By Felix Onuah and Estelle Shirbon
ABUJA (Reuters) – Nigeria’s top general said on Thursday that Abu Musab al-Barnawi, leader of the insurgent group Islamic State of West Africa, is dead.
The Islamic State of West Africa is a derivative of the insurgent group Boko Haram, which has been fighting the Nigerian Armed Forces for 12 years. Later, the two militant factions turned against each other.
The conflict between insurgents and the Nigerian Armed Forces, which is also spreading to neighboring Chad and Cameroon, has already left some 300,000 people dead and millions dependent on aid.
“I can confidently confirm to you that Abu Musab is dead,” Lucky Irabor, the head of the Defense cabinet, told reporters in the presidential village of Abuja, without going into details.
Vincent Foucher, an expert on insurgent groups at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, said sources told him that Al-Barnawi was wounded in August during a clash with Boko Haram fighters and later died, possibly in September.
He said that while it is difficult to get concrete information, the report of al-Barnawi’s death seemed plausible because the Islamic State of West Africa issued a series of lengthy audio recordings in May and June but was completely silent from August onwards.
Al-Barnawi was the third leader of an Islamic insurgent group in West Africa to die this year. Besides him, Abubakar Shekau, from Boko Haram, in May, and Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahrawi, from the Islamic State of the Great Sahara, in August, also died.
(By Felix Onuah, Abuja, and Estelle Shirbon, London)
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