‘Deadliest Terror Group in the World’: The West’s Latest Gift to Africa
Saturday November 28, 2015
Nigeria’s Boko Haram is now officially the deadliest terror group in the world. That they have reached this position is a direct consequence of UK Prime Minister David Cameron and Co’s war on Libya – and one that was perhaps not entirely unintended.
According to a report just released by Global Terrorism Index, Boko Haram were responsible for 6,644 deaths in 2014, compared to 6,073 attributed to ISIS, representing a quadrupling of their total killings in 2013. In the past week alone, bombings conducted by the group have killed eight people on a bus in Maiduguri; a family of five in Fotokol, Cameroon; fifteen people in a crowded marketplace in Kano; and thirty-two people outside a mosque in Yola.
In 2009, the year they took up arms, Boko Haram had nothing like the capacity to mount such operations, and their equipment remained primitive; but by 2011, that had begun to change. As Peter Weber noted in The Week, their weapons “shifted from relatively cheap AK-47s in the early days of its post-2009 embrace of violence to desert-ready combat vehicles and anti-aircraft/ anti-tank guns.” This dramatic turnaround in the group’s access to materiel was the direct result of NATO’s war on Libya.
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