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
Credit: PunchNews
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