President Muhammadu Buhari has said that there was no credible intelligence linking Boko Haram’s source of weaponry to the Islamic State (IS) even as the former had pledged allegiance to the latter.
Buhari said this while fielding questions from newsmen at the closing of the second Regional Security Summit in Abuja.
The president said the claim that the Boko Haram group was getting its arms and ammunition from IS remained unsubstantiated.
He said a major source of the group’s sophisticated weaponry was from the various military and police bases attacked at the peak of the insurgency in the affected countries.
Buhari was categorical in his submission that no clear evidence had shown that Boko Haram sourced its sophisticated weapons from IS.
“The type of weapons they are using, I believe were the ones taken from military bases they attacked at the peak of the insurgency especially in Nigeria.
“If you recall they attacked military bases and carted away weapons, they attacked police stations and broke into their armouries, that was how they got the kind of weapons they have been using to fight.
“Frankly, up till now we don’t have firm intelligence of what IS has been able to send to Boko Haram in terms of weapons or even money.
“But the fact that they said they are affiliated to IS has made many people to believe that they were getting weapons from ISIS,” he said.
Buhari allayed fears that members of the Civilian Joint Task Force (JTF) helping in the counter-insurgency operation in the North East would constitute threat to security in their various communities.
He said the Civilian JTF were carefully constituted by the various state government, stressing that there was a broad plan to rehabilitate them in government’s post insurgency programme.
