Alliance of death: Gangs and bandits cooperate with ISIS

Ahmed Adel

ISIS is seeking to expand its influence in the African continent by allying with criminal gangs in order to help in its desired goal of establishing a caliphate in Africa.

Official warning

A memo seen by AFP and dated July 23 from Nigeria’s immigration chief, Muhammed Babandede, warned of “a large movement of bandits from Zamfara in the northwest of the country towards Borno with the aim of intensive training by Boko Haram.”

Boko Haram, which is affiliated with ISIS, is fighting almost alone in West Africa since May 2021, when its leader, Abubakar Shekau, was killed in clashes with ISIS militants, and now its extremists have strengthened their control over the northeastern region.

Close alliances

According to AFP’s security sources, ISIS has forged close alliances with criminal groups in northwestern Nigeria.

For years, northwest and central Nigeria have witnessed the activity of criminal gangs that attack villagers, loot and kidnap them, steal their livestock, and burn their homes.

The deployment of the army and the signing of peace agreements failed to end the attacks of bandits hiding in camps in the Rogo Forest, which stretches throughout the Nigerian states of Katsina, Kaduna and Zamfara.

Since December 2020, these armed groups have clearly moved to mass kidnappings of high school students for ransom.

These thieves are motivated primarily by greed and have no known ideological motives, but have links to extremist groups. In most of these alliances, extremists make a fortune selling weapons to bandits, who then use them to attack villages and carry out kidnappings for cash.

“It is not surprising that the bandits are moving to the northeast to benefit from the organization’s training,” a security source in the region involved in combating criminal gangs told AFP.

“The more bandits increase their alliances with extremists, the greater the risk of their radicalization, which reduces the possibility of making peace deals with the authorities,” he added, noting, however, that the exchanges between criminal groups and extremists in Nigeria are not new.

Rapprochement

In 2019, Nigeria’s Minister of Defense warned of a rapprochement between Boko Haram and the groups deployed in Zamfara State. AuwalunDaudawa, the leader of one of the groups responsible for the kidnapping of 300 schoolchildren in Zamfara in December 2020, was a source of arms for Boko Haram. He was killed in May 2021 in clashes with a rival group.

Another security source stated that another extremist group affiliated with al-Qaeda, Jamaat Ansar al-Muslimin fi Bilad al-Sudan (Ansaru), is stationed in Kogi and Kaduna states and cooperates mostly with bandits.

On the other hand, local sources with good knowledge of these groups stated that for several years ISIS extremists have maintained strong ties with the bandits of Zamfara and have camps in the forests of this state.

In 2018, for example, ISIS assassinated the leader of a criminal group in Zamfara that it considered an obstacle to the expansion of its influence.

With the elimination of Shekau, cooperation between ISIS extremists and the bandits could intensify, according to the same sources, with one of them saying, “Shekau was a major obstacle, and now the road is open after his death.”

FACT alliance

The Front for Change and Concord in Chad (FACT) allied itself with ISIS in 2018 for the benefit of the Brotherhood militias and the former government of Fayez al-Sarraj in Libya, as they raced to win these militias to help them plunder the wealth of southern Libya for the benefit of Turkey, especially as it is stocked with the richest wealth of oil, gas and gold mines.