ISIS's Boko Haram appointed factional leader el Barnawi captured

el Barnawi, Apointed Boko Haram Leader by ISIS

Nigeria's secret police, the Department of State Security Services (DSS) has confirmed the arrest of factional leader of the Boko Haram sect, AbuMusab al-Barnawi.

He was captured three months before the fall of Sambisa forest, the last major stronghold of the group.

Abu Musab al-Barnawi, a top Boko Haram and ISIS leader, was rated by the United States as the world’s third most wanted terrorist and a major threat to world peace.

He was responsible for major killings, kidnap of locals and foreigners between 2012 and 2015 and was declared Nigerian leader of Boko Haram last August.

Al Barnawi declared him-self new Boko Haram leader in August 2016 and affirmed his allegiance to ISIS who confirmed his designation as the new leader of Boko Haram. This followed the disappearance of the main leader from public view of Abubakar Shekau for more than a year.

However following el Barnawi’s designation as new leader Shekau released an audio message, in which he said he had been “deceived” about Barnawi’s appointment, he denounced Barnawi as an infidel and accused him of plotting a leadership coup. In the following video, Shekau described himself as the group’s rightful leader and vowed to continue the insurgency, while also stating that his group had “no desire to fight our Muslim brethren.” Shekau also continued to refer to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as “caliph,” indicating that the split between the two groups was more complicated than previously thought.

Leadership Tussle

The August edition of ISIS-linked magazine Al-Naba, Abu Musab al-Barnawi was purportedly designated as being in a leadership position in the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), as Boko Haram came to be known following its pledge of allegiance to ISIS— under Shekau’s authority —in 2015.

Several analysts have stated that Barnawi is the son of Yusuf, the founder of Boko Haram, and was previously a close confidant of Shekau within Boko Haram. Prior to the Al-Naba article, Barnawi was little-known in the international media but had made an appearance as a spokesman for the militant group in a January 2015 video.

Barnawi indicated a potential amelioration in Boko Haram’s tactics in the Al-Naba interview. He stated that his intention was to focus the group’s attacks on Nigeria’s Christian population—the country is split roughly evenly between a majority-Muslim north and a largely-Christian south —speaking of “booby-trapping and blowing up every church we are able to reach, and killing all of those who we find from the citizens of the Cross,” according to a translation of the report by the SITE Intelligence group, Newsweek reported

The statement appeared to be a denunciation of Shekau’s indiscriminate policy, which included blowing up mosques and targeting markets frequented by Muslims. In the reported clashes between Barnawi and Shekau’s respective factions, this point seems to have been re-emphasized: a citizen in the Monguno area of Borno, Mele Kaka, told AFP that Barnawi’s fighters had told villagers that they attacked Shekau’s faction “because they had derailed from the true jihad” by killing civilians and looting their property. Barnawi’s faction claimed that such actions “contravene the teachings of Islam and true jihad,” Kaka told AFP.

General Thomas Waldhauser, the recently-appointed head of the U.S. military command center for Africa—known as AFRICOM—also claimed in June that Boko Haram’s ties with ISIS had fractured over its use of children as suicide bombers. “He’s [Shekau’s] been told by ISIL to stop doing that,” said Waldhauser, claiming that Shekau’s failure to cease such operations led to a split within Boko Haram.

Recent Developments

Barnawi has not been as active in the media as Shekau, although U.S.-based news site Sahara Reporters claimed that he released an audio statement in early August, in which he accused Shekau of living in luxury while his fighters starved. Nigeria’s military has apparently given little weight to the alleged appointment, with defense spokesman General Rabe Abubakar telling Newsweek after it was announced that any change in Boko Haram’s leadership “does not in any way affect us by any means.”