Some more news about the #Bakura faction and its malcontents... Following the killing of Sahalaba by Bakura, a group of #JASDJ #BokoHaram went their own way... a mini-thread...
So it really was the case that Bakura had a beef with Sahalaba, who had taken over as imam of JASDJ after Shekau's death in May 2021. Sahalaba was a well established religious scholar, who used to be a qadi. His religious legitimacy was key to his ascension to the imamate.
But Bakura, who used to be the top military commander (amir ul fiya) of pro-Shekau jihadis on Lake Chad , was not happy to be supplanted as top dog because of his insufficient religious knowledge.
He had Sahalaba killed around mid-2022 and took over the imamate.
But the move did not go down too well with a jihadi subgroup based near Gazwa, Bama LGA (at some distance from the northern part of Lake Chad where Bakura's core is). Three commanders, Abu Suleiman, Ikrima and Ba Issa, have refused to submit to Bakura and have gone their own way.
It makes sense factionalism affects JASDJ, in part because of political economy: each subgroup fends for itself, through plunder and ransoming... so why should they follow orders? And in JASDJ, unlike ISWAP, there is no external higher authority to arbitrate internal tensions...
What's amazing is that the powerful JASDJ subgroup in the Mandara mountains (Ali Ngulde, Gobara & Umate) stays loyal to Bakura. Maybe shared hatred and fear of ISWAP unite them? Or Bakura is in a position to provide them with gear (he did send stuff to Shekau in the days)?
Or maybe political economy is not the whole story. Maybe there is a shared sense that Shekau was in the right, that this is the way of the good Muslims? Several defectors I talked to still seem to think Shekau was right over ISWAP, after all.
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