Obama's Libya screw up haunts Nigeria, Niger

Washington Post:

The Islamist insurgency in northern Nigeria has entered a more violent phase as militants return to the fight with sophisticated weapons and tactics learned on the battlefields of nearby Mali, Nigerian officials and analysts say.

Hundreds of people have died this year in bombings, shootings and clashes with security forces in this vast region of the country, where the militant group Boko Haram seeks to overthrow the government and install an ultraconservative brand of Islam.

The militants, who traveled to northern Mali last year to the fight there, have returned with heavy weapons from Libya, presumably from former Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi’s arsenal. Malian militants also used weapons smuggled in from Libya to seize northern Mali last year.

The group and an even more radical splinter faction known as Ansaru are also kidnapping Westerners and killing anyone they deem a threat — tactics used by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the terror network’s West and North Africa affiliate, which helped overrun northern Mali last year.

“The Boko Haram’s level of audacity was high in the last three or four months. It was exactly after the attacks in Mali,” said a senior local government official who spoke on the condition that his name not be used because he is not allowed to comment on security matters. “They were never as audacious as they suddenly became.”

The stepped-up violence is the latest sign that the conflict in northern Mali is spilling into neighboring countries as Islamist militancy spreads across the region.

Last week, suicide bombers in Niger targeted an army barracks and a French-operated uranium mine, killing 26 people and injuring dozens more. Both AQIM and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, an al-Qaeda spinoff in northern Mali, asserted responsibility, saying the attacks were revenge for a four-month-old French-led military intervention in Mali.
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The failure to secure or destroy Libya's weapon stockpiles has turned into a disaster for North African countries as the al Qaeda affiliated groups spread mass murder and mayhem throughout the region.   This was entirely predictable, but the Obama. Hillary clinton strategy precluded dealing with the issue and exacerbated it.