Over 1,000 Boko Haram members now in Libya •To fight ‘holy war’ for $1,000

NO fewer than 1,000 members of the deadly Boko Haram sect have joined the Islamic State (IS) terror group in Libya to fight what they tagged a holy war for a monthly fee of 1,000 US dollars. The Boko Haram members had to jump at the Libya offer following intense heat on them at the hands of the joint military task force in relentless counter- insurgency operations. The development also came as a result of the entry of Cameroon, which shares borders with Nigeria, into the anti-insurgency strategy, fortifying its borders and rolling back the frontiers of the sect. Two United Kingdom-based news media, IB Times and Daily Telegraph, which revealed the details of the recruitment, quoted the United Nations and the Pentagon to have reported a rise in the Libya IS group to 6,500 from 3,000 in just three months. The group is said to have “carried out audacious suicide attacks in Libya’s cities,” with scores of casualties and clashes with “government aligned militias at crucial oil installations.” “The rapid expansion of the Islamic State into the anarchy of post-Gaddafi Libya has been fuelled by the arrival of hundreds of Boko Haram fighters,” the UK media outfits reported. In the Libyan town of Sebha, considered a hub in the trafficking of the terrorists, a local activist told IB Times that “the number of Boko Haram members in Sirte could be as high as 1,000.” The activist is reported to have explained that the Libyan chapter of ISIS did not use regular trafficking routes to “transport fighters” but through “its own hand-selected smugglers.” “There are a number of smugglers that don’t actually work within the human smuggling network. They are not well known. They are the ones bringing the Boko Haram fighters and taking them to Sirte. A former Boko Haram fighter living in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital, Ahmed Umar Bolori, said the same economic reasons that made the terror group members to join the organisation forced them to go to Libya. “These tribes, more and more, as they give up the political process, are aligning themselves with Daesh (the Arabic acronym for the terror group). A lot of them want to do so, not because of ideological links but out of a sense of revenge,” said Bolori. Daily Telegraph reported that security sources from Libya had said ISIS offered $ 1,000 to fighters from neighbouring countries to join their ranks. “There are a lot of businesses that operate between Libya and Nigeria. They will follow the routes that bring goods to or from Libya to Nigeria,” Bolori added.