SUICIDE BOMBING: New Weapon Of Retreating Boko Haram

WHEN the insurgent group, Boko Haram, launched its first suicide bombing attack on June 16, 2011 at the Louis Edet House, headquarters of the Nigeria Police Force, Abuja, it marked the first formal deployment of suicide bombings to achieve political objectives and to cause anarchy in Nigeria.

This was ratcheted up just over two months after on August 26, 2011, when another suicide bomber rammed his car into the United Nations compound, Abuja, killing 21 people.
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Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies and a leading public authority on violent non-state groups noted that Boko Haram’s pledge of bayat to ISIS is “a real game changer. Now ISIS has a much more viable Africa network, which means there’s a greater chance that there will be splinters from organisations like Ansar al-Sharia in Libya and Tunisia. 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. This was going to be a week where ISIS had a very clear loss of momentum in Iraq and Syria. 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.”

In fact, this pledge of allegiance by Boko Haram and acceptance is feared, may lead to the group getting new influx of weapons and terror masterminds, who may want to organise sophisticated, co-ordinated attacks, designed to inflict the largest number of civilian casualties. So far, the suicide bombings have not come close to the five most deadly suicide bombings ever carried out by terror groups.
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