’s bloody struggle with Islamists in its impoverished north, a new threat has emerged with deadly implications, this time for Westerners as well as Nigerians: local militants who openly claim to be inspired and trained by Al Qaeda and its affiliate in the region.

Having split off from Boko Haram — the dominant Nigerian extremist group responsible for weekly shootings and bombings that leave corpses strewn far and wide, including a particularly bloody battle with Nigerian security forces in recent days — this new group, Ansaru, says it eschews the killing of fellow Nigerians.

“Too reckless,” said a young member of Ansaru. His group evidently prefers a more calculated approach: kidnapping and killing foreigners.

Just days before, his group had methodically killed seven foreign construction workers deep in Nigeria’s semidesert north. The seven had been helping to build a road; their bodies were shown in a grainy video, lying on the ground.

The West, which has often regarded the Islamist uprising here as a Nigerian domestic issue, has been explicitly put on notice by Ansaru, adding an international dynamic to a conflict that has already cost more than 3,000 lives.

Ansaru is believed to be responsible for the December kidnapping of a French engineer, who is still missing, and for the abduction of an Italian and a Briton, both construction workers, who were later killed by their captors as a rescue attempt began last year.

It is also likely that the group was involved in the February kidnapping of a French family on the Cameroon-Nigeria border — they were released on Friday, under conditions that are unclear — as well as the kidnapping of a German engineer in Kano killed during a rescue effort last year.

“Any white man who is working with them” — meaning “Zionists,” — “we can kidnap them, everywhere,” said the young man from Ansaru, who called himself Mujahid Abu Nasir.

Recommended for further reading. Follow the link  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-21510767