State Dept. Calls Group in Nigeria Terrorists

The designation allows the United States to freeze assets, impose travel bans on known members and affiliates, and prohibit Americans from offering material support to the organization, which the State Department says is responsible for thousands of deaths in northeast and central Nigeria over the last several years including targeted killings of civilians.

The department also put the same label on Ansaru, a Boko Haram splinter faction that this year kidnapped and executed seven international construction workers.

Administration officials said on Wednesday that the move would help Nigeria combat a growing menace that also threatened American citizens and investment in Nigeria. But many Africa scholars say that branding Boko Haram a terrorist organization will only enhance the group’s international stature with jihadists and help its recruiting efforts.

The group has gained particular notoriety for its attacks inside Nigeria. Boko Haram has been conducting a brutal campaign against the Nigerian military and government as well as civilian targets. On Sept. 17, it carried out attacks in Benisheik, a northeastern town, that killed at least 143 civilians, including women and children.

In its war against the Nigerian state, Boko Haram has singled out government institutions, especially schools, for attack. One of its tenets is that Western-style education, not based on the Quran, is sinful and un-Islamic.

Boko Haram has also conducted attacks against international targets, including a suicide bombing of the United Nations building in Abuja on Aug. 26, 2011, which killed 21 people and injured dozens more, many of them aid workers.

The Nigerian military has been pressing a scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaign against the group, which appeared to have halted its attacks in the urban centers of northeastern Nigeria. In rural areas like Benisheik, however, killings appear to be continuing unabated.

“The Nigerians have not helped themselves in this problem by often using extreme and brutal tactics,” said Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s former top counterterrorism official. “The U.S. has been engaging with the Nigerians to improve their counterterrorism practices. The hope is it’ll pay off.”

American counterterrorism officials say that Boko Haram has links to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Gen. Carter F. Ham, then the head of the Pentagon’s Africa Command, said last December that members of the group had traveled to training camps in northern Mali and had most likely received financing and explosives from the Qaeda franchise. “We have seen clear indications of collaboration among the organizations,” General Ham said at the time.

Boko Haram has also shared tactics, techniques, training and financing with other Qaeda affiliates in Africa, including the Shabab in Somalia and East Africa, American officials say.

The decision to designate Boko Haram and Ansaru came after a spirited debate inside and outside the government that lasted months. The Obama administration was under increasing pressure from Congress, particularly Republicans, to list the group.

But other officials cautioned that Boko Haram did not pose an immediate threat to the United States, and that Americans and American interests could be targeted by the group as a result of the designation.

The designation “would internationalize Boko Haram, legitimize abuses by Nigeria’s security services, limit the State Department’s latitude in shaping a long-term strategy and undermine the U.S. government’s ability to receive effective independent analysis from the region,” a group of 25 scholars wrote in a letter sent last year to Hillary Rodham Clinton, then secretary of state.