Why a Nigerian cleric, Sheikh Ibrahim al-Zakzaky is Hezbollah’s new cause célèbre
Alex Rowell/Now Lebanon 13 January/16
Sheikh Ibrahim al-Zakzaky single-handedly brought Shiite Islamism to Nigeria. His arrest last month has analysts worried about a potential new insurgency
A Lebanese woman holds a banner during a protest in Beirut on 19 December, 2015, against the arrest of Sheikh Ibrahim al-Zakzaky
It is by no means unusual for Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, in his periodic televised speeches, to address events taking place outside the confines of Lebanon’s borders. On the contrary, developments across the Arab world, especially in conflict zones such as Syria and Palestine, often take center stage in the elaborate communiqués watched by die-hard supporters and mortal foes alike.
Rarely, however – if ever – does the West Africa region consume the leader’s attention, which was why his digression along an unexpected tangent in his speech of 21 December was pointedly, if subtly, significant.
“Before I go into the most prominent event” – which was the assassination by Israel two days earlier of Hezbollah commander Samir al-Quntar in Damascus – “I want also to mention […] a bloody incident that happened in Nigeria a few days ago,” Nasrallah told the camera. This was the “appalling massacre” in the city of Zaria, 260km north of Abuja, of “hundreds of followers of the Islamic Movement” by the Nigerian army, along with the arrest of the Movement’s leader, “His Eminence, the Learned, the Mujahid, the Sheikh Ibrahim al-Zakzaky.” Condemning the killings, as well as “the silence of the international community,” Nasrallah “implored” the Nigerian government to release Zakzaky and “hold those responsible to account,” and then spoke for several further minutes about the virtues of the Nigerian cleric – “three of whose sons were killed a year ago during the Quds Day march, reviving the cause of Jerusalem and Palestine” – concluding that “the thing we most fear is there may be American or Israeli or takfiri hands standing behind this abominable action committed by soldiers in the Nigerian army, to place Nigeria and its government and army and people in destructive and appalling fitna [religious strife], as is occurring in many countries of the region.”
Nor was Nasrallah the only Middle Eastern politician to have suddenly voiced an unprecedented interest in Nigerian affairs. The Iraqi populist Muqtada al-Sadr released a statement calling on Abuja to release Zakzaky, and “the people of Iraq” to demonstrate in his honor. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani went as far as to personally telephone his Nigerian counterpart, Muhammadu Buhari, to complain, while Tehran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif made his displeasure known to the Nigerian foreign ministry. The Supreme Leader himself, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, tweeted a photo juxtaposing Quntar; the late Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin; the recently executed Saudi cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr; and Zakzaky under the headline, “Awakening is not suppressible.”
What exactly had happened in Nigeria to get such disparate figures so exercised? And what connects a largely-unknown cleric in Nigeria with major militia leaders in Lebanon and Iraq, and the Iranian head of state? Below, NOW tackles these two questions in turn.
“Substantial loss of life”
There is no disputing that a large number of Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN) members – perhaps more than 300 – were killed by the Nigerian army in Zaria between 12-14 December 2015, according to international human rights organizations. While the army claims it was forced to open fire on a crowd of IMN supporters who were attempting to assassinate the chief of staff, Lieutenant General Tukur Buratai, as he passed through the city, Human Rights Watch (HRW) – which published a detailed report based on video evidence and eyewitness testimonies – says this “version of events does not stack up.” Instead, the army shot live rounds “without any provocation” at people exiting an IMN religious center – the Movement’s members are Shiite Muslims – drawing an angry crowd of IMN supporters wielding sticks and stones to the street outside in protest, said HRW. The army subsequently opened fire on the crowd, killing many, and then advanced to Zakzaky’s residence, where a second group of IMN members gathered to prevent the army’s approach. These, too, were fired upon, and a wounded Zakzaky was eventually arrested along with his wife, Zeenat.
“At best it was a brutal overreaction and at worst it was a planned attack on the minority Shia group,” said HRW’s Africa director, Daniel Bekele. In a press release, Amnesty International’s Nigeria Director M.K. Ibrahim said, “Whilst the final death toll is unclear, there is no doubt that there has been a substantial loss of life at the hands of the military.”
Zakzaky and his wife remain in custody; “healthy and alive,” according to a police spokesperson. Speaking to NOW Monday, IMN spokesperson Ibrahim Musa complained Zakzaky had been denied access to all visitors, including lawyers and doctors – this despite witness reports he was shot four times in the course of the army operation.
“Nobody has seen him or heard from him,” said Musa. “We believe he’s in a terrible condition that demands medical attention.”
Asked whether he expected Zakzaky to be released soon, Musa replied in the negative, citing a barrage of criticism from officials and local media portraying the IMN as an unruly “state within a state” that threatened national security.
“We think the government has already made up its mind on the followers of Sheikh Ibrahim al-Zakzaky and the Islamic Movement,” Musa told NOW. “And we believe that what is happening now is not just done by the government per se, but it is the Wahhabist Zionist [conspiracy] against the Movement.”
“Follow the teaching of Imam Khomeini”
If Musa’s latter remark carried echoes of Nasrallah’s comment about “Israeli or takfiri hands,” it was not by coincidence. For what binds the IMN with several fellow Shiite groups across Lebanon, Iraq, and beyond are firm political and ideological – and, many analysts believe, organizational and financial – ties to the ruling regime in Tehran. How citizens of Nigeria – a country where Shiite Islam was virtually unknown 40 years ago – came to be part of Iran’s transnational body politic is a story inseparable from the life of a single man: Sheikh Ibrahim al-Zakzaky.
Now 63 years old, Zakzaky has been involved in Islamist activism since his teens in the early 1970s. Born a Sunni Muslim, he began his political life as a devotee of the Muslim Brotherhood, and reportedly maintained relatively amicable relations with the group – whose ranks included Muhammad Yusuf, founder of the jihadist outfit now known as Boko Haram – until the late 1990s. As early as 1980, however, Zakzaky had paid a transformative visit to Iran, where Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had just seized power, after which he would convert to Shiite Islam.
From the mid-80s onwards, Zakzaky’s persistent calls for an emulation of the Iranian Revolution in Nigeria earned him repeated jail sentences, but the momentum behind his Islamic Movement (which split from the Brotherhood following his conversion) only accumulated further with every incarceration. Inspired by Zakzaky, conversions to Shiism have been substantial enough to turn a once-negligible Shiite population into a following estimated anywhere between “tens of thousands” and “3 million.”
Potentially as many as three million Nigerians, that is to say, ostensibly seek to replace their existing republican democracy with wilayat al-faqih; the Iranian model of theocratic government developed by Khomeini and explicitly endorsed on the IMN’s website (adorned with photos of Khomeini and his successor, Khamenei, alongside Zakzaky). In a 2009 address to the Imam Khomeini Conference in London, Zakzaky expounded on his enduring admiration for the late imam:
“The world needs the thoughts of Imam Khomeini […] what remains for the world is to follow the teaching of Imam Khomeini. We cannot talk of Imam Khomeini being a former leader, or an older leader, he’s still the leader, and, praise be to God, he has got a successor in the person of Sayyid Ali Khamenei, may God protect him, where the teaching of the Imam continues as if the Imam himself is [still] alive.”
Beyond commitment to wilayat al-faqih, Zakzaky’s politics might be described as fervently anti-American and anti-Israeli, infused with conspiracy theorism and anti-Semitism. A treatise of his on the subject of “terrorism” posted on the IMN website claims, inter alia, that the US government carried out the 9/11 attacks; the Spanish government carried out the 2004 Madrid train bombings; and the CIA assassinated President John F. Kennedy. It also asserts that “nobody denies the fact” that “not a single Jew was killed” on 9/11 (the “beneficiary” of the Iraq war, he once told an interviewer, was “international Jewry”). As for Israel, “all the citizens, 100% of them are terrorists.”
No great surprise then, perhaps, that besides London Zakzaky’s recent travel destinations include Lebanon, which he visited last year; touring Hezbollah-operated sites (including the Martyrs of the Resistance Graveyard, the former Khiam prison, and the Resistance Museum in Mleeta); attending the ‘International Union of Resistance’ conference; and sitting down for a lengthy interview with Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV (in which, seeking to link events in Africa with those in the Middle East, he said ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, Boko Haram, and the Al-Shabaab jihadists of Somalia were all “hired” by “the West and Israel”).
A Nigerian Hezbollah?
This history of contacts with Hezbollah (an IMN delegation also met Party officials in Beirut in 2012) raises questions about potential militarization of their clash with the Nigerian state. Musa, the IMN spokesperson, insisted to NOW that their relations with Hezbollah were purely a matter of “common views;” nothing at all “financial or military or something like that.”
Yet in 2013, the Nigerian army uncovered a weapons storage facility owned by a Lebanese national, Talal Ahmad Roda, in the city of Kano, around 160km northeast of Zaria. According to Nigerian court papers, Roda and two other Lebanese nationals arrested with him confessed to being part of a Hezbollah cell in the country. Roda was given a life sentence for illegal arms possession (only to be released in January 2015), but the others were cleared of terrorism charges on the grounds that Hezbollah is not deemed a terrorist organization under Nigerian law. Nonetheless, in February 2015 the US Treasury Department sanctioned two of the three – Mustapha Fawaz and Abdallah Tahini – along with Fawaz’ brother, Fouzi, for alleged paramilitary and fundraising activities on behalf of Hezbollah in Nigeria.
Musa told NOW the IMN “doesn’t have any connection” with the sizeable Lebanese community in Nigeria. Security analysts in the country, however, said the very opposite.
“The Nigerian State has a trove of information linking the IMN with hundreds of Lebanese who are resident in Nigeria, especially Lebanese based in Kano,” Cheta Nwanze, head of research at SBM Intelligence, told NOW. “They strongly believe that this is a basis for coordination with the Hezbollah in Lebanon.”
As such, in the wake of last month’s Zaria killings, fears are on the rise in Nigeria that the IMN could – with the help of Hezbollah – soon develop a full-fledged military wing. The Movement has already, in fact, been accused of sporadic, low-level militancy for several years; mostly directed against Sunni rivals. A leaked US embassy cable dated February 2008 claimed “IMN training camps exist in the North,” though the author, then-ambassador Robin Sanders, did not at the time believe there was a “significant threat of Shia-inspired militancy.” Today, facing attacks from both the state and Boko Haram jihadists – who killed 22 IMN members marching in Kano on the Shiite religious occasion of Ashura in November 2015 with a suicide bombing – analysts worry an IMN insurgency is no longer so remote a prospect.
“Further actions against Zakzaky and his supporters, particularly if they fall outside of the ambit of the law, could see the IMN, as was the case with Boko Haram, express their grievances against the Nigerian state in the most violent of manners,” Ryan Cummings, chief Africa analyst at red24, wrote last week.
Needless to say, with an all-out insurrection by Boko Haram – which renamed itself Wilayat Gharb Ifriqiya (“West Africa Province”) following its March 2015 pledge of allegiance to ISIS – already ravaging Nigeria’s northeast, the possibility of the IMN launching its own rebellion in adjacent territory is one analysts dread considerably.
“The Nigerian military is already stretched fighting Boko Haram, there is violence in the North Central and there is a possibility of an insurgency resurfacing in the Niger Delta when the Presidential Amnesty Programme ends in a matter of a fortnight,” wrote Nwanze on the SBM Intelligence website. “Adding a die-hard Shi’a insurgency with millions of adherents in the heart of Nigeria is a recipe for disaster that Nigeria can ill afford.”
All eyes on Iran
Ultimately, analysts say, the decisive variable in the equation is Iran, the state that backs Hezbollah, and, whatever IMN’s protestations to the contrary, has backed the Movement in one way or another since Zakzaky’s conversion in the early ‘80s. If Iran wants the situation to deteriorate – for “a small matter [to] degenerate into a bigger one,” in President Rouhani’s rather forthright phrasing – then, the argument goes, it will do so.
