DAR AL HARB/ISLAM - NIGERIA: "OLD ISLAMISTS RE-EMERGE AS NEW 'TALIBAN'"

Old Islamists re-emerge as new 'Taliban'
By Dino Mahtani in Lagos

When a small group of attackers emerged from their hideout in Nigeria's main northern city of Kano, they descended on a local police station wearing black bandanas, shooting nine policemen dead and setting fire to vehicles.

As the mayhem unfolded, the military sealed off the neighbourhood of Panshekara, where a heavy gun battle ensued for hours with the Muslim radicals known locally as the "Taliban".

There were, at most, 500 fighters in total, and most probably fled to a nearby forest, according to a military report leaked to the Financial Times after the incident in mid-April. It criticised the police and intelligence services for being "lackadaisical". Twenty-five fighters were killed and Islamic literature was seized by authorities, the report said.

In Panshekara, witnesses heard assailants, who included women carrying grenades in cloth bags, speaking in either the local Hausa dialect or in the Arabic and French, languages -spoken in neighbouring Saharan countries.

The fighters, suspected by some officials to have come from Nigeria's north-east and from Chad on Nigeria's north-east frontier, told local people they meant no harm to civilians but were interested in destroying the Nigerian state because it was un-Islamic.

They also allegedly said they wanted to avenge the murder of a local radical preacher, known to have links with Islamistclerics from Saudi Arabia.

The attack in Kano bolstered a growing perception in official circles that Africa's biggest oil producer, where half the 140m population is estimated to be Muslim, is turning into a terrorist incubator.

In 2003 Osama bin Laden listed Nigeria as among the "most qualified" countries for "liberation" along with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco and Yemen.

Nigeria is currently trying its first al-Qaeda suspect, Mohammed Damagun, a director of a prominent northern newspaper who is accused of using $300,000 (€220,000, £149,000) in -al-Qaeda funds to ferry 17 "Taliban" fighters for training in the Saharan state of Mauritania.

But there are no proven cases of al-Qaeda terrorist attacks in Nigeria. Hardline Islamist groups from the remote north-east of Nigeria have attacked several times in the past decades only to be put down in heavy security crackdowns.

"There has always been a strand of militant Islam in Nigeria which has waxed and waned over the years. But the tendency of these latest groups to self-style themselves 'Taliban' is a bit of a publicity stunt," says Nowa Omoigui, a lecturer at Nigeria's war college.

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1) Old Islamists re-emerge as new 'Taliban'