US, UK Add Pressure

Release// Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram is prepared to start releasing up to half of the kidnapped schoolgirls in the coming days after dropping demands for the release of top commanders in talks with the Nigerian government.

The militant Islamist group, which kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls a month ago, is willing to conduct a gradual release of its hostages in return for the freeing of Boko Haram prisoners in Nigerian jails, it was claimed. In a significant concession, the group has abandoned demands for its top commanders to be released, seemingly aware that this would be politically impossible for the Nigerian government. Officially designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the State Department in November, Boko Haram burst into public view in 2009 with a series of attacks on public buildings in northeastern Nigeria. A brutal counteroffensive by Nigerian security services followed, leaving hundreds dead.

The precise structure and membership of Boko Haram and its affiliates, and even the tenets of their extremist ideology, are unclear. Nigerians I spoke with on a research trip late last year unanimously condemned the group’s violent tactics, as well as its focus on imposing a locally outlandish brand of Islam. Still, it has a real following in the country’s impoverished northeast. “Ninety-five percent of our youth in Borno have a connection to them,” Biye Peter Gumtha, a national assembly member from the region, recently told German radio. “Young men without prospects are open to radical offers.”