According to some analysts, Isis rejected Shekau because of Boko Haram’s deadly attacks on Muslims. “They exploit the condition of those who are displaced by the raging war, providing them with food and shelter and then Christianising their children”, SITE Intelligence quotes the new leader as saying. “People should know we are still around”, Shekau said.
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An Isis magazine carried an interview with him and said he was previously a Boko Haram spokesman.
The group pledged its allegiance to ISIS previous year.
Al-Barnawi, who has been named as Boko Haram’s new leader, is something of a mystery.
In Wednesday’s interview, Al Barnawi said he would end attacks on mosques and markets used by ordinary Muslims, instead threatening to kill Christians and bomb churches.
Shekau in the recorded message said nothing would deter the sect from pursuing its cause, even if they were called “kwawarij”, meaning those that opposed arbitration as a means to chose a new leader.
Shekau explained in an audio recording, purported to be of his voice, that Baghdadi not respond to letters explaining that al-Barnawi is “an infidel” who is propagating “false creeds”.
Shekau’s audio message was released in response to reports that he had been purportedly replaced by Sheikh Abu Musab al-Barnawi, a former ISIS spokesperson.
Yet hunger and malnutrition rates across the border in Chad, where poverty and desertification have been compounded by Boko Haram violence, are troubling, said Pascal Nshimirimana, Chad program manager for the International Medical Corps (IMC).
Barnawi is the nickname of the terror group’s leader who comes from Nigeria’s northeastern Borno state, the birthplace of the Boko Haram insurgency.
“Boko Haram has lost its prestige and become hard to control [under Shekau]”.
In March 2016, Boko Haram was believed to have released a video featuring Shekau.
The crackdown by the Nigerian government and military has made significant progress in weakening the group.
In the last 18 months it has lost most of the territory it had controlled after being pushed back by an offensive by the forces of Nigeria and its neighbours.
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Boko Haram last week ambushed a humanitarian convoy, killing three civilians including a United Nations employee and causing the suspension of United Nations aid to newly liberated but still unsafe areas of Nigeria’s northeast.
