Nigeria predicts that Boko
Haram will soon be defeated, but the militant group's ties with Islamic State
mean that would probably push the fighters further into neighbouring countries,
writes BBC Monitoring Africa security correspondent Tomi Oladipo.
The Nigerian military has been
in overdrive in trying to control the narrative of its war against Boko Haram
in recent weeks.
It says it has cornered the
jihadists and the conflict will soon be over - in line with its mandate from
President Muhammadu Buhari to end the crisis by mid-November.
Boko Haram's eccentric frontman
Abubakar Shekau has not appeared in a video since February, when he threatened
to disrupt the elections.
The following month he pledged
allegiance to the Islamic State group (IS) in an audio message and since IS
also reached out to their Nigerian counterpart, Shekau has taken a back seat.
Shekau has released similar
audio clips to disprove reports about his death, although the fact that he is
not visible leaves room for speculation among the army that they have killed
him, as they have claimed on several occasions.
His retreat from the forefront
signifies that Boko Haram, also known as IS West Africa Province, now takes
orders from the further up the IS hierarchy.
Nonetheless, there was recently
room for another message to once again defy the Nigerian government, which
sparked the realisation in the military that this game of cat-and-mouse was
going nowhere.
Defence spokesman Colonel Rabe
Abubakar described Shekau as "irrelevant" and urged Nigerians not to
"not to lose sleep over the concocted audio rhetoric of the waning
terrorist sect which is a usual antic of a drowning person struggling to hold on
to anything to remain afloat".
Boko Haram leader Abubakar
Shekau used to appear regularly in the group's videos. Overall, Boko Haram's
propaganda campaign has waned since the beginning of the year, when it used
social media to promote sleek videos showing speeches and attacks.
The latest video, released to
coincide with the Eid al-Adha festival in late September, is poorly produced
and appears to show fighters praying but there is no indication of how recent all
the footage is.
It has been two years since the
US placed a $7m (£4.5m) bounty on Shekau's head but neither he nor his top
commanders have been found.
As long as that is not
achieved, the group will be able to rethink its strategy, recruit, rearm and develop
new methods of operating.
The jihadists have shown that
they can continue to inflict significant damage even with few but deadly
explosions.
In one recent triple attack,
they killed dozens of people in Maiduguri, the city where they were formed in
2002.
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