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In Burkina Faso, Ansar ul-Islam, the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM) and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS) Are All Believed To Be Heavily Concentrating Their Recruitment Efforts On The Fulani, A Transnational Ethnic Group In West+Central Africa
The portents of this emerging reality for Nigeria is made all the more by the fact that terrorist activities have since 2018 increasingly shifted from the north to the east of that country.
Nigeria is separated from eastern Burkina Faso by a strip of Benin Republic territory which is not wider than 150 kilometres. Nigeria remains at the crossroads of Fulani-dominated pastoralist movements from all across the West and Central African sub-regions
One reason for this is that even with its growing issues of desertification, Nigeria still possesses te largest acreage of pasture in the entire region between Senegal/Mauritania and Chad/Central African Republic where the Fulani dominate animal husbandry
Already, the backdrop that is necessary for the easy penetration of a notoriously porous Nigeria exists on account of growing bandit-driven insecurity in the border-facing northwestern Nigerian states of Zamfara, Sokoto + Katsina which are a veritable Fulani heartland no less
Though their spheres of influence are situated 1.000 miles apart from each other, given the foregoing paradigms, any collaborative between ISGS in the Burkina/Niger borderlands and ISWAP in Nigeria's far northeast could>>>
<<<swiftly introduce the spectre of full-blown terrorism into the heady mix of security woes facing NW Nigeria at this time. You might want to recall that #BokoHaram have severally tried to stage attacks in Borno using the guise of pastoralist movements
Only last month on NTA's "Rogo at Large", one observed fair-skinned Tuareg pastoralists who arrived from as far north as Agadez, somewhere inside Jigawa State. That is just how far pastoralists travel on the regular in these parts.
Eastern Burkina is less than a fifth of that distance from Kebbi State. Shine your eyes, Nigeria..
