{"id":23476,"date":"2019-12-28T15:41:12","date_gmt":"2019-12-28T14:41:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/?p=23476"},"modified":"2019-12-28T15:41:12","modified_gmt":"2019-12-28T14:41:12","slug":"isis-affiliate-in-nigeria-releases-a-video-showing-11-executions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/?p=23476","title":{"rendered":"ISIS Affiliate in Nigeria Releases a Video Showing 11 Executions"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Ruth Maclean\u00a0and\u00a0Eric Schmitt<\/strong>
\nAn affiliate of the Islamic State in Nigeria has claimed responsibility for the execution of 11 people, saying the killings were in retaliation for the death of the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria in October.
\nA video released on Thursday showed members of the Nigerian affiliate slashing the throats of 10 people and shooting an additional person. A voice-over says the killings are a \u201cmessage for Christians\u201d and that all of those killed were Christian, although Nigerian experts said some of them were probably Muslims, based on previous episodes involving the group.
\nThe Islamic State, or ISIS, has\u00a0lost all of the territory\u00a0it once held in Iraq and Syria, but it remains a threat even after Mr. al-Baghdadi was\u00a0killed\u00a0in an American raid on his hide-out in northwestern Syria. In addition to the affiliate in Nigeria, which is known as the Islamic State West Africa Province, groups in\u00a0the Philippines,\u00a0Afghanistan,\u00a0Sinai\u00a0and\u00a0the Sahel, a 3,000-mile stretch of land south of the Sahara, also claim allegiance to ISIS.
\nThe members of the Islamic State West Africa Province, which is known by the acronym ISWAP, left the Islamic militant group Boko Haram in 2016.\u00a0According to\u00a0the International Crisis Group, it has between 3,500 and 5,000 fighters. Its leaders split from Boko Haram in part because they disapproved of the violence that the group and its\u00a0harsh leader, Abubakar Shekau, has meted out to Muslims, according to analysts.
\nThe executions could herald a possible return to the harsher methods of Boko Haram, according to experts.
\nAbdulbasit Kassim, a co-author of \u201cThe Boko Haram Reader: From Nigerian Preachers to the Islamic State,\u201d said that other Islamic State provinces had released videos of revenge for the killing of Mr. al-Baghdadi. Mr. Kassim said there was a strong possibility that ISWAP was under pressure to do the same.
\n\u201cI think there\u2019s a demand from IS Central: \u2018ISWAP, where is your submission for revenge for Baghdadi?\u2019\u201d said Mr. Kassim, referring to the main body of the Islamic State. He added that he believed ISWAP was making two types of propaganda, one aimed at obtaining ransoms from the Nigerian government, and one to satisfy Islamic State demands.
\nThe video was released to Ahmad Salkida, a Nigerian journalist who often publishes information about both ISWAP and Boko Haram.\u00a0According to Mr. Salkida, ISWAP had shown interest in negotiating a prisoner swap, but abruptly changed course and executed the prisoners instead.
\nThe 56-second video shows the captives, who were blindfolded and wearing orange tunics, kneeling on the ground, their captors standing behind them in black balaclavas.
\nA fighter in the middle lifts a handgun and shoots the prisoner in front of him in the head. The video then cuts to the fighters standing behind the other 10 prisoners. Holding each captive by the face or hair, the fighters slit their throats.
\nIn the version of the video seen by The New York Times, which was published on\u00a0Amaq, an ISIS propaganda arm, a man speaks over the recording.
\n\u201cThis message is to the Christians in the world,\u201d he says in both Arabic and Hausa, a Nigerian language, according to the Washington-based\u00a0SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks jihadists and white supremacists. \u201cThose who you see in front of us are Christians, and we will shed their blood as revenge for the two dignified sheikhs, the caliph of the Muslims, and the spokesman for the Islamic State, Sheikh Abu al-Hassan al-Muhajir, may Allah accept them.\u201d
\nA day after the death of Mr. Baghdadi, considered the caliph by his followers, the man thought likely to be his successor, Mr. al-Muhajir, the group\u2019s spokesman,\u00a0was killed in a separate raid.
\nAaron Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said he thought that \u201cI.S. is trying to grab headlines during the holidays when usually there isn\u2019t much news.\u201d
\nThe State Department condemned the attacks. \u201cWe are appalled by the vicious ISIS-West Africa attack targeting Christians in Nigeria,\u201d Tibor Nagy, the State Department\u2019s top Africa policy official, said in a Twitter message.
\nPresident Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria said in a statement, \u201cThese barbaric killers don\u2019t represent Islam and millions of other law-abiding Muslims around the world.\u201d
\nThere has been an upsurge in violence in northeast Nigeria over the past year, and particularly in the last six months, contributing to a deteriorating humanitarian situation there, with armed groups setting up checkpoints to target and abduct civilians, the United Nation\u2019s humanitarian coordinator in Nigeria, Antonio Canhandula, said this week.
\nIn Burkina Faso, another West African country plagued by groups of armed militants, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for an attack on Tuesday that killed seven soldiers that it said ISWAP fighters had carried out.
\nTens of thousands of civilians, the majority of them Muslim, have been killed by both Islamist militants and Nigerian security forces in three northeastern states of Nigeria since 2009.
\nBy New York Times<\/strong>
\nRuth Maclean reported from Dakar and Eric Schmitt from New York.<\/strong>
\nEric Schmitt is a senior writer who has traveled the world covering terrorism and national security. He was also the Pentagon correspondent. A member of the Times staff since 1983, he has shared three Pulitzer Prizes.\u00a0@EricSchmittNYT<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Ruth Maclean\u00a0and\u00a0Eric Schmitt An affiliate of the Islamic State in Nigeria has claimed responsibility for the execution of 11 people, saying the killings were in retaliation for the death of the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria in October. A video released on Thursday showed members of the Nigerian affiliate slashing the throats of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":20982,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[614,473,615],"class_list":["post-23476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-executions","tag-iswap","tag-retaliation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23476\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}