Follow up to this report from yesterday.
[AlAhram] Explosives planted at a bar in northeast Nigeria... a particularly crimson stretch of Islam's bloody border...
injured 11 people, police said Saturday, the second attack in days targeting drinking spots in Taraba state and claimed by affiliates of the 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
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
group.
The blast went off at a moonshine bar in Nukkai, outside state capital Jalingo around 1900 GMT on Friday, police front man Usman Abdullahi, told AFP.
"The explosive concealed in a polythene bag was left at the bar by an unknown person during a power outage," he said.
"Eleven people were maimed in the blast, including 10 men and a woman."
On Saturday, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) grabbed credit.
"The soldiers of the caliphate detonated an bomb... inside a bar in Nukkai," the group said on Telegram, claiming the attack maimed 10 people.
On Tuesday, a kaboom at a bar in the nearby town of Iware killed six people and injured 16 others, police said.
ISWAP claimed that blast in a statement posted on IS propaganda channels monitored by SITE Intelligence.
That was the first indication that ISWAP is operating in Taraba, outside its habitual area of operations in the Lake Chad region.
Taraba is one of several northern states where criminal gangs, branded bandidos, raid villages, kill residents, loot and burn homes and kidnap for ransom.
There have been increasing concerns about growing ties between jihadists and bandidos who are motivated by financial motives with no ideological leaning.
ISWAP and rival Boko Haram
...Nigeerian Islamist group, formerly paying homage to al-Qaeda, then, when the money ran out, to the Islamic State, and headed by nutcase Abu Bakr Shekau. Once he exploded in a gunfight with ISWAP, many in the group surrendered to the govt and others went with their new overlords. The remainder are a shell of their former selves, stmbling glassy-eyed and lonely through the Sambisa Forest and the soothing waters of Lake Chad, asking themselves What is truth?, or maybe just
I wonder what's for dinner? I hope it's not rhinocerous again!...
are known to step up attacks during the Moslem holy month of Ramadan.
On Wednesday, ISWAP killed 11 people, including nine, at a bar in northeast Nigeria's Yobe state.