US largest State Sponors of terrorism – terrrorist groups operative through-out MENA, including Nigeria, Syria, Iran

West using terror to plunder oil resources of Nigeria
7 October, 2012 – nsnbc.com

Nigeria, Africa’s top oil producing nation, is witnessing a surge in sectarian violence that is destabilizing the central government and threatening to split the country in two.

On the surface, a militant group known as Boko Haram appears to be the protagonist. But some believe that powerful Western interests are using the violence to consolidate foreign control over Nigeria’s vast oil wealth.

With a population of 160 million, Nigeria is the known as the “giant of Africa”. In addition to crude oil, Nigeria has also the biggest reserves of natural gas among Sub-Saharan nations. Western energy companies are gearing up to tap this wealth even further in the coming years. Balkanising the country into North-South entities would undermine the central government in Abuja and bolster exploitation by these corporations.

Recent national security concerns by the US government and its Western allies, Britain and France, have featured West Africa as a new global priority. These powers have warned against the rise of so-called terrorism in the region and are citing this threat as a reason for expanding their military presence in Burkino Faso, Cote D’Ivoire, Mali and Niger. Britain’s former colony Nigeria is emerging as a supposed top Western security concern.

The cold-blooded slaughter last week of 25 students and staff at a college dormitory in northern Nigeria has been linked to the militant group, Boko Haram.

The secretive sect is blamed for nearly 1,400 killings since 2009, involving a campaign of terror that has seen bomb and gun attacks on government buildings, police stations, communication facilities, churches and even mosques.

On the country’s Independence Day last Monday night, a group of unknown armed men entered the Federal Polytechnic premises in the northeastern town of Mubi. The attackers called out students by name, according to local police, and then proceeded to execute the victims by gunshot or by slitting their throats with knives.

The killings have since sparked a desperate exodus of students from the town, and the region has become gripped by heightened fears of further bloodshed.

Boko Haram seems the most likely culprit. The reclusive network is said to want to impose a strict version of religious law and to ban all symbols of Western influence, including the central government of President Goodluck Jonathan. Western commentators have labeled the group “Nigeria’s Taliban”.

However, some Nigerian analysts believe that the organization is being used by powerful external forces as a conduit for destabilizing Nigeria. Political analyst Olufemi Ijebuode says: “The upshot of this latest massacre is to destabilize the state of Nigeria by sowing sectarian divisions among the population. The killers may have been Boko Haram operatives, but Boko Haram is a proxy organization working on behalf of foreign powers.”

“The bottom line is that this murderous attack, as with many, many others in recent years, is saying that the Nigerian government is not in control of its own country,” adds Ijebuode.

A timeline of Boko Haram’s insurgency shows a remarkable increase in violent capability. The group was first formed in 2002 in the city of Maiduguri, the northeast most state of Borno. However, it was not until mid-July 2009 that it adopted violent tactics, apparently following a heavy-handed crackdown by Nigerian security forces that involved extrajudicial killings of leading members.

In these initial violent clashes, supporters of Boko Haram were armed with rudimentary means, such as attacking police stations with motorcycles laden with fuel and even using bows and poison-tipped arrows.

Within two years, the group had acquired assault rifles and was able to mount bomb attacks in the capital Abuju, including one on the police headquarters in June 2011. Two months later, in August 2011, the United Nations headquarters in Abuja was bombed, killing 24 people.

In the following months, the group carried out a wave of coordinated bomb and gun attacks in several cities across the north of the country that resulted in hundreds of deaths. As well as government buildings, churches and mosques have been targeted in a deliberate attempt to provoke sectarian hate. …more