Boko Haram leader fatally wounded — Nigerian military

Abubakar Shekau sustained serious injuries when the air force raided a Boko Haram camp in the north-eastern village of Taye, situated in the Sambisa forest of Borno State, army spokesman Sani Usman said in a statement.

But the context surrounding Shekau has shifted this time, however.

However, Usman was silent on whether or not the affected Boko Haram leaders were among those on the 100 most wanted list of the group released by the military.

He noted that the Nigerian Armed Forces are well known for their contributions to peace support operations worldwide and have contributed tremendously to world and regional peace. He was a theology student and is fluent in his native Kanuri language, as well as Hausa and Arabic, and appears to understand English too.

“One of our tasks, one of our central tasks and nearly every single religious leader I just heard in the other room talked about this task, has to be to remove the vulnerabilities in our own position”.

The jihadist group Boko Haram, whose name translates roughly to “Western education is forbidden”, was founded in 2002 by Mohammed Yusuf. Buhari promised to dismantle Boko Haram within a year; although he hasn’t done so, military pressure on the terrorist group has increased and its territory has shrunk.

The jihadist group has claimed more than 20,000 deaths, displaced 2.6 million people from their homes, and kidnapped thousands of children since it started fighting in 2009 for an independent Islamist state in Nigeria.

THE leader of Boko Haram has been killed in the “most unprecedented and spectacular” airstrike, according to Nigerian military. He formally pledged allegiance to ISIS’s self-styled caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in March 2015, and gave ISIS its first franchise in sub-Saharan Africa.

A fracturing Boko Haram isn’t good news for the 218 mostly Christian schoolgirls who have been held captive since 2014.

“Some of the girls are crippled, some are terribly sick and some of them, as I had said, died during bombardment by the Nigerian military”, said a camouflaged fighter in an August video message, standing in front of some the imprisoned girls.

It remains unclear how the military arrived at the high death toll.

The video, which portrays about 50 girls, may be a way to remind the world that even though Shekau doesn’t have foreign backing, he still controls the girls and can not be ignored.

An army spokesman told the BBC’s Hausa service that Abubakar Shekau’s shoulder was badly injured in the strike on Friday in north-eastern Borno state.

If true, the army’s announcement signals an end to a long chase.

Early this month, the Islamic State issued a statement saying it was naming a leader for what it described as its West African operations.