The Los Angeles Times quotes Africa Center Director J. Peter Pham on the relationship between Nigeria’s Boko Haram and ISIS:
That makes Nigeria’s Boko Haram group a natural ally. Boko Haram’s efforts to carve out an Islamic state in northern Nigeria predate the declaration of a caliphate by Baghdadi, to whom the group pledged allegiance last month. In terms of brutality, Boko Haram equals and may have even inspired Islamic State, said J. Peter Pham, an expert on the group at the Washington-based Atlantic Council think tank. Islamic State, he noted, invoked the Nigerian militants’ abduction of hundreds of schoolgirls, who were forced into marriage and slavery, as justification for the treatment of Yazidi women and girls abducted in Iraq.