ICC Note: Boko Haram has reportedly figured out ways to acquire fuel for motorcycles and other vehicles, despite military pressure cutting off their supply lines and squeezing the militant Islamist terror group into hiding in the Sambisa forest in northern Nigeria. One method involves overpaying for jerrycans of oil, which entices sellers to make dangerous treks in remote places in order to provide deliveries for extreme profits. They have also figured out that adding salt to peanut oil creates a combustible concoction they can fill up into motorbikes. The elusive and adaptable insurgency continues to prove itself difficult to defeat, still ravaging northern Nigeria with suicide bombing attacks and merciless abductions. Boko Haram has particularly devastated the Christian Church in the region, targeting pastors for murder, kidnapping young girls and forcing them to convert to Islam and serve as sex slaves and destroying a reported 13,000 churches in their ongoing seven-year campaign to establish an Islamic caliphate in West Africa.

By Morgan Winsor

4/20/16 Nigeria (IB Times) – Boko Haram is apparently producing its own petroleum to power its motorcycles and other vehicles as the Nigerian Islamic militant group runs out of fuel due to the state military’s squeeze on supply lines. Civilians and military sources in northeast Nigeria told Agence France-Presse on Monday the terrorists were paying massive amounts of money for jerricans filled with fuel.

“Boko Haram were paying outrageous sums to get fuel, and the incredible profit margin made young men defy the risk and take fuel to them,” an unnamed senior military source in Maiduguri, Borno state, told the news agency. “The cutting-off of fuel supplies has badly crippled Boko Haram, and that has been made possible by blocking all identified supply routes and the crackdown on the suppliers.”

Babakura Kolo, a civilian vigilante in Maiduguri assisting the Nigerian army to fight Boko Haram, said the militants were willing to pay any amount for fuel. Kolo was apparently involved in the crackdown on Boko Haram suppliers in the Borno state capital.

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