Interesting to note that it seems that this spread into Niger as well - we didn’t hear about that before.
A bloody uprising to create a Taliban-style state in Africa’s most populous nation appears an isolated rebellion launched by a cleric-led, Afghan-inspired, bloc of university students using family wealth, not al-Qaeda funding, authorities and captured fighters have told correspondents.
| Just a flash in the pan, huh? |
Security forces of two nations, Nigeria and neighbouring Niger, quashed the students’ surprise offensive, which appalled Nigeria’s northern Muslims with the violence of its fiery attacks on police and police stations and other public buildings.
| Normally those are reserved for beauty contests and churches... |
Even with the campaign defeated, and scores of the campaigners dead, in jail or in hiding, the students declare themselves unrepentant.
| "We dunnit an' we're glad! Glad we tell yez!" |
The two-week uprising ended on January 3 with at least two policemen and 16 others dead, including 10 students killed by Nigerian villagers and by Niger security forces as the young men tried to fight their way across the border after defeat by Nigeria’s army and police. Residents say they believe the true death toll in the northern state of Yobe was higher - about 50, with students making up most of the dead.
| I think we're all happy to hear that... |
The uprising came without warning, and virtually without precedent. Except for an Islamic uprising in northern Nigeria in the 1980s, Nigeria and West Africa as a whole have seen none of the kind of broad-based armed Islamic movements spreading in the Philippines, Indonesia and other Asian nations. In West Africa, "there’s a brewing religious intolerance in some places, but it’s mostly fuelled by political leaders. Most people left to their own devices aren’t becoming fundamentalists," said Ross Herbert, at the South African Institute of International Affairs in Johannesburg.
| Unless there's a beauty contest in town, of course... |
"In West Africa, people have too many other problems to worry about fomenting global revolution," Herbert said.
| You'd think that would be the case, but pick a country at random on the map of Africa and you'll find at least two groups engaged in Armed Struggle™... |
Police said the students included children of top northern government officials. Leaving prosperous homes and university study, the young settled with a Nigerian Islamic cleric known variously as Abu Umar, or Mullah Umar in a tent city on the banks of the Yobe River. The students called themselves Al Sunna wal Jamma, Arabic for Followers of the Prophet’s Teaching. Investigators do have one key question, the official said: Where, and how, did university students learn how to handle arms?
It ain’t rocket science, folks. And whatever training they did get didn’t seem to do them much good.
"We certainly know they received some weapons-training, because they’re not taught sharp-shooting in school," he said.
| If they'd actually learned how to handle guns the casualty rate would have been higher. I get the impression they were a shoot-from-the-hip crowd... |
"They put Islam upside down," said Ibrahim Tijjani, a Maiduguri-based Muslim cleric. "Violence is only justifiable in Islam when one’s religion, life, family or property is attacked - none of which happened in this case."
| The definition of an "attack" on one's religion seems to be the flexible point there. |
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