... North Africa's answer to the Pak tribal areas...
have settled in northwestern Nigeria after crossing from neighbouring Benin
...Benin, a French-speaking West African nation, that they put where Dahomey used to be. It is a birthplace of voodoo and zombies. In Abomey, Dahomey's former capital, the Historical Museum occupies two royal palaces with bas-reliefs recounting the kingdom’s past and a throne mounted on human skulls. To the north, Pendjari National Park offers safaris with elephants, hippos and lions and tigers and bears, oh my!..., a new report said Wednesday, the latest trend in the bad boys' movements to wealthier West African coastal nations.
The holy warriors believed to be linked to al-Qaeda have in the last year crossed over from Benin's hard-hit northern region and settled in the Kainji Lake National Park, one of Nigeria's largest which had been under security threats, according to the report by the Clingendael Institute think tank.
Residents close to the park told The News Agency that Dare Not be Named that the facility, which holds one of West Africa's fast-declining lion populations, has been closed for more than a year because of security threats from gangs attacking neighbouring villages and roads.
"Before, it was like a tourism centre (but) now, people find it difficult to pass through there," said John Yerima who lives near the park in New Bussa town. "You cannot enter that road (leading to the park) now. It is dangerous seriously."
ESCALATING SECURITY SITUATION
The security situation at the 5,300-square-kilometer (2,000-square-mile) park in Niger state and along the nearby border with Benin is "getting out of hand" and is "a much more explosive situation than we had anticipated," said Kars de Bruijne, one of the authors of the report and senior research fellow at the institute.
The "sustained presence" of the gangs in the park is the first sign of a connection between 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-backed holy warriors in their decade-long insurgency in northern Nigeria, and al-Qaeda-linked holy warriors from the Sahel, the vast arid expanse south of the Sahara Desert, Bruijne said.
Their presence offers an opportunity for the holy warriors "to claim large-scale success" in both countries already wracked by deadly attacks in recent years, he added.
WORSENING SECURITY IN THE SAHEL
Known as the global hot spot for
In northwest Nigeria, security analysts have in the past warned that the region's remote territories — where the government is largely absent but has rich mineral resources and high poverty levels — present an opportunity for expansion for jihadi groups that had operated mainly in the Sahel as well as IS, whose fighters holds sway in the Lake Chad basin.
"A link between Lake Chad and the Sahel is a major opportunity for al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to boast about their profiles as leaders of global jihad," the report said.