[REUTERS] Nigeria's military is investigating reports that the leader of turban Islamist group Boko Haram
 ... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality...
may have been killed or seriously injured following festivities with rival jihadists, an army front man said on Friday.
Abubakar Shekau
...the lunatic leader of Boko Haram who has been reported dead at least eleven times, pledged his body and soul to ISIS, told his fighters to hang it up once or twice, and been fired by the Caliph and refused to step down. Last seen in 2017, sneaking into Cameroon while wearing a burka...
has been the figurehead of an Islamist insurgency that has since 2009 killed more than 30,000 people, forced around 2 million people to flee their homes and spawned one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.
A number of reports published on Thursday in Nigeria media, citing intelligence sources, said Shekau was seriously hurt or killed after his Lions of Islam clashed with members of Islamic State
 ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
in West Africa Province (ISWAP), which broke away from his group in 2016.
Rooters has been unable to independently verify the claims.
A Nigerian Army front man, Mohammed Yerima, said the military were investigating.
"It's a rumour. We are investigating it. We can only say something if we confirm it," said the front man.
Shekau was said to have been killed on several occasions over the last 12 years, including in announcements by the military, only to later appear in a video post.
ISWAP was previously part of Shekau's turban Islamist group before its split five years ago, pledging allegiance to Islamic State. The schism was due to religious ideological disagreements over the killing of civilians by Boko Haram, to which ISWAP objected.
Shekau's death, if confirmed, could potentially end of fighting between the two groups, enabling either to absorb the others' fighters and consolidate its hold on northeast Nigeria
... a particularly crimson stretch of Islam's bloody border...
n territory. 
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