Embattled President Umaru Musa Yar’adua is seeking the help of the United States to counter the rising incidence of sectarian violence which authorities believe might have opened the doors to foreign Jihadists and other radical Islamists groups, including Al Qaeda.

Huhuonline website has learnt from authoritative sources in the US State Department that Nigeria has made a formal appeal or anti-terrorism funding from the United States and the issue will feature top on the agenda during Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s upcoming visit to Nigeria. In return, Nigeria will join the “coalition of the willing” by providing combat and support brigade troops of Muslim extraction to join the fight against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Although the final details are yet to be worked out, intelligence officials are said to have expressed strong reservations; warning Yar’adua that sending Nigerian troops into Afghanistan or Iraq will attract the anger and possible retaliation of Islamic fundamentalists groups and make Nigeria a target of attacks like the US embassy bombings in East Africa.

But facing mounting political pressure from within his own northern Muslim constituents, the President has vowed to go ahead with what a Presidential source described as “cash-for-troops” deal with the Americans, arguing that most of the Nigerian soldiers will be Muslims who understand their Muslim counterparts in Afghanistan, including the local language. But the source dismissed the President’s optimism as misplaced; saying Yar’adua is fighting a battle for his own political survival.

With the Niger Delta amnesty threatening to unravel; and a fragile cease-fire reigning in the poverty-ridden north where sectarian violence claimed over 700 lives and displaced thousands more, the continuing crises in the most economically marginalized areas - the Niger Delta, where the oil industry has destroyed the local economy, and the north, where traditional agriculture is failing to sustain the people - mean that Yar’adua is fighting a war on two fronts

Nigerian intelligence sources told Huhuonline website that the recent crisis with Boko Haram might have quietly opened the door to external Muslim fundamentalist groups such as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb which operates as far south as Northern Mali. To make a bad situation worse, Al Qaeda’s leader and the world’s most wanted man; Osama bin Laden has identified Nigeria as a resource-rich country ripe or insurrection and the foundational outpost for the recreation of the ancient Muslim caliphate of that stretched from the Sarduana of Sokoto to the Ghana-Mali-Songhai empires of West Africa.

Nigerian Intelligence officials are working round the clock looking for evidence linking Al Qaeda to the extremist Boko Haram sect but Islamic proselytizers from Pakistan are said to be at work along the Sahel belt with instructions from bin Laden to infiltrate local militant groups like Boko Haram and MEND with a view to destabilizing Nigeria. Although the fighting with Boko Haram militants has stopped for the time being; for the intelligence services and military, making sure Nigeria does not become an Al Qaeda recruitment post remains an ever more threatening challenge especially as most Boko Haram members have fled to neighboring Chad, Cameroon and Niger - where Boko Haram’s leader Ustaz Mohammed Yusuf allegedly told the military he bought his weapons - they have vowed revenge after Yusuf died in police custody. Retaliation could follow if Yusuf is claimed as a martyr. Attempts by international Islamist groups to destabilise Nigeria through sponsorship of extremist sects are hard to discern. Nigerian intelligence sources insist that Yusuf’s group and its members are home-grown.

No one has, it seems, yet produced evidence that Boko Haram has links to Al Qaeda, whose affiliates move easily through the porous borders of the Maghreb to the north but the cash washing around Nigeria ’s corrupt oil economy makes it more vulnerable to foreign funding, and national intelligence sources accept that the growing political and economic pressures in the north have created new opportunities for militants to exploit in their campaign to destabilise the government - and the chance for foreign-backed and organized groups to move into the region’s biggest economy and most populous country.

Indeed lol