Reporting on Somalia for twenty-five years, Harper has gained extraordinary access to members of Al Shabaab—and, disturbingly, they in turn have access to her. Visiting areas rarely accessed by foreign journalists, Harper paints a complex picture of life for ordinary people in the group’s grip—stories of tremendous loss, unbearable compromise, and unexpected profit.

Speakers

Mary Harper, the BBC Africa Editor, has reported on Africa and from its conflict zones for a quarter-century. The author of Getting Somalia Wrong?, she has served as an expert witness and advised the European Commission on the Horn of Africa, and contributes to The Times, The Guardian and The Economist.

Nuradin Aden Dirie is an independent consultant specialising in the politics of the Horn of Africa. His experience spans more than 25 years in the areas of regional politics, security, conflict resolution, humanitarian assistance, statebuilding and elections. For the past six years, Nuradin has been Special Adviser to the Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations for Somalia. In that role he was at the heart of attempts to support the establishment of a viable government as well as helping to set meaningful terms of delivery of international development support and to address the threat posed by al-Shabab.

The Frontline Club was at full capacity on Wednesday 4 February, as a panel of experts discussed the implications of Boko Haram’s presence in West Africa in the lead up to the Nigerian presidential elections on 14 February.

L -R Peter Okwoche, Funmi Iyanda, Mike Smith, Bala Mohammed Liman and Alex Perry.

The panel included: Bala Mohammed Liman, a doctoral candidate at SOAS specialising in the intersection of conflict and identity in Nigeria; Funmi Iyanda, a Nigerian producer, journalist and talk show host; Mike Smith, a foreign correspondent with AFP and former West African bureau chief; and Alex Perry, a contributing editor at Newsweek‘s international edition and author of The Hunt for Boko Haram. The discussion was chaired by Nigerian journalist at the BBC Peter Okwoche  who, by way of an introduction, commented that the panel knew “Nigeria even better than me, which says a lot!”

The discussion began with Smith and Perry explaining why Boko Haram had reached such prominence under the current Presidential term, and the ways in which the Government was at fault for their failure to act.

Smith said: “This is absolutely a national issue now, maybe a regional issue. We don’t want to exaggerate though, Jonathan called it the ‘Al Qaeda of West Africa’, but it is absolutely not that.”

Perry said: “[Boko Haram] has reached the regional level [of importance] because Nigeria has allowed it to. We have to focus on the core issues: a total lack of governance and corruption that people are fed up with. It doesn’t legitimise Boko Haram, but you create a situation where some unrest becomes much more likely in these circumstances.”

Okwoche asked: “Should the buck stop with Goodluck Jonathan?”

Perry answered: “Nothing good that has happened in Nigeria has anything to do with him… look at the disinterest and indifference. It took 20 days for the Government to even notice the Chibok girls were missing. I mean, my God, 20 days to notice a whole school had gone… It was an unbelievable confirmation of the indifference and shows how out of touch the political elite are.”

He continued: “The government in Nigeria, it’s a very dark place, it does something very corrosive to notions of civic trust and culture of public good. If you think everyone in Nigeria is out for himself or herself, it makes you pretty frightened and cornered.

“You can’t trust people to tell the truth, truth evaporates and there is a darker motive behind everything… A solution to this is beginning to disappear, and that is really scary.”

A member of the audience commented on the group themselves: “We speak very little about the Boko Haram organisation itself. Maybe it is the Western media or my ignorance, but it seems like we know relatively little about the hierarchy of the group, the ability of the organisation.”

Smith responded: “My best definition of what we have now, is that Boko Haram…is just a good name to call all the things going on in the insurgency. Some of it may be different cells, or it may be one dominant cell – it gets quite complicated.”

“We have no idea how many members they may have because they recruit at will, and recruit both people who just need money or who are attracted to the ideology.”

Perry said: “This is local town rebels gone slightly, well totally, sociopathic. You can almost say what they are against, but saying what they are for is almost impossible because they are incredibly bad at articulating it.”

He continued: “I am not underestimating their brutality at all…. it has become a death cult. There is an awful lot of ceremony around the beheadings, there are readings from books, and everyone is arranged in a circle. How do you counter an idea when there’s not really an idea there to counter?”

A member of the audience asked how poverty affects Boko Haram’s level of recruitment, and asked the panel to comment on the impact of high unemployment and disillusionment amongst young people in this regard.

Okwoche interjected with a shocking statistic: “Within the age group of 19-25 in Nigeria, the unemployment rate is 40%. That completely blew my mind.”

Perry said: “In the North, I imagine that figure would be double. The marginalisation and exclusion and huge youth bulge could be a great resource, but if it is not tapped, if that energy isn’t re-directed, it’s a time bomb. Social exclusion is the bedrock with which Boko Haram is founded. There is no doubt about it, the area has some of the worst poverty statistics for anywhere in the world…it really is one of the worst places to live on earth. But there is no alternative, there are no jobs, and Boko Haram will pay you.”

The final questions focused on the future of Nigeria, and whether the current situation had a chance of improving in the near future. Iyanda answered with little optimism.

She said: “I keep thinking about this and I don’t like any of the answers. Either we get lucky, we get a good change of Government, or we get a change of heart or strategy from the same Government. Otherwise it would have to be that something really desperate happens. The Nigerian government and its sense of well-being would have to be threatened. I don’t know how that would happen… but I don’t want to find out.”

Watch and listen back below:

The threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and the international network of militants it has spawned will be with us for a “generation”, according to experts speaking at the Frontline Club on Wednesday 24 September 2014.

From Al-Qaeda to ISIS: terrorist tactics. Panel discussion at the Frontline Club, 24 September 2014. From L to R: Patrick Cockburn, Peter Neumann, Sam Kiley, Alia Brahimi and Aymenn al-Tamimi. Photograph by Richard Nield

On the day that the UN security council agreed to launch an effort to prevent the flow of foreign jihadis in support of the Islamic State and US-led airstrikes continued in Syria, the Frontline Club panel underlined the seriousness of the ISIS threat and sought to explain its appeal to an estimated 15,000 foreign fighters.

Hosted by Sky News foreign affairs editor Sam Kiley, the debate brought together Peter Neumann, Professor of Security Studies at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, and founder and director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR); Alia Brahimi, visiting research fellow at the Oxford University Changing Character of War Programme at Pembroke College, Oxford and author of Jihad and Just War in the War on Terror; Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a recent graduate from Brasenose College, Oxford University, and a Shillman-Ginsburg fellow at the Middle East Forum; and Patrick Cockburn, a Middle East correspondent since 1979 and author of The Jihadis Return: Isis and the New Sunni Uprising.

The panel was unanimous in its belief that the airstrikes launched by a US-led alliance on Monday 22 September would not bring a speedy halt to the ISIS insurgency, something that UK prime minister David Cameron and a spokesperson for the US defence administration later admitted.

“I don’t believe the air campaign is going to be able to defeat ISIS, or that a more intensive military campaign would either,” said Neumann. “We’re going to be down there for years.”

Military strikes against ISIS ignore the root of the problem, the panel argued. “I’m pessimistic about the efficacy of airstrikes,” said al-Tamimi. “What is needed is a change of mindset on the ground. It’s local mindsets that matter here in Iraq now.”

“The US is trying to cut them off at the head, but we have to cut them off at the legs and deal with the causes,” said Brahimi.

The popularity of ISIS was attributed to a range of factors, including government failings and the organisation’s successes on the battlefield. “Maliki’s heavy handed responses to political issues in Iraq have definitely played a part,” said Brahimi. “Both Maliki and Assad have attempted to deploy military solutions to political problems.”

“One simple thing in ISIS’ favour is victory,” said Cockburn, pointing to the organisation’s military successes in Mosul, Anbar and Tikrit, and the fact that it has inflicted heavy defeats on the Syrian army. “In the context of great numbers of bitter, angry Sunni young men in Syria and Iraq, their lives pretty hopeless. . . . All of a sudden there’s this victorious army that they can join. It’s all very appealing.”

ISIS has taken advantage of a groundswell of anger and disillusionment among unrepresented Sunnis, which make up about 20% of the population in Iraq and 60% in Syria, and tapped into a history of insurgency that dates back to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

“ISIS has ridden on the back of an overall revitalised Sunni insurgency in Iraq,” said Brahimi. “You can draw a straight line between [the invasion of Iraq] and the rise of ISIS. So many in Syria . . . cut their teeth in the Iraqi insurgency, trying to take the whole territory in the war against the US.”

For the time being, ISIS is focused on the ‘near enemy’, but it is likely that it will eventually move against Western targets. “[ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-] Baghdadi will relish straying onto [Al Qaeda leader] Ayman al-Zawahiri’s ground,” said al-Tamimi. “Conducting attacks against the west has the ability to re-energise the ranks and silence internal critics. Baghdadi and Al-Zawahiri are in a race.”

The conflict has attracted between 12,000–15,000 foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq in the past three years, the largest overseas participation of independent fighters since Afghanistan in the 1980s, according to Neumann. Foreign combatants make up an estimated 40% of ISIS recruits.

Many were initially motivated by humanitarian reasons, but more recent converts to the ISIS cause are driven by a mixture of ideology, idealism, and adventure. “The idea of a caliphate . . . motivates people to build something that can be there in a thousand years time,” said Neumann. “It’s like an adventure holiday minus the alcohol.”

“The narrative is increasingly utopian and the reality increasingly dystopian,” said Brahimi. “We have to make more of that.”

The broad international appeal of ISIS is storing up huge problems for the future, and this is something that airstrikes will not change. “You have 15,000 people who may go to other conflicts, go back to their own countries, or stay in the region,” said Neumann. “These networks will keep us busy for another generation.”

Watch and listen back here: