After Losing Land, Boko Haram Responds With Bombs From its Nigerian bases, the Islamic State affiliate causes havoc in Cameroon, Chad and Niger By Yaroslav Trofimov
http://www.wsj.com/articles/after-losing-land-boko-haram-responds-with-bombs-1453979515
GANCEY, Cameroon—Just before dawn prayers earlier this month, a young man wearing a belt of 12 explosive canisters walked into the squat, ochre-colored building that serves as the mosque of this Cameroonian village.
As he recited the prayers in the dissipating darkness, the young man accidentally stepped on the foot of Abba Ali, a 70-year-old villager.
“I looked up at him and suddenly realized that this was a stranger,” Mr. Ali said. “That scared me.”
Moments later, the intruder detonated his device in one of some 40 suicide bombings that Boko Haram, a militant group that has become the West African “province” of Islamic State, unleashed on Cameroon’s Far North region since July.
“Everyone is afraid that we will have another suicide bomber here soon,” said the Gancey mosque’s imam, Moustapha Goni. “They have tried it once, and they will likely try it again.”
Boko Haram, the deadliest of Islamic State’s many affiliates world-wide, expanded its long-running conflict with Nigeria into the neighboring Cameroon, Chad and Niger over the past year and a half. Some of these offensives involved attacks by formations as big as a thousand men, aided by columns of armor pilfered from Nigeria’s military bases.
Just in Cameroon’s Far North region, home to a million people split roughly equally between Muslims and Christians, some 1,200 people died in this conflict, according to government statistics. Many times more were killed in Nigeria.
By conventional measures, Boko Haram is finally losing this war. In recent months, operations by Cameroonian forces, which receive assistance from the U.S. Special Operations troops, and parallel offensives by the militaries of Nigeria and Chad have significantly weakened the militant group’s ability to wage conventional warfare.
Evicted from much of the Belgium-sized area it controlled a year ago, Boko Haram is the only one of Islamic State’s many affiliates to have suffered such dramatic territorial losses. Developments here, therefore, offer insights into what may happen should Islamic State’s central command be ousted one day from the core areas it controls in Syria and Iraq.
A disheartening lesson so far: Islamic State’s loss of territory only transforms the nature of the war rather than ending it.
“They have changed their methods because they realized that frontal combat is no longer in their favor,” said Capt. Ticko Kingue, who commands a company of Cameroonian mechanized infantry deployed along Boko Haram-held areas of Nigeria. “So now they have shifted to the tactic of cowards—the phase of kamikaze attacks.”
This new phase of the war, which also involves an upsurge in roadside bombings and other guerrilla-type actions by Boko Haram, is proving just as deadly—and, in some ways, more difficult to tackle than the more conventional battles of last year.
Boko Haram’s campaign of intimidation has almost completely paralyzed the region’s economy, with streets emptying after dark and travel on key roads only possible with military escorts. It has also prompted at least 100,000 people in the Far North—a one-time tourism magnet—to flee to safer parts of the majority-Christian Cameroon.
ENLARGE “Their caliphate project involved amputating parts of our territory,” said Minister of Communications Issa Tchiroma Bakary, who hails from a prominent Muslim family in northern Cameroon. “Militarily, they can no longer achieve that—and so now their objective is no longer to amputate but simply to kill.”
It is often teenagers and young girls brainwashed by Boko Haram who carry out these bombings, choosing as targets concentrations of people such as markets or mosques. On Monday, at least 32 people were killed in one such suicide attack—carried out by four girls — of a weekly market in the village of Bodo.
A poster at Cameroonian installations offers tips how to identify such attackers by their “haggard eyes due to lack of sleep” and “a strong perfume, often considered as most appropriate to enter paradise.”
To counter the suicide bombers, Cameroonian authorities have also spurred the creation of so-called “vigilance committees”—local self-defense groups that keep an eye on strangers entering villages and provide intelligence to the military.
Cameroon’s Israeli-trained special forces, known as BIR, also receive training in intelligence collection and defusing roadside bombs from U.S. Special Operations troops. The U.S. has also set up a drone base in the northern Cameroon city of Garoua to provide all the four countries targeted by Boko Haram with surveillance and intelligence data about the militant group.
On a recent afternoon, several hundred “vigilance committee” members lined up on the road not far from Gancey to greet a visiting commander of BIR. Many were armed with homemade muskets and pistols, machetes, or arrows and bows.
ENLARGE “We know that Boko Haram wants to take over the village, so whenever we know that someone is not from here, we act,” said one of the committee leaders, Warrai Coumandji.
In another village further south along the border, Mathieu Kodji said he handed over four Boko Haram suspects to the military in recent months. “We can identify them because they have scars here on the shoulder from carrying their weapons,” Mr. Kodji said, baring his shoulder to show the spot. “They are trying to hide, but we ferret them out.”
BIR trooper Bakwali Wiandi Christian said the help of these “vigilance committees” was invaluable: “They are the ones who make us really efficient, with all the intelligence that they provide.”
But loyalties in the region cut both ways. Cameroon has imprisoned several local officials, including a mayor, in the Far North for suspected Boko Haram links, and many young villagers along the border have joined the group.
“Boko Haram, too, has informers all over,” BIR Lt. Col. Leopolde Nlate Ebale, head of operations for the Cameroonian task force overseeing the most sensitive areas along the Nigerian border, said as he surveyed the “vigilance committee” members lined up to greet him. “Boko Haram bets on fear—either to force people into actively supporting them, or to at least constrain them into silence.”
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