Nigeria's dangerous Islamists are a potential threat to Olympics

THE FIRESTORM of attacks on Kano this past weekend by the fanatics of the fundamentalist Boko Haram movement threatens civil war across northern and central Nigeria. The fear is Boko Haram (meaning western education is haram or forbidden) could also spread their message of hate and violence well beyond west Africa.
 
Along with its fellow extremists bent on violence - al-Qaeda and the Somali al-Shabaab in particular - Boko Haram is now high on the watch list for both MI5 and MI6 as a potential threat to the London Olympic Games this summer.
 
Al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab and Boko Haram are part of an extensive but loose network of radical Islamic groups with main centres in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Caucasus, east and west Africa and in the Maghreb.
 
They pose a potential threat in the UK through links in various diaspora groups. Officially there are about 150,000 Nigerians living in the UK, but it is thought the real figure is well over 250,000. Similarly, about 65,000 Somalis or people of Somali descent are in the UK according to official figures. A Home Office source suggests that the real figure is also well over 250,000.

One of the largest Somali groups in Britain live close to the Olympic site in the borough of Tower Hamlets, where they are the second largest ethnic group after the Bangladeshis. Somalis in London have been known to be in communication with al-Shabaab via internet chatrooms.

Boko Haram was founded as an Islamic protest movement in 2002 by a charismatic cleric Mohammed Yusuf in Maiduguri [see Briefing].

Following Yusuf’s death in 2009, Boko Haram came under new command, and attacks in Nigeria intensified.  On 26 August last year suicide bombers assaulted the main offices of the UN in the capital Abuja, killing 24 people. For the second Christmas in succession last year, congregations of Christians were attacked as they worshipped in churches.

This past weekend, in the biggest attack so far, about 170 people were killed in Kano, and many more injured, in a string of rolling attacks by bombers on motorbikes.
 
The tactics are modeled on those of the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, but it is the connections across Africa and Europe that cause concern.

Links with the newly reconstituted al-Qaeda in the Maghreb offer a jumping-off point for attacks into Europe, including the UK.
 
Al-Shabaab, too, offers connections to Europe and Britain – particularly as its fighters are coming under heavy pressure from the international force of African troops in southern Somalia, and are moving abroad.
 
Last Saturday, Bilal al-Berjawi, a commander who had grown up in the UK, was killed on the outskirts of Mogadishu by a strike from a drone launched from an airbase in Ethiopia. He had been a colleague of Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who planned al-Qaeda’s bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam in August 1998, and the bombing of an Israeli hotel in Mombasa in 2002.
 
Earlier this month American authorities charged a former US soldier Craig Baxman, 24, for abetting al-Shabaab and trying to join them after secretly converting to Islam while still serving. He was arrested on a bus in Kenya as he tried to make his way to Somalia.
 
Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram are a particular challenge, according to British security officials, because they thrive among the poorest, most marginalised sections of their diaspora communities – and these are the hardest to understand and penetrate. ·