Last month, Boko Haram leader Sheikh Abubakar Shekau appeared in a video in which he appeared to be suggesting that he was prepared to surrender. In the recording, he urged his fighters to lay down their arms to save themselves from death and indicated that his time as the head of the group might be coming to an end.
In that March video Sheikh Shekau appeared thin and spiritless, delivering his message without his usual fiery manner. This had prompted speculation from the Nigerian Army that the Islamist group was on the verge of collapse in the face of a sustained military counter-insurgency.
However, in a video posted on YouTube yesterday, which showed men holding AK-47s and posing in front of Toyota Hilux pick-up trucks and a lorry mounted with a military cannon, Boko Haram maintained that it was still a potent fighting force and would not surrender. A masked man in camouflage said in a prepared script in Hausa that there would be no surrender.
He added: “You should know that there is no truce, there are no negotiations, there is no surrender. This war between us will not stop and Shekau is still the head of the West African wing."
This latest video, of markedly better quality than Sheikh Shekau’s and including Arabic subtitles, featured nine masked Boko Haram fighters standing on sandy ground in an undisclosed desert location. It is, however, unclear whether Sheikh Shekau was among the masked people in the video.
In the latest video, the masked fighter likened Boko Haram to the Islamist insurgents in Iraq, Libya and Syria. Boko Haram, which has killed over 20,000 people and displaced more than 2m people from their homes, had pledged allegiance to Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in March 2015.
Ryan Cummings, an Africa security specialist, said: “The new video appears to confirm collaboration between Boko Haram and the Islamic State group. The production quality bears the hallmarks of the Islamic State’s media wing.”
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