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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDeadliest Terror in the World: the West’s Latest Gift to Africa
Deadliest Terror in the World: the Wests Latest Gift to Africaby Dan Glazebrook
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/27/deadliest-terror-in-the-world-the-wests-latest-gift-to-africa/
Nigerias Boko Haram are now officially the deadliest terror group in the world. That they have reached this position is a direct consequence of Cameron and cos war on Libya and one that was perhaps not entirely unintended.
According to a report just released by Global Terrorism Index, Boko Haram were responsible for 6,644 deaths in 2014, compared to 6,073 attributed to ISIS, representing a quadrupling of their total killings in 2013. In the past week alone, bombings conducted by the group have killed eight people on a bus in Maiduguri; a family of five in Fotokol, Cameroon; fifteen people in a crowded marketplace in Kano; and thirty-two people outside a mosque in Yola.
In 2009, the year they took up arms, Boko Haram had nothing like the capacity to mount such operations, and their equipment remained primitive; but by 2011, that had begun to change. As Peter Weber noted in The Week, their weapons shifted from relatively cheap AK-47s in the early days of its post-2009 embrace of violence to desert-ready combat vehicles and anti-aircraft/ anti-tank guns. This dramatic turnaround in the groups access to materiel was the direct result of NATOs war on Libya. A UN report published in early 2012 warned that large quantities of weapons and ammunition from Libyan stockpiles were smuggled into the Sahel region, including rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns with anti-aircraft visors, automatic rifles, ammunition, grenades, explosives (Semtex), and light anti-aircraft artillery (light caliber bi-tubes) mounted on vehicles, and probably also more advanced weapons such as surface-to-air missiles and MANPADS (man-portable air-defence systems). NATO had effectively turned over the entire armoury of an advanced industrial state to the regions most sectarian militias: groups such as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Boko Haram.
Continued: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/27/deadliest-terror-in-the-world-the-wests-latest-gift-to-africa/
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Deadliest Terror in the World: the West’s Latest Gift to Africa (Original Post)
newthinking
Nov 2015
OP
uppityperson
(115,681 posts)1. K&r for scary assholes
leveymg
(36,418 posts)2. Libya and its aftermath are largely Hillary's work. ISIS also.
This is the inevitable result of botched regime change and bad judgement at the top of CIA and State that pushed this policy.