A little over a week after a video of elusive Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau, surfaced in which he said “the end has come”, suggesting the terrorist group, responsible for the death of over 20,000 and displacement of over 2 million people in the northeast, was ready to surrender, a new video released on Friday, suggested otherwise.
A frail-looking Shekau, who was not seen or heard from in over a year, in the unverified video released late last month, said his time in charge of the terrorist organization may be coming to an end.
While the video message was received by Nigerians with mixed feelings, the military authorities urged the citizenry to disregard the message and remain vigilant even as it vowed to sustain the tempo of the war against insurgency
However, in Friday’s message, Boko Haram maintained it was a potent fighting force, with fighters posing with AK-47s in front of Toyota Hilux pick-up trucks and a lorry mounted with a military cannon.
“You should know that there is no truce, there is no negotiations, there is no surrender”, an unidentified masked man wearing camouflage said in a prepared script in Hausa, in the video posted on YouTube.
“This war between us will not stop”, he vowed.
The video, which quality was better than Shekau’s and included Arabic subtitles, featured nine masked Boko Haram fighters standing on sandy ground in an undisclosed desert location.
It was not clear if Shekau was one of the masked people in the video but the masked man, who read the prepared script, said the Boko Haram leader was still the head of the “West African wing” of the Islamic State (IS).
He also likened Boko Haram to the Islamist insurgencies in Iraq, Libya and Syria.
