Hundreds of Boko Haram members stayed
at training camps with Malian militants for months in Timbuktu, learning
to fix Kalashnikovs and launch shoulder-fired weapons, a report has
said.
The Nigerians fled the city into the
desert, along with the other militants, days before a French airstrike
on January 20, American newspaper Wall Street Journal reported.
A man who said he was hired to cook
for the militants said the Boko Haram members trained for about 10
months at what is now a bombed-out customs-police building on Timbuktu’s
desert fringe, intermingling with a local al Qaeda offshoot called
Ansar Dine.
“Every day I saw people coming here,
saying they want to sign up,” said the man, whose description of the
militants’ activities matched those offered by four neighbours.
The Wall Street Journal quoted locals
as saying that until just a few weeks ago, the bombed-out customs-police
building in Timbuktu was one of bustling training centers populated not
only by local al Qaeda-linked militants but also by hundreds of Boko
Haram members.
Well over 200 Nigerians arrived in
Timbuktu in April 2012 in about 300 cars, the cook said, after al Qaeda
in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) swept into the city.
Residents said about 50 Boko Haram
militants lived and trained at the customs building, and 50 more lived
in an annex across a giant sandy lot, while others took up in other
abandoned government buildings.
The presence of Nigerian trainees in
Mali confirms statements earlier made by authorities that some Boko
Haram fighters trained in Mali.
Last year, a senior security chief
gave a briefing in which he said Nigeria was going to Mali primarily to
uproot the Boko Haram training facilities.
Also, Chief of Army Staff Lt-General
Azubuike Ihejirika said last month that Boko Haram received training in
Mali, making it imperative for Nigerian troops to join the international
campaign to free northern Mali from militants.
Running a war college
The Wall Street Journal report quoted
neighbours as saying that in Timbuktu, AQIM ran a sophisticated war
college from several abandoned buildings. Judging by locals’ accounts of
the training, this was where Boko Haram militants gained skills to
allow them to expand beyond their typical quick-hit bomb strikes.
On dunes just west of the customs
house, Boko Haram fighters fired shoulder-fired arms, the cook and four
neighbors said—though it couldn’t be determined if they were describing
sophisticated rockets or more rudimentary mortars. In its Nigeria
attacks, Boko Haram appears not to have used shoulder-mounted weapons.
Within a week of the foreign
militants’ arrival, the al Qaeda-backed groups began offering jobs to
locals. A gunman came to the cook’s door, looking for someone fluent in
the Hausa language—which the cook had learned in Kumasi, a trading town
in Ghana with a large Hausa population. They paid him about N3,000 a
day, he said, to cook for Ansar Dine and Boko Haram.
A restaurateur said he sometimes
brought tubs of couscous and spaghetti to the training camp, but said
the Boko Haram fighters didn’t extend much courtesy to locals. “They are
extremely rude,” said the restaurateur, adding: “They pay whatever
price you want.”
On a typical day, after rising before
dawn to pray and read the Quran, the militants ran five laps around the
sand-choked lot, the size of several football fields, said the cook and
neighbors who witnessed the exercises. After push-ups in the sand, the
militants ate a breakfast of bread and powdered milk.
They then met with specialists, the
cook said. He described an arms specialist from Pakistan, who he said
taught Boko Haram and Ansar Dine members how to break apart and
reassemble assault rifles, over and over again. There was a computer
specialist who appeared, to the cook, to be mostly occupied making
fliers extolling the fundamentalist cause. A heavy arms specialist who
the cook said was from
Afghanistan told militants how to breathe steadily when firing a shoulder-mounted rocket.
“Swear to God, every day, new people,
they come,” said Moulhar Arby, a girl in the earthen-wall house next
door to the customs office. “Nobody knows how they come here.”
Commanders from Boko Haram and Ansar
Dine gave newcomers 4,000 West African CFA, the local equivalent of
N1,250, to enlist, the cook said. After training, he said, recruits were
given about N4,700—their first taste of money following months of
sharing bathrooms with scores of militants.
Days before the French bomb hollowed
out the customs building, the Nigerians sneaked away, neighbors said.
Every night, a few came back to toggle the lights, these people said,
presumably to convey to surveillance planes above that Boko Haram was
still in Timbuktu, the report said.
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