Nigeria has been declared a new haven for jihadists belonging to Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) whose leaders were on Monday accused of sneaking armed jihadists from Syria into Nigeria to train terrorists to launch attacks in Britain.
According to a report by the UK based Sun, strong leads have been established that the ISIS which has a strong romance with Boko Haram insurgents in Nigeria, had capitalized on the relationship to infiltrate Nigeria with jihadists.
Before the report was published, the Federal Government had claimed that the milita herdsmen behind recent killings in Nigeria were foreigners.
Even President Muhammadu Buhari had during one of his foreign trips said that the killer-herdsmen were being trained and deployed in Nigeria from Libya after the demise of the country’s former dictator, Muammar Gaddafi.
The British newspaper’s report that Boko Haram insurgents were also being sent to the Middle East for training in a chilling ‘exchange programme’ has added another dimension to the claim about the presence of foreign terrorists in the country.
The report said there were fears that the strong links between Nigeria and the United Kingdom would make it easier for the ISIS to send its killers to Britain to launch terror attacks.
The news medium claimed that over 150 British troops were undertaking counter-terrorism training with Nigerian forces in an attempt to stem the bloody tide and stop ISIS from having a grip on the West African sub-region.
According to the report, at one of such training missions in Kaduna, a senior Nigerian Air Force (NAF) Commander, Group Captain Isaac Subi explained how local terror groups were learning from IS after swearing allegiance to its black flag.
The 46-year-old Subi, who has been fighting terrorism across Africa since 1991, said: “They come and train their fighters here and some of our insurgents too are granted access to their training in Yemen and Syria, acquiring those skills and they come back and teach others”.
The report further cited the stabbing to death of Fusilier Lee Rigby in 2013 in London by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, both of Nigerian descent as a pointer to the fact that the poisonous influence of the fighters had already ended in horrific attacks on British soil.
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