Nigeria’s president Goodluck Jonathan says Boko Haram militants have been receiving training from ISIS.
However president Jonathan did not mention the countries where the militants have been training. He told VOA that for a long time he has been suspecting the group for having alliances with international extremist groups.
He further stated that:’We know the links are there. But even now, we may not know the degree of linkages as to how much funds are coming in from them, the kind of volume of weapons coming in from them, the nationalities coming from them.’
Nigeria has been battling the Islamic militants whose main base in North East since 2009. The group has been indiscriminately killing citizens regardless of their faith and it has also displaced thousands of people with most being left homeless.
The groups tactics involve suicide bombings, take people hostage and torching villages of people suspected not to support the fighters. Last yar Boko Haram took hostage 200 hundred school girls who have yet to be rescued by the government.
President Jonathan is running for re-election on March 28 in what is expected to be the most competitive vote since Nigeria returned to democracy in 1999. Election officials postponed the vote from its original date in mid-February because the military said it couldn’t provide enough troops to guard the polls.
Since then, Nigerian soldiers along with troops from neighboring Chad, Cameroon and Niger have pushed Boko Haram out of many towns and villages they occupied in the country’s northeast.
