Boko Haram, Facing Fuel Shortages, Makes Its Own

(The Peninsula/Agence France Presse) Boko Haram has been forced to produce its own fuel to power its motorbikes because of an acute petrol shortage caused by a military squeeze on supply lines.

A senior military source said the Islamists were paying huge sums of money for jerrycans of fuel while a woman who recently escaped from the group said they were making groundnut oil into biodiesel.

"Boko Haram were paying outrageous sums to get fuel and the incredible profit margin made young men defy the risk and take fuel to them," said the source in the Borno state capital, Maiduguri.

"The cutting off of fuel supplies has badly crippled Boko Haram and that has been made possible by blocking all identified supply routes and the crackdown on the suppliers," he told AFP.

Ya-Mairam Ya-Malaye, a 57-year-old mother-of-eight who was among hundreds of women and children abducted from the town of Bama in September 2014, managed to escape Boko Haram last week.

She said the group has devised a crude way of adding salt to oil extracted from groundnuts to make biodiesel for their motorcycles to mount attacks from their Sambisa Forest enclaves in Borno.

"They confiscate the groundnuts (that) farmers in villages in and around Sambisa cultivated all-year-round from their farms and irrigation fields," she explained from Maiduguri.

"They crush the nuts using diesel-powered grinding machines to extract the oil to which they add salt to make it light and combustible."

Boko Haram had been getting fuel from young men who would bring the petrol to designated points near Sambisa (forest) for the fighters to pick, she added. READ MORE and MORE (Inquirer.net)