he Multinational Joint Task Force, which comprises Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Benin, helped to secure the release of the captives, mostly women and children.most of them were women and children.
remember the self righteous tweets #save our girls? Well, the local African countries managed to do it, but don't expect CNN to notice.
Wikipedia on this Multinational force
the US is helping with money and training.
But in the past, the US was reluctant about this because of corruption (I know here in the Philippines, often the money just gets diverted into the pockets of the big shots: and even the weapons get sold to the bad guys to make a profit)
there is also a report on a Fulani attack on a local church. not much in the article, but the background is that the herders are attacking the farmers, which has been going on for years.
so where do the Bokos get their financing? Drug smuggling of course.
According to an Africa Intelligence report, the group could be getting a lot of its financial support from drug traffickers who are using Nigeria’s strategic location as a crossroad for global narcotics transport.
A BBC report cited findings by the International Crisis Group saying that the group had forged ties with arms smugglers and drug traffickers who use their territory as a transit route.
A 2012 report from the Inter-University Center for Terrorism Studies alleged that Nigerian terrorist groups are financed by drug cartels in Latin America.
UKIndependent notes that ISIS and Alqada are more interested in money than religion, so are busy in the drug smuggling business.
related item: The Mali connection: Drugs smuggling.
and the backstory: massive corruption problem.
and also the Population growth thanks to colonialism providing modern medicine.
While the Islamic terrorists get the most publicity (because of their extreme violence and eagerness to spread worldwide) most of the outlaw activity is about making money. The Islamic terror groups dominate the most lucrative criminal activities (smuggling drugs) because the Islamic terrorists are the most violent outlaws around and generally unencumbered by family or tribal responsibilities. Nevertheless, the Islamic terrorists are a small part of a much larger smuggling activity
and the French are busy with the fight against these guys, but the Americans are doing their thing with air support: For the US military it's personal:
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The Americans stand ready to provide airstrikes for as many ISGS targets as the French intel effort can locate. The Americans are keen to eliminate ISGS because this groups was responsible for a late 2017 ambush in Niger that killed four American soldiers. ISGS wants to kill more American troops because that is a big deal with ISIL since Islamic terror groups tend to consider Israel and the United States the main enemies of Islam. Israel and the Americans have also proved to be the most effective at hunting down and killing ISIL groups. So this particular campaign against ISGS will be more of the same, just in a very remote part of the world.
a short background on the problems of reporting: a lot of the reporters are from the left and see the "insurgents" as the good guys, so their reports are biased.
AlJ does this sometimes, with reports from the bad guys explaining why they fight, but not usually in their main articles.
And SP usually is blunt about the corruption problem, but figures their readers know how it works so doesn't give the details.
I'll explain using the Philippines as an example.
Once one of our family met and had dinner with another American helping in the south against the Islamic extremists. and he shook his head and said: They steal every thing.
So the US gives aid to the military and also for local development.
For the military, the US supplies information on what's going on (drones and electronic spying, including on cellphone calls), trains local soldiers, and also helps with drones and air support: but because of the law, the smart bombs are usually done via the Philippine military.
And you don't usually hear about the US support, unless the liberals can find "civilians" killed, then there is a big fuss.
Duterte is not taking it from these bozos: He just threw out an Australian "missionary" nun who was helping the bad guys by documenting "civilian casualties" by the local military. Lots of messiness going on there, and what she claims were atrocities was in an area where this had happened under the previous president, and it didn't help that she joined in and talked at political rallies (something foreigners are forbidden to do).
True, murders and civilian casualties, sometimes deliberate and sometimes accidentally because they are with the bad guys, either as family members or as hostages.
But the western activists don't usually worry when the Islamicists kill local traditional religion villagers, only when they are killed by the military or shot by a local Politician's hit men because they are reporting this, and the international groups rarely point out the main cause of the war: that the bad guys .(including "islamic" freedom fighters, our local communists, and of course the private armies of the politicians) are paying off the local businessmen and politicians.
And yes, the war on drugs is part of this: The Philippines was descending into the anarchy due to drug cartels and druggies committing crime. And a lot of the cops and the local politicians were on the take to look the other way.
but it also comes down to corruption: We just lost another priest here for opposing mining interests that would destroy the land of the locals. Probably a hit by a military or NPA type working on their own and paid for by the businessman or the politicians who will get rich by looking the other way when they pollute.
and we expect a lot of these murders to happen in the next week or two because we are having local elections, and the local officials often get rich diverting development and infrastructure money into their own pockets.
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