Nigeria’s Chief of Defence Staff, General Lucky Irabor, has said that the leader of the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), Abu Musab al-Barnawi, is dead.
Speaking at the weekly briefing organised by the Presidential Communications Team at the Presidential Villa in Abuja on Thursday, General Irabor said: “I can authoritatively confirm to you that Abu Musab is dead. As simple as that. He is dead and remains dead.”
He did not state how and when al-Barnawi died.
The leadership of the late jihadist leader made ISWAP a dominant insurgent group after it seized power from the late Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau.
Citing multiple accounts APA reported in September that al-Barnawi may have been killed during a gun battle with a rival faction in Borno State a month earlier.
One report at the time suggested that the ISWAP warlord died toward the end of August but the Nigerian government was tight-lipped about the issue.
The Nigerian military is still fighting a determined 12-year Islamist insurgency in the northeast which has killed thousands and displaced over three million people.
Although the Nigerian defence chief did not state how al-Barnawi had died, it has been suggested he was killed in a skirmish with rival factions within ISWAP.
Reports of al-Barnawi’s death came just weeks after the reported death of his former Boko Haram boss Abubakar Shekau, reportedly killed by an ISWAP militia.
al-Barnawi was the son of late Boko Haram founder Mohammed Yusuf who died in the custody of the Nigerian police shortly after his capture in 2009.
The current insurgency in northern Nigeria by the militant sect began that year.
The ISWAP leader has been on the Nigerian government’s list of most wanted terrorists thanks to his notoriety for being ruthless during raids and ambushes against operatives of the state security services.
For several years most of his activities were centred around the Lake Chad region.
Aside from infiltrating and destroying Nigerian military camps in Borno, his ISWAP took the fight to neighbouring Yobe State and extended it beyond Nigeria, to Chad and Niger.
al-Barnawi was to succeed his father as leader of Boko Haram but eventually got involved in a bitter power struggle with Shekau for the soul of the organisation in 2016.
Shortly afterwards, the Islamic State (IS) confirmed him as their favoured leader in Boko Haram which became their affiliate that same year.
As ISWAP leader, al-Barnawi was reputed to have won and maintained the loyalty of Boko Haram fighters who had joined the organisation when his father led the group.
According to some unconfirmed reports he had been prepared for the ISWAP role by receiving training from ISIS before he became its leader.
One report says he benefitted from regular financial cash incentives from ISIS but also addressed deficits by taxing local populations and engaging in fisheries activities in the areas under ISWAP control in Borno.
If another version of how Al-Bernawi met his end is anything to go by, he was ambushed along with five other ISWAP senior commanders by Nigerian soldiers in Bula Yobe, a community near Borno State’s border with Yobe.
However, the other version says he died in a leadership crisis within ISWAP that degenerated to full scale armed hostility with a faction that originated from Central Africa.
Many believed that the Nigerian government was understandably reticent about al-Barnawi’s death thanks to its sensitivity as a national security issue with regional implications.
The Director, Defence Information, Maj.-Gen. Benjamin Sawyer was quoted at the time as saying “if ISWAP or BHTs are fighting among themselves, it is the media that always gives the entire nation the information. It is not us, because we are not in their camps”.
GIK/APA