•  washington
• Wednesday, January 25, 2012
• Inter Press Service

The U.S. State Department Tuesday 'strongly' condemned recent lethal attacks carried out by the Islamist group Boko Haram in northern Nigeria, but also warned against an excessive reaction by the government's security forces.

The attacks against government and other facilities in Kano, the north's economic capital, and Bauchi state killed at least 185 people and renewed fears here that Africa's biggest oil exporter and most populous nation is becoming dangerously unstable.

They followed nationwide strikes and demonstrations that forced President Goodluck Johnson to partially restore fuel subsidies that had been abruptly cut by the government earlier this month. The latest attacks by Boko Haram were the deadliest in a campaign of violence that, since it began in July 2009, has taken a total of at least 935 lives, according to a briefing paper also released Tuesday by Human Rights Watch (HRW), which denounced the group's attacks as 'indefensible'.

Nigeria, the dominant power in West Africa and the oil- and gas-rich Gulf of Guinea, provides the United States with about eight percent of its total oil imports, making it Washington's biggest trading partner on the African continent. It is also one of only three sub-Saharan African countries - along with South Africa and Angola, another major oil exporter - with which the administration of President Barack Obama has established high- level bi- national commissions.

While security in the oil-producing Niger Delta region has long dominated U.S. concerns about Nigeria's stability, the emergence of Boko Haram, whose name has been translated as 'Western education is sacrilege', in the predominantly Muslim northern part of the country has sparked growing concern, particularly in the Pentagon and its four-year-old Africa Command, or AFRICOM.

In his first visit to Nigeria as AFRICOM commander last August, Gen. Cater Ham charged that Boko Haram had made contacts with Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) and that it was conceivable that those two groups could form a 'loose' partnership with al-Shabab in Somalia. 'What is most worrying at present, at least in my view,' he told journalists in Lagos in mid-August, 'is a clearly stated intent by Boko Haram and by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb to coordinate and synchronise their efforts,' he said. 'I'm not so sure they're able to do that just yet, but it's clear to me they have the desire and intent to do that.'

When, just 10 days later, the group carried out a suicide attack on the U.N. compound in the capital Abuja, killing at least 23 people, it appeared that Ham's suggestion that Boko Haram's ambitions - or those of at least one faction within the group - were no longer confined strictly to Nigeria. It was the first known attack by the group on a foreign target.

Since then, the Nigerian government, backed by some Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill, have called for putting Boko Haram on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organisations and for the administration to substantially increase its counter-terrorism assistance - which amounted to only 1.5 million dollars over the last two years - to Abuja.

In a presentation to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) here in October, Ham also appeared to endorse such an approach, reiterating his fears about the 'stated intent' of Al- Shabaab, AQIM, and Boko Haram 'to link and synchronise their efforts', which he described as a 'very, very dangerous outcome for us'.

© Inter Press Service (2012) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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