Boko Haram’s shadowy leader Abubakar Shekau has appeared in a new video vowing to fight on, shrugging off an apparent split in the hardline jihadist group blamed for thousands of deaths since 2009.
“I… Abubakar Ash-Shakawy (Shekau), the leader of Jama’atu Ahlissunnah Lidda’awati Wal Jihad, made it a duty for myself (to fight) Nigeria and the whole world,” Shekau said in the video released on Sunday, using the group’s name since it declared allegiance to the so-called Islamic State.
Last week, Shekau said in an audio message he was still head of the group despite his purported replacement by Sheikh Abu Musab al-Barnawi, a former Boko Haram spokesman.
“We have no desire to fight our Muslim brethren,” Shekau, who last appeared in March, said in the 24-minute video.
Shekau ridiculed suggestions that he was dead, and looked more composed and energetic than in previous appearances.
“I’m alive by the permission of Allah,” he said in his speech in Arabic and Hausa, adding that he would only die when his time came.
In the video he is wearing camouflage gear and holding a machine gun, standing between two Islamist fighters in balaclavas armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
He taunted President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration and condemned Western countries including the United States, France, Germany and “the tyrants of the United Nonsense (UN)”.
At the end of his speech – apparently filmed in Boko Haram’s stronghold in the Sambisa forest of northeastern Nigeria – he fired off rounds of ammunition into the air.