Nigeria
needs serious help from countries with competent military and technology power
to defeat our enemies as latest revelations have shown that the violent sect,
Boko Haram and other groups in northern Nigeria received as much as $3million
from Osama bin Laden in 2002.
According to
a report by some United States intelligence analysts, Bin Laden was said to
have dispatched an aide to Nigeria to hand out the seed money in naira to a
wide array of Salafist political organisations that shared al Qaeda’s goal of
imposing Islamic rule.
“There were
channels between bin laden and Boko Haram leadership,” one senior U.S.
intelligence official told The Daily Beast, adding that “He (Bin Laden) gave
some strategic direction at times.”
According to
a report in a United States-based newspaper, The Daily Beast, the Al-Qaeda
founder helped in the process of providing Boko Haram’s seed money. Boko Haram
was founded by Mohammed Yusuf in 2002. Yusuf was killed in police custody in
2009.
The Daily
Beast reported on Sunday that officially, the U.S. intelligence community
believed that the sect had only tangential links to al Qaeda’s North African
affiliate, and that reports of Bin Laden backing the Nigerian outfit were
off-base, but many analysts have believed that the ties between Boko Haram and
al Qaeda global leadership go much deeper — and are about more than a little
seed money.
A
comprehensive report on Boko Haram published by the International Crisis Group,
also confirmed that Boko Haram’s early leader, Mohammed Yusuf, received money
from a disciple of Osama bin Laden named Mohammed Ali in 2002.
The report
added that bin Laden got to know Ali in the 1990s when he was based in Sudan,
adding that after Ali travelled with Bin Laden to Afghanistan, he was provided
with $3m in Nigerian currency in 2002 and sent to the north of the country to
fund al-Qaeda’s ideology.
The saga
continues...
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