The AP quotes Africa Center Director J. Peter Pham on how US military assistance in the fight against Boko Haram could lure foreign fighters to the cause as a result of the Boko Haram-ISIS alliance:
J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council, a research center in Washington, said increasing Western assistance to the multinational African military effort against Boko Haram and the role of South African and other contractors “make this fight all that more appealing to the Islamist extremists.”
“Militants finding it increasingly harder to get to Syria and Iraq may choose instead to go to northeastern Nigeria and internationalize that conflict,” Pham wrote in an email to The Associated Press.