ELEPHANT JIHAD: North African Islamists funding terrorism by slaughtering elephants
Sudanese Muslim militiamen and Somali al-Shabaab terrorists are financing their jihad from poaching raids against the endangered wildlife.
The janjaweed poachers use the profits from massacring the African elephant to continue their sectarian killings against other religionists and unbelievers!
The common link is their utter disregard for life and for the rule of law.
via Africa Review
Cameroon’s Special Forces have been deployed to foil an imminent raid by Sudanese poachers who for eight weeks earlier this year slaughtered half the population of elephants for their ivory at one of the country’s wildlife reserves.
The poachers have been attempting to take park guards in northern Cameroon by surprise by exploiting greater ground cover that has sprouted in the rainy season, according to international conservation body World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), which said it had been informed by high ranking officials of the Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR) on Friday.
“This is the same group of poachers that in early 2012 travelled more than 1,000km on horseback from northern Sudan across the Central African Republic and Chad to kill over 300 elephants in the Bouba N’Djida National Park in northern Cameroon,” WWF said.
The heavily armed and well coordinated poachers, who had told local villagers of their plans to kill as many elephants as possible, claimed they had killed as much as 650 out of some 1,000 that roamed the park.
The elephant population in Cameroon and in central Africa is estimated to have been halved, mainly by poachers, between 1995 and 2007 with the number of elephants killed still on the rise…
A story from the New York Times in September explained that Sudan’s janjaweed, the Arab Muslim supremacists who bear responsibility for the genocide against black Africans in Darfur, are offenders in the illegal ivory trade.
Der Spiegel reports that janjaweed poachers use the proceeds for arms: “The millions of dollars their poaching raid must have brought in will allow them to replenish their weapons stores.” The New York Times also identified al-Shabaab from Somalia as an ivory poaching participant.
al-Shabaab, the militant Islamist group that has pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda, recently began training fighters to infiltrate neighboring Kenya and kill elephants for ivory to raise money.
One former al-Shabaab associate said that the Shabaab were promising to “facilitate the marketing” of ivory and have encouraged villagers along the Kenya-Somalia border to bring them tusks, which are then shipped out through the port of Kismayo, a notorious smuggling hub and the last major town the Shaabab still control.
Sadly, the Islamist culture and tradition of raiding, pillaging, plundering and exploitation of natural resources and property is alive and well.
Related articles
- Cameroon army to take on machine-gun-toting elephant poachers (worldnews.nbcnews.com)
- Poachers slaughter Kenyan elephant family (capitalfm.co.ke)
- Cameroon army to take on elephant poachers (worldnews.nbcnews.com)
- World Wildlife Fund bemoans killing of 11 elephants in Kenya (ghanabusinessnews.com)
- AFRICA WILDLIFE : Horror as entire family of elephants slaughtered for ivory (environmentaleducationuk.wordpress.com)
- Surge in Elephant Poaching (changebydoing.wordpress.com)
- Horror as entire family of elephants slaughtered for ivory (telegraph.co.uk)
- WWF: Elephant poaching increasing across Africa (itv.com)
