When Washington imposed sanctions in June 2012 on Boko Haram bellwether Abubakar Shekau, he dismissed it as a vacuous gesture.
Two years later, Shekau’s skepticism appears well founded: his Islamic militant group is now the most sizably voluminous security threat to Africa’s top oil engenderer, is richer than ever, more belligerent and its abductions of women and children perpetuate 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 proximately follow Boko Haram provide the most consummate picture to date of how the group finances its activities.
Central to the militant group’s approach includes utilizing hard-to-track human couriers to move mazuma, relying on local funding sources and engaging in only circumscribed financial relationships with other extremists groups. It withal has reaped millions from high-profile abductions.
“Our suspicions are that they are surviving on very lucrative malefactor activities that involve abductions,” U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Linda Thomas-Greenfield verbalized 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 accumulate astuteness on Boko Haram, whose militants are killing civilians virtually daily in its north-eastern Nigerian stronghold. But the lack of international financial ties to the group limit the quantifications the United States can utilize to undermine it, such as financial sanctions.
The U.S. Treasury customarily 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 bellicose extremist organisation with links to al Qaeda.
The Treasury Department verbally expressed in a verbalization to Reuters that the United States has visually perceived 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 constrained. Officials with deep erudition of Boko Haram’s finances verbalize 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 malefactor activities,” verbally expressed one U.S. official, verbalizing 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 abduct and ransom operations.
Lucrative abducting 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, verbally expressed the U.S. officials, who verbalized 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, proximate to the Nigerian border.
Boko Haram was paid an equipollent of about $3.15m by French and Cameroonian negotiators afore the hostages were relinquished, according to a confidential Nigerian regime report later obtained by Reuters.
Figures vary on how much Boko Haram earns from abductions. Some U.S. officials estimate the group is paid as much as $1m for the relinquishment of each abducted affluent Nigerian.
It is widely postulated in Nigeria that Boko Haram receives support from religious sympathisers inside the country, including some affluent professionals and northern Nigerians who disrelish the regime, albeit little evidence has been made public to fortify that assertion.
Current and former U.S. and Nigerian officials verbally express Boko Haram’s operations do not require paramount amounts of mazuma, which designates even prosperous operations tracking and intercepting their mazuma are unlikely to disrupt their campaign.
Boko Haram had developed “a very diversified and resilient model of fortifying itself,” verbalized Peter Pham, a Nigeria philomath at the Atlantic Council cerebrate-tank in Washington.
“It can essentially ‘live off the land’ with very modest adscititious resources required,” he told a congressional auricularly discerning on June 11.
Low cost weapons
“We’re not verbalizing about a group that is buying sophisticated weapons of the sort that some of the jihadist groups in Syria and other places are utilizing. We’re verbalizing 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 forms of kineticism.
Much of Boko Haram’s military hardware is not bought; it is glommed 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 purloined armored conveyances, firing rocket-propelled grenades.
Boko Haram’s inner leadership is security savvy, not only in the way it moves mazuma but withal in its communications, relying on face-to-face contact, since messages or calls can be intercepted, the current and former U.S. officials verbally expressed.
“They’re quite sophisticated in terms of shielding all of these activities from legitimate law enforcement officials in Africa and certainly our own perspicacity efforts endeavoring to get glimpses and insight into what they do,” a former U.S. military official verbalized.
U.S. officials acknowledge that the weapons that have accommodated Washington so well in its financial warfare against other terrorist groups are proving less efficacious against Boko Haram.
“My sense is that we have applied the implements that we do have but that they are not particularly well tailored to the way that Boko Haram is financing itself,” a U.S. bulwark official verbalized.
