ISIS Accepted a Pledge of Allegiance from Africa’s Deadliest Terror Group

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ISIS has a few foreign groups from which it has accepted pledges, including Ansar Bayt al-Maqdisi in the Egyptian Sinai and groups of fighters in strategic areas of Libya. ISIS has a shura council that dictates the group's strategic direction but takes a devolved, hands-off approach on tactical matters. “It's sort of like centralized decentralization,” Zelin told Business Insider.

But Boko Haram's pledge could have major ramifications even if it doesn't lead to a close operational relationship.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a leading public authority on violent non-state groups, tweeted: “Reflecting further on Boko Haram's pledge of bayat to ISIL, I cannot stress enough how significant it is. A real game changer.”
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The Al Qaeda-linked jihadist group Ansar al-Sharia is active in Libya and was involved in the attack on the US diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. In contrast, ISIS has been limited to a presence in certain cities in Libya that the group has greatly exaggerated in its propaganda, according to Gartenstein-Ross.

The Boko Haram pledge could shift the balance in Africa. “Now ISIS has a much more viable Africa network, which means there's a greater chance that there will be splinters from organizations like Ansar al-Sharia in Libya and Tunisia,” Gartenstein-Ross told Business Insider.

And ISIS gets a piece of good news in a time when it's showing signs of internal fracture and suffering losses in the Sunni regions of Iraq, most notably in Saddam Hussein's birthplace of Tikrit. Even though discussions of a Boko Haram-ISIS merger predate ISIS' recent setbacks, the partnership has started at an opportune time for the Islamic State.

“This was going to be a week where ISIS had a very clear loss of momentum in Iraq and Syria,” Gartenstein-Ross said. “It was finally becoming undeniable that they were in big trouble.”

Accepting Boko Haram's pledge gives ISIS “territorial options,” Gartenstein-Ross said, along with “the perception that this is a movement on the rise. Even if it's experiencing losses in other areas, now it has something it can point to in terms of its continuing momentum.”
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