Word: group
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...expert on the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. "There exists a socioeconomic and political atmosphere in the north [of Nigeria] that has created such kinds of conditions for these kinds of things." Sani says the phenomenon can be traced back five years to the country's northeast, when a group of young Muslims from a wealthy background launched what became known as Nigeria's Taliban movement, also known as Boko Haram. "These young men were not children of the poor," he says. "They came from privileged homes, they came from powerful homes, they came from homes of people that were holding...
...July, the heavily armed Nigerian Taliban were subdued by government troops near the northeastern border with Cameroon, in a clash that left more than 800 dead. The next month, during her visit to Nigeria, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speculated publicly on the group's links with al-Qaeda. Nigeria denies that al-Qaeda has an active presence in its territory...
...claim of responsibility was a haughty cackle, even if the operation it reveled in had ended in failure. In an Internet post* on Dec. 28, 2009, the group al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula declared that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's alleged attempt to blow up Northwest Flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas had demonstrated the "frailty" of American intelligence, "making all they have spent upon security technologies a waste to them." In an additional shout-out, it praised "the hero mujahid [Major] Nidal Hasan," the accused perpetrator of the Fort Hood, Texas, massacre, as an exemplar of the mission...
...Detroit incident, the group claimed, was retaliation for U.S. military-assisted attacks on "the noble Yemenite tribes in Abyan and Arhab, and finally in Sibwa" in which "scores of Muslim women and children, and families in their entirety" were killed - assaults that took place in the preceding week. Under pressure in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, al-Qaeda began turning the lawless mountain areas of Yemen into a new staging area. That staging area is now sending more and more violent probes out into the world...
Meanwhile, analysts say Yemen has been slow to confront the al-Qaeda threat with the gusto that the U.S. has been pushing for, in large part because going after the Islamist group hasn't always been in the government's best interests. Indeed, some experts say that al-Qaeda seeks not to overthrow the government but only to establish a base in Yemen - a link between the Horn of Africa and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula - and that so long as Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh leaves al-Qaeda alone, they'll do the same...