UN blacklists Boko Haram, imposes sanctions

A United Nations Security Council committee blacklisted the Nigerian group Boko Haram as an Al-Qaeda-linked group “responsible for a series of major terrorist attacks” on Thursday, subjecting the organization to targeted financial sanctions and an arms embargo. 

The move made by the U.N. Security Council Committee on Al-Qaeda Sanctions comes over a month after the group claimed credit for the abduction of about 300 schoolgirls from school in northeastern Nigeria and as suspected Boko Haram gunmen reportedly killed 29 farm workers as they tilled their fields in a remote Nigerian village. 

“The Security Council has helped to close off important avenues of funding, travel and weapons to Boko Haram, and shown global unity against their savage actions," U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said.

"What will the practical impact of that be? Hard to say but it's an essential step we had to take," said Australian U.N. Ambassador Gary Quinlan, adding that the aim was to "dry up support" for the group. 

"We will work to try and make sure that anybody supplying any material assistance to Boko Haram — whether funding or arms — will in fact be stopped, will be deterred by the fact they too will be eligible for listing on the sanctions list," he said.

The group has in the past two months stepped up their five-year-old campaign to carve out an Islamic state in a country that is split about evenly between Christians and Muslims.  

The group has relentlessly targeted civilians, whom the military seems helpless to protect, according to detractors.

Nigeria, which until recently had been reluctant to seek international help to combat Boko Haram, requested earlier this week that the group, whose name roughly translates to “Western education is sinful,” be sanctioned. The insurgents have demanded the release of detained Boko Haram fighters in exchange for the girls — a swap officials said the government will not consider.

With regard to the kidnapped schoolgirls, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan and the country’s military have been criticized for their slow reaction to the mass abduction, which took place on April 14. 

President Barack Obama on Wednesday announced that the United States was sending in 80 military personnel to help in the search for the missing schoolgirls. Some of those U.S. troops had already arrived in Chad, Pentagon spokesman Army Colonel Steve Warren said on Thursday.  

The U.S. mission will help expand drone searches of the region, said Lt. Col. Myles Caggins, adding that this latest deployment of soldiers will not be involved in ground searches.

Meanwhile, a police source told Reuters on Thursday that a Boko Haram attack killed 29 farm workers and injured 10 in the village of Chukku Nguddoa in Borno state, adding that most of the village, including its grain store, was razed. 

On Wednesday, Boko Haram attacked three villages in Nigeria and killed 48 people. On Tuesday, a double bomb blast in the central Nigerian city of Jos killed 118 people. The powerful car bombings took place in a crowded bus terminal and market. Rescue workers with body bags combed the rubble for bodies as scores of residents gathered at mortuaries and hospitals in the search for missing loved ones. 

Jos was tense with fears that the attack could inflame religious rivalry in the city, which sits on a volatile fault line dividing Nigeria's mainly Muslim north from the predominantly Christian south, and which has been a flashpoint for such violence in the past.

Boko Haram attacks have increased in frequency and deadliness in Nigeria, with more than 2,000 people killed so far this year, compared to an estimated 3,600 between 2010 and 2013.

Al Jazeera and wire services