Shekau: Group says no surrender yet

About a week after Boko Haram’s most wanted leader, Abubakar Shekau appeared to say farewell to his doomed struggle to establish a Caliphate in Nigeria, the group has come out with a new video, repudiating the impression he gave.

In a  video Friday released today, a masked spokesman of the group denied  any suggestion it might surrender. It maintained it was a potent fighting force, with men holding AK-47s posing in front of Toyota Hilux pick-up trucks and a lorry mounted with a military cannon.

“You should know that there is no truce, there is no negotiations, there is no surrender,” an unidentified masked man in camouflage said in a prepared script in Hausa, the dominant language in the north, in the video posted on YouTube.

“This war between us will not stop.”

The video, of markedly better quality than Shekau’s and including Arabic subtitles, featured nine masked Boko Haram fighters standing on sandy ground in an undisclosed desert location.

Shekau was still the head of the “West African wing”, said the masked speaker, likening Boko Haram to the Islamist insurgencies in Iraq, Libya and Syria.

In March 2015, Boko Haram pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group, another deadly terror organisation.

But there were few signs that Boko Haram — now styled as Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP) — has drawn benefits from the partnership.

Since then Nigeria’s army has won back swathes of territory from the militants, liberating thousands of people who had been living under Boko Haram control.

*with reports by Mail Online