BIAFRA NEWS: the Ambazonian deputy military leader

 

Fulani fighters, including some who have crossed the border from Nigeria to Cameroon, have been implicated in some of the conflict’s deadliest incidents. In February 2020, armed Fulani men alongside Cameroonian military personnel attacked Ngarbuh village in the Northwest region and killed 21 civilians, including 13 children. This February, in an unprecedented surge of attacks, armed Fulani raided 18 villages in Nwa subdivision, killing at least 17 people and displacing 4,200 local residents.

In Nigeria, Biafrans battle with the Fulani for ethnic and political supremacy. Targeted ethnic violence against the Igbos by Fulani and other northern Nigerian ethnic groups was one of several factors that led to the civil war in the 1960s. Today, pro-Biafra activists use incendiary language, referring to the Fulani as “terrorists,” to incite violence. Across the country, Fulani have been accused of killing thousands of Nigerians amounting to “crimes against humanity and genocidal massacres against Christians,” according to Gregory Stanton of Genocide Watch.

Similar communal violence—often following farmer-grazer and ethnic lines—has flared across Mali, Niger, Chad, and Burkina Faso. In recent years, the death toll from ethnic and intercommunal violence has reached unprecedented levels, even exceeding that of violent extremism and terrorism in Mali, according to  ACLED. Boko Haram, the Islamic State West Africa Province, and other violent extremist groups also exploit these ethnic tensions for their own gain.

The Ambazonia Defense Forces see the Biafra-Ambazonia alliance as a critical outlet to end rising Fulani-led attacks. “This is going to be a very good opportunity for us, because what we see on the field is there have been some alliances between the Cameroon government and Fulani,” Daniel, the Ambazonian deputy military leader, said. “So this is very big for our cause, in our fight against these Fulani, particularly those who are coming in from Nigeria.”

Despite a shared religion, the increasing involvement of Fulani in Cameroon’s Anglophone conflict is unlikely to fuse with the Boko Haram insurgency in the Far North region, and there is no evidence to suggest there has been a merging of the conflicts thus far, according to Akem Kelvin Nkwain, a human rights officer at CHRDA.

Even so, a further exacerbation of ethnic tensions involving the Fulani in Cameroon is likely to have a ripple effect across the region. “A development in which Fulanis become major actors, for better or for worse, in a country like Cameroon then gets exacerbated in Nigeria because of its own demographics and population categorizations,” said Fomunyoh, of the National Democratic Institute. This “then spreads to other parts of West Africa where you have populations that identify with the Fulani or with Peul [another name for ethnic Fulani], and then they may either feel victimized or pinpointed or isolated or targeted.”

The Biafran and Ambazonian movements are both fractured, and not all factions support the alliance and rising violence. Spokespeople from the self-proclaimed Interim Government of Ambazonia, the other major Anglophone separatist group, and the Customary Government of IPOB have denounced the alliance and proclaimed that the leaders involved are “impostors.”

Still, escalating violence in southeastern Nigeria and western Cameroon will only add to national and regional security challenges at a time when the region is already struggling with plummeting economies, democratic backsliding, and a resurgence of violent extremism and terrorism. Nigeria and Cameroon, both critical international partners in U.S. anti-terrorism campaigns and once beacons of economic stability in the region, may be on track to becoming failed states, which would have a devastating regional and global impact.