When Washington imposed sanctions in June 2012 on
Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau, he dismissed it as an empty gesture.
Two years later, Shekau’s skepticism appears well
founded: his Islamic militant group is now the biggest security threat to
Africa’s top oil producer, is richer than ever, more violent and its abductions
of women and children continue with impunity.
As the United States, Nigeria and others struggle
to track and choke off its funding, Reuters interviews with more than
a dozen current and former U.S. officials who closely follow Boko Haram provide
the most complete picture to date of how the group finances its activities.
Central to the militant group’s approach includes
using hard-to-track human couriers to move cash, relying on local funding
sources and engaging in only limited financial relationships with other
extremists groups. It also has reaped millions from high-profile kidnappings“Our
suspicions are that they are surviving on very lucrative criminal activities
that involve kidnappings,” U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African
Affairs Linda Thomas-Greenfield said in an interview. Until now, U.S. officials
have declined to discuss Boko Haram’s financing in such detail.
The United States has stepped up cooperation with
Nigeria to gather intelligence on Boko Haram, whose militants are killing
civilians almost daily in its north-eastern Nigerian stronghold. But the lack
of international financial ties to the group limit the measures the United States
can use to undermine it, such as financial sanctions.
The U.S. Treasury normally relies on a range of
measures to track financial transactions of terrorist groups, but Boko Haram
appears to operate largely outside the banking system.
To fund its murderous network, Boko Haram uses
primarily a system of couriers to move cash around inside Nigeria and across
the porous borders from neighboring African states, according to the officials
interviewed by Reuters.
In designating Boko Haram as a terrorist organisation
last year, the Obama administration characterised the group as a violent
extremist organisation with links to al Qaeda.
The Treasury Department said in a statement to Reuters
that the United States has seen evidence that Boko Haram has received financial
support from al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb (AQIM), an offshoot of the jihadist
group founded by Osama bin Laden.
But that support is limited. Officials with deep
knowledge of Boko Haram’s finances say that any links with al Qaeda or its
affiliates are inconsequential to Boko Haram’s overall funding.
“Any financial support AQIM might still be
providing Boko Haram would pale in comparison to the resources it gets from
criminal activities,” said one U.S. official, speaking on condition of
anonymity.
Assessments differ, but one U.S. estimate of
financial transfers from AQIM was in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars.
That compares with the millions of dollars that Boko Haram is estimated to make
through its kidnap and ransom operations.
Lucrative kidnapping racket
Ransoms appear to be the main source of funding
for Boko Haram’s five-year-old Islamist insurgency in Nigeria, whose 170
million people are split roughly evenly between Christians and Muslims, said
the U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
In February last year, armed men on motorcycles
snatched Frenchman Tanguy Moulin-Fournier, his wife and four children, and his
brother while they were on holiday near the Waza National Park in Cameroon,
close to the Nigerian border.
Boko Haram was paid an equivalent of about $3.15m
by French and Cameroonian negotiators before the hostages were released,
according to a confidential Nigerian government report later obtained by Reuters.
Figures vary on how much Boko Haram earns from
kidnappings. Some U.S. officials estimate the group is paid as much as $1m for
the release of each abducted wealthy Nigerian.
It is widely assumed in Nigeria that Boko Haram
receives support from religious sympathisers inside the country, including some
wealthy professionals and northern Nigerians who dislike the government,
although little evidence has been made public to support that assertion.
Current and former U.S. and Nigerian officials
say Boko Haram’s operations do not require significant amounts of money, which
means even successful operations tracking and intercepting their funds are
unlikely to disrupt their campaign.
Boko Haram had developed “a very diversified and
resilient model of supporting itself,” said Peter Pham, a Nigeria scholar at
the Atlantic Council think-tank in Washington.
“It can essentially ‘live off the land’ with very
modest additional resources required,” he told a congressional hearing on June
11.
Low cost weapons
“We’re not talking about a group that is buying
sophisticated weapons of the sort that some of the jihadist groups in Syria and
other places are using. We’re talking AK-47s, a few rocket-propelled grenades,
and bomb-making materials. It is a very low-cost operation,” Pham told Reuters.
That includes paying local youth just pennies a
day to track and report on Nigerian troop movements.
Much of Boko Haram’s military hardware is not
bought; it is stolen from the Nigerian army.
In February, dozens of its fighters descended on
a remote military outpost in the Gwoza hills in north-eastern Borno State,
looting 200 mortar bombs, 50 rocket-propelled grenades and hundreds of rounds
of ammunition.
Such raids have left the group well armed. In
dozens of attacks in the past year Nigerian soldiers were swept aside by
militants driving trucks, motor bikes and sometimes even stolen armored
vehicles, firing rocket-propelled grenades.
Boko Haram’s inner leadership is security savvy,
not only in the way it moves money but also in its communications, relying on
face-to-face contact, since messages or calls can be intercepted, the current
and former U.S. officials said.
“They’re quite sophisticated in terms of
shielding all of these activities from legitimate law enforcement officials in
Africa and certainly our own intelligence efforts trying to get glimpses and
insight into what they do,” a former U.S. military official said.
U.S. officials acknowledge that the weapons that
have served Washington so well in its financial warfare against other terrorist
groups are proving less effective against Boko Haram.
“My sense is that we have applied the tools that
we do have but that they are not particularly well tailored to the way that
Boko Haram is financing itself,” a U.S. defense official said.
Source: Reuters
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