Coming from two recent successful, high-profile terror operations, the Islamic State’s West Africa Province (ISWAP), seems set for its biggest prize yet – its conceited declaration of kidnapping the Nigerian president. In March this year, a detachment of the group, operating mostly around the forests between Kaduna and Niger State, deployed to blow up a Kaduna–Abuja train off its tracks, murdering scores, and kidnapping about 62 people, from whom they have so far extracted an average of about N100 million naira from each of the 35 victims released so far. As exasperated negotiators with the terrorists would later say, the pitiless killers have no reason to publicly communicate their motives because “the president and your leaders know our demands.”
After some sham motions in government circles, the abducted train riders were abandoned to their fate, scrambling through tortuous paths to pay their ransoms, while elected officials in Abuja traded blames but offered no accountability. Then in July, another ISWAP detachment, with possible operational support from Ansaru, a breakaway faction of Boko Haram and affiliate of Al-Qaeda, operating mostly in Kaduna and Kogi States, struck at the heart of the Nigerian capital, Abuja. Storming the Kuje Medium Security Prison in the capital city, the terrorists killed at least one of the security personnel, and liberated 879 inmates (among them 64 Boko Haram members and other criminals), in an operation that…
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