Explosion at Nigerian illegal oil refinery kills more than 100

More than 100 people were killed overnight in an explosion at an illegal oil refining depot in Nigeria’s Rivers state, a local government official and an environmental group said.

“The fire outbreak occurred at an illegal bunkering site and it affected more than 100 people who were burned beyond recognition,” the state commissioner for petroleum resources, Goodluck Opiah, said on Saturday.

Unemployment and poverty in the oil-producing Niger Delta have made illegal crude refining an attractive business but with deadly consequences. Crude oil is tapped from a web of pipelines owned by major oil companies and refined into products in makeshift tanks.

The hazardous process has led to many fatal accidents and has polluted a region already blighted by oil spills in farmland, creeks and lagoons.

The Youths and Environmental Advocacy Centre said several vehicles that were in a queue to buy illegal fuel were burned in the explosion.

Al Jazeera’s Fidelis Mbah said that there are dozens of illegal oil businesses scattered around southern Nigeria.

“The unemployed youth are trying to produce oil on their own in order to sell to survive,” he said, speaking from Abuja. “The youths know that this is dangerous but because of the poverty levels, they have taken to [working in] illegal refineries.”

“The government said the owner of the illegal refinery is presently on the run and they have declared him wanted,” Mbah added. “They’re hoping that if he’s apprehended, they will find out exactly what happened.”

At least 25 people, including some children, were killed in an explosion and fire at another illegal refinery in Rivers state in October.

In February, local authorities said they had started a crackdown to try to put a stop to the refining of stolen crude, but with little apparent success.

Government officials estimate that Nigeria, Africa’s biggest oil producer and exporter, loses an average of 200,000 barrels per day of oil – more than 10 percent of production – to those tapping or vandalising pipelines.

That has forced oil companies to regularly declare force majeure on oil and gas exports.

Al Jazeera

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More than 160 passengers still missing from train attacked in Nigeria

More than 160 passengers who were on a train that was attacked in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna last month remain missing or unaccounted for, as details of possible collaboration between Boko Haram jihadists and local bandits have emerged.

Ten people were killed, two in the weeks since the attack on 28 March, when gunmen bombed the rail tracks, derailing the train before gunning down passengers and train staff, and abducting scores of people.


The Nigerian Railway Corporation that runs the train service said earlier this month that 168 people were unaccounted for, including over 140 passengers it had not been able to reach through registered contacts. At least one person has paid a ransom and been released. A relative of two of the victims said families were not aware of any other freed captives by the assailants.


On Thursday, a spokesperson said that while there had not been an update on the number of passengers missing in two weeks – to the anguish of relatives – new information would be announced soon.

The attack was just one of many by armed groups targeting major transport links and communities across northern Nigeria in recent years and was the most significant targeting the train line between Abuja and a major city in northern Nigeria since it began operating in 2016.

The rail attack, like many incidents in the region, was initially suspected to be carried out by one of the so-called “bandit” terror groups, possibly by mainly ethnic Fulani gunmen who have launched deadly attacks from hideouts in a forested expanse stretching across northwest Nigeria and into the Sahel. The groups, some heavily armed and coordinated, have grown more deadly than jihadist groups. They emerged from a worsening conflict with farmers over encroachments on private farmland by pastoralists and disputes over land. Population growth, rural development and the climate crisis have fuelled a scarcity of land to graze cattle for herders, as historic grazing routes have vanished.

But in recent weeks, government officials and security experts have raised alarm at the involvement of jihadist groups, thought to be increasingly active in north west and central Nigeria. The region has become a nexus for several armed groups and an escape for jihadists facing more intense pressure from the Nigerian army in the northeast, but where insurgency continues to devastate lives.

On Thursday, Islamic State West Africa Province (Iswap), claimed responsibility for an explosion that it said killed or injured 30 people at a market where alcohol was sold in the eastern state of Taraba State, marking an expansion of the area where the extremist group has operated in.


Local government officials have said terror units, aligned with Boko Haram or Iswap are controlling rural communities as far south as Niger state, neighbouring the capital Abuja.

Nigeria’s minister of information and culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, said last week that what was happening, “is a kind of an unholy handshake between bandits and Boko Haram insurgents”.

“Preliminary reports of what transpired at the Kaduna train attacks showed that there is a kind of collaboration between the bandits and the dislodged Boko Haram terrorists from the northeast. I can tell you very confidently that the federal government is on top of this matter,” he said.

Earlier this month, an unverified video circulating on social media appeared to show the attackers and dozens of abducted victims, some put forward to plead with the government for their lives. In the video, the assailants spoke in Hausa, saying the government knew their demands.

Yusuf Anka, a researcher based in Zamfara, northwest Nigeria said Ansaru – a Boko Haram unit in the region – had collaborated with bandits to stage the attack on the train, and that the group was seeking the release of their members detained by Nigerian authorities. “If their demands are met, and the prisoners are freed, it will be the first successful negotiation in the northwest for these jihadist elements.”

To ordinary people, attacks by bandits or jihadists were increasingly indistinguishable, he said. While in some areas jihadists have clashed with bandits, in some cases, they were working together. “There are also times where you will see cooperation between them, when attacking government institutions, especially the military or in attacks for financial motives,” Anka said.

Attempts by jihadist groups to rally bandits to their cause had largely failed, with jihadists often positioning themselves to local communities as guardians, offering protection, alternative governance and Sharia law in communities where bandits were intent on attacking.


Meanwhile, survivors and relatives of victims of the train attack have continued to express anguish.

One railway worker hid in the toilet along with two other employees when the train derailed, praying quietly, trying not to cry or make a sound as gunmen began shooting passengers on carriages.

“I’m still experiencing the trauma. I even had to move from Kaduna because I couldn’t sleep there anymore,” said the worker, who asked not to be named.


Four rail staff, friends of his, had been kidnapped, he said. Their relatives were desperately trying to raise ransom funds for their release, after almost a month in captivity.

In Abuja, over the last few weeks, a group made up of families of the kidnapped victims has held press conferences and marches, pleading with the government to help.

“There’s a seven-month pregnant woman, who only gives birth through cesarean section, only God knows what she’s going through … There’s a toddler who is twoyearsold for God’s sake,” a relative said, fighting back tears while others wept around him.

Many of the now frequent mass abductions and killings in Nigeria do not draw an official response from the federal government. When they do, such as after the train attack, President Muhammadu Buhari, pledged again to bring the attackers to justice.

Yet, relatives of victims have bemoaned that the government and security agencies rarely communicate updates and the government has maintained it does not pay ransoms. Families lament that even after victims negotiate directly with militants, security agencies do not collect information about the assailants from the families or the rescued abductees.

By Emmanuel Akinwotu and Alex Uangbaoje

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Twenty burnt to death in Nigeria road accident

Twenty people, including children, were burnt to death after a public mini-bus collided with a car on a highway in northern Nigeria, the road safety agency said on Tuesday.

"The accident was caused by a speed violation. A driver was injured, 20 were killed and burnt to ashes," the Bauchi state command of the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) said in a statement.

In Africa's most populous nation, many roads are poorly maintained and riven with potholes, leading to accidents that claim dozens of lives every year.

Reporting by Ardo Hazzad, Editing by MacDonald Dzirutwe and Sandra Maler

Reuters  

Are Nigeria’s bandits a new Boko Haram cell or rival ‘terrorists’?

On December 11, 2020, more than 300 boys were abducted from a boarding school in Kankara, a small community in the northwestern Nigerian state of Katsina by gunmen on motorcycles.

The incident fit Boko Haram’s modus operandi, and the group’s leader Abubakar Shekau claimed responsibility for the attack in an audio message, before releasing a video of the kidnapped children.

This further lent credence to the assumption by Nigerian politicians and pundits that the group which has waged war in the northeast for more than a decade, was the orchestrator of the brazen attack.

Within a month, the victims were released.

But in March 2021, Auwalun Daudawa, a notorious kingpin of one of the gangs responsible for abduction sprees in the northwest, claimed responsibility for Kankara. “I did that in Katsina because the governor [Aminu Masari] came out to say he will not dialogue again with our people,” he told the local Daily Trust newspaper.

According to local media reports, the abduction had been a joint operation by seven different gangs who had sent a video to Shekau asking him to claim responsibility. They knew that the government “feared Boko Haram more than them” and would be willing to meet the demands quickly.

The plan worked. According to the schoolboys, an unspecified amount was paid as ransom within days, even though the government repeatedly denied this.
Mislabelling and underestimation

Since 2010, gangs of bandits have run riot in vast swaths of northwest Nigeria but only in the last few years has the crisis ballooned into national prominence in Africa’s most populous country.

Data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) shows that bandits were responsible for more than 2,600 civilian deaths in 2021 – a lot more than those attributed to Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) in the same year – and almost three times the number in 2020.

But debate has been raging on many details about the bandits, including their capacity to shock the state and whether they were petty criminals or more advanced gangsters. In January 2022, the government proscribed them as “terrorists”.

On March 28, an unknown number of heavily armed men attacked a moving train between Nigeria’s capital Abuja and neighbouring Kaduna state. They detonated an explosive device to stop the train before shooting into the carriages, killing at least eight people and abducting a still unspecified number of passengers.

This happened a couple of days after an attack on an international airport and preceded another attack on a military facility – all in Kaduna.

The train attack was one of the highest-profile attacks to date in northern Nigeria and triggered a debate. But across social media and even in the corridors of power, the episode is being widely attributed, once again, to Boko Haram.

Since the Kankara school kidnapping, Nigerian government officials and public commentators have been quick to assign blame for major bandit operations to “jihadists”.

But experts say this constant mislabelling represents a longstanding underestimation of the northwest armed bandits and the complex dynamics of the region’s evolving conflict.

A close examination of the activities of these groups suggests that they pose a unique and perhaps, even more complex threat than Boko Haram and its factions, including ISWAP.

Key to their increasing notoriety and multiplication is increasingly easy access to sophisticated military-grade weapons, mostly through the many porous borders of West Africa and the wider Sahel.

But the high number of civilian casualties is also due to divergent modus operandi between armed bandits and the so-called jihadists.

For example, ISWAP, arguably still the most influential armed group in Nigeria today, focuses on attacking government forces and installations. Its commanders also tax and govern rural communities rather than terrorise them, said James Barnett, a research fellow at the Institute of African and Diaspora Studies, University of Lagos.

But the bandits comprise dozens of unaffiliated groups often competing for territory or spoils from raids and have no unified chain of command or single objective, complicating state efforts to conclude disarmament deals.

“There is no single leader or group of leaders that the state can negotiate with who has real control over the thousands of armed bandits operating in northern Nigeria,” said Barnett.

Unlike the armed groups operating in northeastern Nigeria, the bandits of the northwest who are also more in number, are mostly driven by economic opportunism and have no clear political ideology, said Fola Aina, a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI), in London.

But the possibility of them adopting one soon – or even synergy between both groups – cannot be ruled out.

Most of the bandits are ethnic Fulani and have grievances stemming from perceived marginalisation in a state of predominantly Hausa people.

Consequently, they are “potential prime targets for manipulation and being co-opted by jihadis operating within the region, who have more clearly defined political objectives and are keen to increase the number of their foot soldiers, following the deaths of many at the hands of Nigerian security forces,” said Aina.
A layered conflict

And now the government may be recognising the signs, too.

After the Abuja-Kaduna train attack, sources within the Nigerian government blamed Boko Haram for these attacks and suggested that armed bandits did not possess the coordination and power to plan such an attack.

But in a recent interview, Nasir El-Rufai, governor of Kaduna, one of the states most affected by the crisis, said the attack bore the hallmarks of a collaboration between armed bandits and Boko Haram elements.

This view was reinforced on April 13 by information minister Lai Mohammed who said there was “an unholy handshake” at play.

Seven nights before the attacks on the airport and the train, a middle-ranking bandit based in Aja in Zamfara forest received a call from a criminal boss in another forest closer to Kaduna.

The former told Al Jazeera that it was an invitation for a job in Kaduna but he turned it down because he “just had a new bride” and wanted to spend time with her and enjoy Ramadan at home.

He implied that the attack in Kaduna was financially motivated and executed by multiple armed bandits from Zamfara, the epicentre of the crisis, alongside a few members of Ansaru – another Boko Haram splinter group.

But it was also “because the military raided a settlement of the armed bandit leader who is the closest friend of Ansaru some weeks ago, killing eight of his men, taking close to 30 motorcycles and recovering 11 rifles,” he told Al Jazeera.

The bandit also said his comrades were willing to let the Ansaru members “take credit to create the Boko Haram impression and make the government more scared but the Fulani there are only interested in the money”.

Beyond reprisals for military operations and air strikes leading to the arrest of some of their own, the bandits are also motivated by vengeance against ethnic Hausa vigilantes who they accuse of killing their wives and children. This has led to attacks against host communities of the vigilantes.

Al Jazeera also learned that there have been multiple efforts by Ansaru to convert the bandits – but a difference in ideologies has frustrated those moves.

From 2019 to 2020, Ansaru members held a series of preaching exercises in towns like Munhaye and Dandallah, both in Zamfara. During these sermons, they directed the bandits to desist from stealing, smoking, drinking, adultery, and to embrace fasting and prayers.

The bandits ignored this, leading to the deaths of five armed bandits and the planting of an explosive that detonated, resulting in the death of a high-profile bandit leader.

This severed relations between several armed bandits and the Ansaru, with the former even giving the latter an ultimatum at some point. This may jeopardise any future collaborations, except for commercial purposes.

A January study published by the United States Military Academy’s Journal of Terrorism Studies, based partly on interviews with armed bandits and “jihadist” defectors, concluded that: “Nigeria’s armed bandits have grown so powerful that they are not in desperate need of cooperation with jihadis, let alone a need to convert to jihadism.”

For the Nigerian government at all tiers, understanding the layered dynamics at play could be useful for any counterinsurgency operations.

By Yusuf Anka

Al Jazeera 

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