Who are Alhaji Sa’idu, Alhaji Ashiru?

(Link on DailyTrust site)

Around 2017 I learnt of a dramatic arrest of a Dubai-based Nigerian unlicensed currency exchange operator. Though I initially assumed that it was just a typical incident involving some Nigerians engaged in currency exchange without appropriate licenses, eyewitnesses’ accounts of the dramatic way the arrest was made left me suspecting other possible more serious reasons behind it; yet I never suspected anything close to what I recently learnt. 

Not long after the arrest, a “big man” elder friend of mine from Kano who had been approached by the suspect’s relatives in hopes he might be of some assistance to the suspect on account of his perceived experience with relevant procedures in the UAE contacted me in turn and introduced a brother to the suspect to me who had come to Dubai to follow up on the case.

And even after I met with him in Dubai, I was still under an assumption that the case was, at worse, a money-laundering case, which such unlicensed currency exchange operators perpetrate knowingly or unknowingly on behalf of some Nigerian home and foreign-based Internet fraudsters who capitalize on the naivety of such unlicensed currency exchange operators to implicate them in money-laundering crimes while they (fraudsters) get away with it.

Interestingly, a typical case in this regard plays out when an Internet fraudster in, say, Lagos manages to scam his victim in, say, London, however, due to the scrutiny that a Nigeria-bound money transfer particularly attracts from money transfer operators and authorities across the world on account of Nigeria’s particular notoriety in Internet fraud, the fraudster contacts a typical greed-driven but naïve Dubai-based mostly Hausa unlicensed currency exchange operator offering him a share from the money if he agrees to collect it in Dubai on his behalf.

He, (i.e. fraudster), then advises the victim to transfer the money to the Dubai-based fellow citing bogus reasons why he cannot receive it directly. The Dubai guy then receives the money, takes his share as agreed, and transfers the balance to the fraudster in Nigeria who ends up collecting the money without leaving any trace behind while the poor guy remains the actual receiver of the money according to the official records and therefore ends up being eventually traced and arrested in Dubai whenever a victim reports being scammed. 

Anyway, recently a friend of mine familiar with the arrested Dubai-based Nigerian unlicensed currency exchange operator’s case sent me a 24-page Abu Dhabi Federal Court of Appeal’s conviction and sentence against the fellow and asked me for a favour to translate it from Arabic to English as, according to him, it would be presented to a top government official who had been approached by the convict’s relatives to facilitate the Nigerian government’s intervention in hopes of securing his release by the UAE authorities.

After going through it, I discovered, among other things, that the fellow in question was actually one of a 6-man network of accomplices convicted and sentenced respectively. What, however, shocked me was the discovery that the case is entirely different from what I had assumed all along. I discovered that the convicts were, in fact, tried and convicted for funding the Boko Haram terror group in Nigeria.

However, due to the amount of workload and having concluded that there is hardly anything that the Nigerian government can do for them, I only made a one-page summarized English version of the original 24-page court file, which is full of details of many Boko-Haram funding transactions that the convicts had perpetrated at least since 2015.

I also observed that almost all the transactions were initiated by one Alhaji Sa’idu based in Nigeria who, according to the file, is a senior undercover Boko-Haram member responsible for facilitating the group’s access to funds from its sponsors. His name appears many times throughout the file.

Equally, one Alhaji Ashiru was mentioned in some of the transitions; and he is, according to the file, a Nigerian government official and yet a senior undercover Boko-Haram member who facilitates the transfer of misappropriated public funds to the group. 

The pattern of a typical transaction is that Alhaji Sa’idu would arrange an unidentified or vaguely identified Arab person on a visit to Dubai from Turkey to hand over an amount of money in US Dollars to one of the convicts who would, in turn, advise his Nigerian-based business partners to hand over the Naira equivalent of the amount to Alhaji Sa’idu. 

Though the convicts, or at least some of them, could be victims of manipulation by Alhaji Sa’idu and Alhaji Ashiru who had capitalized on their gullibility, the court file maintains their involvement anyway and, accordingly, two of them were sentenced to life imprisonment while the remaining four got a 10-year jail sentence respectively. 

Now, shocked by those discoveries, and wondering whether Nigerian authorities are aware of this case, I checked with a Nigerian diplomat friend of mine here in the UAE who promised to check in turn and get back to me.

Meanwhile, in case the Nigerian government isn’t aware, which is quite probable, it means that the duo of Alhaji Sa’idu, Alhaji Ashiru and perhaps others are probably carrying on their Boko Haram-funding facilitation activities through other accomplices and/or by manipulating other home or foreign-based Nigerian hustlers oblivious of the actual purpose of the informal financial transaction services they are providing. 

In any case, considering the sheer implications of this case on Nigeria’s security and stability, the Nigerian government doesn’t have any reasonable excuse whatsoever to justify its unawareness of it. After all, it maintains a diplomatic mission in the UAE, which is manned by supposedly trained diplomats as well as the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) operatives who are particularly responsible for preventing foreign-linked threat against Nigeria and its interests.    

Besides, regardless of whatever military measures Nigeria takes against Boko-Haram terrorists, its ability to defeat the group for good depends on its ability to identify and eliminate all its sources of funds, which can only be achieved through painstaking intelligence-gathering, accurate intelligence analyses, and proactive measures accordingly.  

The dynamics behind Beirut blast

 (Link on Daily Trust site)

The Lebanese capital, Beirut was last Tuesday rocked by the most devastating blast in the history of the country. It was so massive that the associated shockwaves were felt in Cyprus 240 kilometres away. It left more than 130 dead, more 5000 wounded and extensive destruction particularly in and around the seaport facilities where it occurred.

According to the Governor of Beirut, Marwan Abboud, the blast could be compared to the United States nuclear attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 during World War ll, which were the first and so far the only incidents of nuclear attacks in the world. He also estimated the cost of the resultant damage to be between three to five billion US Dollars, which is too much to bear for a desperately struggling economy like the Lebanese economy.

The country’s President, Michel Aoun was quick to attribute the incident to an accidental explosion of “2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate (which) had been stored unsafely in a warehouse for six years.” However, it’s widely believed among informed observers and analysts on Middle East affairs, and, of course, within intelligence communities in the region and beyond that the blast was never accidental, and, instead, it was just one of the similar “mysterious” incidents that characterize the Israel-Iran tensions over the past several years.

Of course, as far as those with little or no understanding of the intricacies of the underlying politics of the Israel-Iran tensions are concerned, the incident remains as officially explained by the Lebanese authorities, or it’s simply mysterious in the absence of any definitive contrary official narrative about the alleged party responsible for it or the targeted party. 

Whereas, the incident was never accidental or even isolated for that matter. It was actually one of the series of surgical clandestine missile or aerial strikes that Israel has been conducting over the past few years on Iranian military facilities and factories within Iran and its military bases and sponsored militia units and their logistics facilities across Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. This is though Israel has never officially admitted nor denied responsibility for any of such attacks, while the Iranian authorities, which even though know deep down that Israel has always been responsible, have never held it responsible either.

That further explains the confusion of casual observers who are not familiar enough with the relevant politics involved especially considering the aggressive rhetoric that the two countries always trade against each other.  

Over the past two months, in particular, Israel has intensified its attacks on various military targets and facilities within Iran including its Natanz nuclear project complex, gas pipelines, military factories and other sensitive facilities. Also, for several years, Israel has been attacking Iranian military sites and its sponsored militia units across Syria, of course with the covert approval if not overt connivance of the Russian military in the country, which is supposed to protect the Bashar Al-Assad’s regime and its Iranian allies. (I may address the dynamics of Russian “betrayal” of President Assad in this regard in another piece).

Likewise, across Iraq, various Iranian military units, bases of the Iranian-backed militias and armouries have been the targets of Israeli attacks. Also, in addition to Israel's intermittent attacks on the Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, it has equally conducted covert and sometimes more devastating attacks on some secretive or disguised facilities of the militia within the country.

Even the recent attack in Beirut wasn’t targeted at the state of Lebanon per se, after all; it was instead believed to have been targeted at a massive alleged Hezbollah armoury disguised as a seaport facility.

By the way, by manipulating the false pretext of resisting the Israel occupation of Palestine, Hezbollah militia, which is believed to be stronger than the Lebanese military itself, is the only armed political player in Lebanon, which enables it to hold the country to ransom and dictate state policies according to the dictates of the militia’s Iranian sponsors in faraway Tehran.

Now, understanding the logic behind Israel’s reluctance to admit responsibility for such attacks and Iran’s pretended obliviousness of Israeli’s responsibility requires looking at the underlying tactical and strategic considerations of both parties.

On the part of Israel, in order to keep the support of the global powers that it has always enjoyed and manipulated at the expense of Palestinians on whose confiscated territories it was created in 1948, and even though it’s the strongest military power in the region, it feigns vulnerability in the face of the persistent, albeit actually empty, existential threats from Iran since its transformation into a theocracy following the Khomeini-led revolution in 1979.

While on its part, Iran’s bogus commitment to eliminating the state of Israel, which its leaders have always chanted has been its most effective political capital among the gullible across the Muslim world; it, in fact, partly owes its survival to it. To maintain it, therefore, it has to keep making threatening but empty rhetoric against Israel and to also keep sponsoring purported anti-Israeli militias e.g. Hezbollah and Hamas and manipulating them to conduct reckless adventures in the name of attacking Israel, which in turn retaliates with disproportionate force to kill as many vulnerable Palestinians or Lebanese as possible and destroy their properties and infrastructure. This is even though it (i.e. Iran) has a supposedly strong military, yet it has never targeted Israel and won't' dare to; obviously, its military is actually only intended for the pursuit of its expansionist agenda at the expense of Muslim nations.

Israel, therefore, capitalizes on these dynamics to undermine Iran and its sponsored militias through such “mysterious” attacks knowing that Iran would rather continue to feign obliviousness of Israel's responsibility for the attacks and continue to suffer in silence than to hold it responsible, for it realizes that, by so doing, its largely gullible fans would rightly expect it to retaliate while, in reality, it's never and indeed has never been serious in its threats against Israel in the first place.