US strikes targeted IS militants, Lakurawa jihadists, Nigeria says

TDT | Manama

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US strikes in Nigeria this week targeted Islamic State militants from the Sahel who were in the country to work with the Lakurawa jihadist group and “bandit” gangs, a spokesman for the Nigerian president told AFP yesterday. The exact targets of the strikes, launched overnight Thursday into Friday, had been unclear. Washington and Abuja previously said they targeted ISlinked militants, without providing details on which of Nigeria’s myriad armed groups were attacked.

“ISIS, Lakurawa and bandits were targeted,” Daniel Bwala, a spokesman for President Bola Tinubu, told AFP on Saturday. “ISIS found their way through the Sahel to go and assist the Lakurawa and the bandits with supplies and with training,” he said. The Islamic State Sahel Province (ISSP) group is active in neighbouring Niger, as well as Burkina Faso and Mali, where it is fighting a bloody insurgency against the governments of those countries.

While Nigeria has long battled its own, separate jihadist conflict, analysts have been worried about the spread of armed groups from the Sahel into the west African country. “The strike was conducted at a location where, historically, you have the bandits and the Lakurawa parading around that axis,” Bwala said. “The intelligence the US government gathered, also, is that there is a mass movement of ISIS from the Sahel to that part.”

There were casualties, but it was unclear who among those targeted were killed, Bwala added. The site of the strikes -- in Nigeria’s northwest state of Sokoto -- has puzzled analysts, since Nigeria’s jihadist insurgency is mostly concentrated in the northeast. Researchers have recently linked some members of the armed group known as Lakurawa -- the main jihadist group located in Sokoto State -- to the ISSP. Other analysts have disputed those links, however, and research on Lakurawa is complicated as the term has been used to describe various armed fighters in the northwest.