Clashes in recent weeks between Nigerian government security forces and the Iran-aligned Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN) show the “challenge Iran and its proxy groups pose, even in places far from the Middle East’s violence sectarian fault line.” Armin Rosen of Business Insider reported Tuesday.
The clashes apparently began after members of the IMN blocked a highway, obstructing the motorcade of a regional military chief. When the chief exited his car, he was pelted with rocks, quickly escalating the situation. During the violence, the IMN’s leader, a Iran-trained cleric named Ibrahim Zakzaky, was critically injured and arrested.
Zakzaky has longstanding ties to Iran. In 2009, he spoke at a London memorial for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of revolutionary Iran. Philip Smyth, an expert on Shiite militias and an adjunct fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Business Insider that Zakzaky follows Khomeini’s ideology of Vilayat-e Faqih, or “rule of the jurisprudent,” meaning that he is a “supporter of the social and political and religious decisions that come down from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.” Smyth pointed out that Hezbollah’s leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah uses strikingly similar language, and with him, “you know what you’re getting here.”
Hmmm look what made it into Hassan Nasrallah's speech about the Samir Kuntar hit https://t.co/wbw8CLG2DW pic.twitter.com/7m0AVBo4Oz
— Armin Rosen (@ArminRosen) December 23, 2015
Cheta Nwanze, the head of research for the Lagos-based group SBM Intelligence, told Business Insider that Nigeria’s Shiites “largely want to be left alone, and are not really interested in imposing their own views on others by force.” But Smyth has noted a “spike” in Shiite militants discussing Nigeria online. Smyth pointed out earlier this year in a widely-distributed monograph (.pdf) for the Washington Institute that “West Africa has seen an expanding Shiite population and Iranian influence since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. The growth of the Shiite community and, with it, Iranian sway has resulted in the creation of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria.”
While Nigeria continues to fight the insurgency of the ISIS-affiliated Sunni group Boko Haram, the government remains vigilant towards the IMN, which is actually a bigger organization with the potential to support a violent insurgency if it chose to. The death or imprisonment of Zakzaky could possibly spark a radicalization of the IMN in an unpredictable way.
In Desperate For Allies and Secret Assets, Iran Penetrates Africa, which was published in the Auguest 2013 issue of The Tower Magazine, Rosen provided the background on Iran’s recruitment and mentoring of Zakzaky.
In October of 2010, Nigerian authorities scored the largest seizure of an Iranian weapons shipment in African history, when a container ship carrying crates of rocket launchers and heavy mortars was impounded in the port of Lagos. This embarrassment hardly ended Iran’s efforts in the country. In June of 2013, a Hezbollah cell was uncovered in the northern Nigerian city of Kano. And Iran has an asset in Nigeria that’s arguably more valuable than a foothold for its Lebanese proxies: Sheikh Ibrahim Zakzaky, a radical Iranian-trained Shi’ite cleric and a promoter of Iranian state ideology in Sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous country.
According to researcher Philip Smyth, Zakzaky’s career is the product of an Iranian recruitment effort in the early 1980s. “They approached him because he was leading various Islamist-style groups, and they told them if you come on board with us, you’ll have money and an ideology you can push.” He spoke out in favor of Khomeini-style clerical rule, and emerged as a leading hardliner during Nigeria’s late-90s debate over the imposition of Sharia law in the country’s predominantly Muslim north.
“Zakzaky was actually bitterly opposed to Sharia,” according to Alex Thurston, a PhD candidate at Northwestern University and an expert on Islam in Nigeria. “He said that this is just a half measure, and that you can only bring back Sharia if you do it in the context of a full Islamic state.” Thurston emphasizes that Zakzaky is a marginal figure in Nigeria — someone who commands tens of thousands of followers within a Muslim community of over 85 million. But he adds that Zakzaky has been a persistent and demagogical figure in Nigerian civic life. “He is known as a firebrand,” says Thurston. “He’s been in and out of jail through his career, and he’s extremely provocative when he’s on the radio.”
Perhaps significantly, there were almost no Nigerian-born Shi’ites in the country at the time of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, according to Thurston. A 2009 Pew Forum report said that there are as many as 4 million. Only a minority buys into hardline Khomeinism, but Zakzaky has still aided in Shi’ism’s spread in Nigeria. He is a careful and multilingual expositor of Iran’s state theology, and his skills were on full display during a 2009 lecture in London in honor of the 20th anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s death. In Zakzaky’s view, Khoneimism had already triumphed over the revolutionary false consciousness of communism, and would deal a similar deathblow to western capitalism as well. “The Imam understood different aspects of the din [religion] as a universal message for the entire governance of mankind,” the Iranian-trained cleric said, in English, before closing his speech with a firm rejection of any kind of non-universalist, non-Khomeinist form of political Islam. “Some people think that just as we have imam Khomeini in Iran, other Muslim countries should have their own Khomeini-type leader…Look, the world, the whole world, the entire world needs only one Khomeini, and it has one.”
Iran has achieved at least a few of its asymmetrical objectives in Nigeria: it has an ideological foothold within the country’s Shi’ite community, which might include as much as 5 percent of Nigeria’s Muslims. And Hezbollah was able to sustain weapons caches and commercial interests in a country that, according to Smyth, has a notable Lebanese Shi’ite presence.
[Photo: AFollower313 / YouTube ]