SHEHU of Borno, Abubakar El-Kanemi, has revealed that foreigners are behind the Boko Haram insurgency that has ravaged the North Eastern part of the country for years on end.
The traditional ruler, made the revelation at a town hall meeting organised by Yateem Faqeer Global Foundation in Abuja on Thursday.
He said the foreigners penetrated terrorism in the Northeast region in the guise of seeking to acquire Quranic education
According to him, “Borno has witnessed so many things, both good and bad. Boko Haram is something meaningless, mindless and without any sense of direction as none of the Holy Books, either Quran or the Bible, indicates that you show disrespect to others, burn and destroy their property. And I want people to know that Boko Haram was never initiated or started by people of the North-East Zone. It is something they just brought to us from nowhere.
“Boko Haram insurgents came to Borno and the North-East in the guise of acquiring Quranic education while not many did not know they had an ideology which was polluted as well as promoted into the minds of the youths, and created havoc in our area.”
For his part, former Chief of Army Staff, General Alwali Kazir (retd) dismissed insinuations that the bandits and other armed criminal gangs operating in the Northwest and other parts of the country were the offshoots of Boko Haram insurgents in the North East, insisting that apparent ideological differences separated them.
Nevertheless, he recommended both kinetic and non-kinetic approaches as panacea to Nigeria’s insecurity.