The raids, carried out by criminal groups locally known as bandits, targeted villages in Sokoto State on Thursday, following several days of deadly assaults in the country’s predominantly Muslim north.

Ahmad Yahaya, a community leader in Dan Adua village, said at least 12 people were killed and 43 abducted across Isa and Sabon Birni local government areas during the attacks. He said heavily armed gunmen carried out the raids.

Lawmaker Muhammad Saidu Bargaja, who represents the affected areas, confirmed the violence, reporting similar casualty figures and describing the security situation as “highly devastating.”

The districts are believed to be under the influence of Bello Turji, a notorious gang leader whose network imposes levies on communities and conducts retaliatory raids against those who refuse to comply.

The latest violence comes amid a wider escalation of attacks by both criminal gangs and jihadist groups. Earlier in the week, a senior military officer, Brigadier General Oseni Omoh Braimah, was killed along with several troops during an overnight assault on a military base in northeastern Nigeria, according to local officials and intelligence sources.

Separate attacks in the northwestern states of Kebbi and Niger have also left at least 90 people dead since Sunday, based on figures from local authorities, humanitarian groups and church sources.

The surge underscores ongoing security challenges in northern Nigeria, where armed groups continue to target civilians, security forces and infrastructure despite military operations aimed at curbing the violence.

As the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia has erupted once again, with Turkey displaying immediate bias toward Azerbaijan, some anticipate that the future of the conflict in the Caucasus will see a 2+2+1 alliance formula: Azerbaijan and Turkey versus Armenia and Iran, with Russia acting as a mediator, though showing bias toward Armenia.

This alliance formula is due to the nature of the Turkish-Iranian rivalry in the Caucasus and Iran’s desire not to allow Azerbaijan to emerge as a powerful nation, recapture its territories, ally with Turkey and control the most important project to transfer gas and oil from the Caucasus to Europe — the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. However, a number of variables have contributed to Iran not adopting this formula and instead announcing a neutral official position, making only slight changes to the rhetoric it has adopted in relation to the conflict.

The official Iranian rhetoric has always called for the dispute to be settled via negotiations, without showing much enthusiasm toward the Azerbaijani position. It has also attempted to act as a mediator. But Russia refuses to let Iran serve as a mediator at the official level, insisting that the Minsk Group, which functions under the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, acts as the official mediator. Moscow co-chairs the Minsk Group in partnership with the US and France.

Meanwhile, Azerbaijan believes that Iran’s neutrality is questionable, given the significant economic cooperation between Iran and Armenia, especially after the construction of a gas pipeline between the two countries, which was inaugurated in 2007, and Tehran’s implementation of road projects within the Azerbaijani territories that are occupied by Armenia.

After the conflict erupted once again on Sept. 27, Iran only belatedly issued its first statement on the ongoing fighting; unlike the Turks, who immediately stated their position, standing firmly behind Azerbaijan. The first Iranian statement made use of the same rhetoric as past statements issued when such fighting broke out. It called for the conflict to end and for the warring parties to engage in negotiations. However, the official Iranian rhetoric swiftly changed, with Tehran mentioning Azerbaijan’s right to retrieve its entire territories that were occupied in 1994. This rhetoric had never emanated from Iran before.

There are several variables that contributed to Iran shifting its rhetoric. Perhaps a primary issue was Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev announcing his two conditions to stop the fighting: Armenia returning Azerbaijani territories and Turkey partaking in the negotiations as a mediator. There is no doubt that the second condition would threaten Iran’s standing in the Caucasus and deepen the Turkish presence in the region. By seeking to woo Azerbaijan via its official statements, Iran wanted Baku to ease its opposition to allowing it to participate as a mediator. This is because it is expected Armenia will veto Turkey’s participation as a mediator, resulting in the need for others to get involved.

The second variable is Iran’s concern about the possible expansion of Azeri protests within its borders. This minority makes up 20 percent of Iran’s population and they support Azerbaijan in its quest to recapture its territories. This concern deepened when a number of Azerbaijanis protested in front of the Iranian Embassy in Baku, chanting: “Persians, Russians and Armenians are the enemies of us and the Turks.”

This is in addition to protests inside Iranian Azeri-majority cities like Tabriz and Ardabil, which denounced Iran’s support for Armenia. These protests pose a threat to Iran’s domestic security and could lead to the Azeri minority taking action against the regime in Tehran.

To calm the situation and mollify the Iranian Azeris’ resentment, deputies of the supreme leader in the four Azeri-majority provinces of Zanjan, Ardabil, East Azerbaijan and West Azerbaijan announced that Iran is supportive of Azerbaijan. They stated that Iranian territories would not be used to deliver Russian weapons to Armenia.

It seems that the idea of Iran passing Russian weapons on to Armenia has some basis. Russia shares no land borders with Armenia. They are separated by Georgia, which has massive economic interests in Azerbaijan, as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline passes through Georgian territory on its way to the Turkish coast. This is in addition to the Russian-Georgian dispute over the two regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

In contrast, Iran is directly connected to Russia via the Caspian Sea and is connected to Armenia by land via the Meghri corridor. Due to the military alliance between Russia and Iran and Moscow’s previous use of Iranian airports during the Syrian war, suspicions have grown about the Russians using Iranian territory to provide Armenia with weapons.

The third variable, which is dominating the Iranian mindset, is the reported Azerbaijani use of militias made up of Syrians transferred by Turkey to Azeri territories from both Syria and Libya. There is no doubt that these militias will pose an imminent danger to Iran after the fighting stops if Turkey does not take them back to Syria. Many of these militias believe that their No. 1 enemy is Iran, not Russia, Armenia or even Bashar Assad. Hence, Iran will bear the brunt of this use of militias — a weapon it has been solidifying and using itself in many Middle Eastern disputes.

Therefore, Iran demonstrating some degree of sympathy with Azerbaijan and its ally Turkey may be to safeguard itself from the militias stationed a stone’s throw away from its borders. These groups are sufficiently combat-ready to engage in guerrilla warfare within Iran, just like the Fatemiyoun and Zainabiyoun militias, which Iran brought from Afghanistan and Pakistan, respectively, to battle the Syrian opposition.

Article first published on Arab News.

Dr. Mohammed Al-Sulami is Head of the International Institute for Iranian Studies (Rasanah). He tweets under @mohalsulami.

The MB capitalized on the victim card to retain and expand their place in Europe…

While the Muslim Brotherhood’s (MB) radical ideas have shaped the beliefs of generations of Islamists, Jihadists and terrorists groups, over the past seven years, it has lost some of its power and appeal in the Middle East, crushed by swift decisive political and security awareness from A4 governments.

Since the MB rise to power in Egypt and snubbing by younger generations of Non-Islamists who helped bring them to power, the MB lost credibility as the driving force for change in the Middle East, in fact they became a full fledged dictatorship.

But the Middle East is only one scene of the Muslim world domination plan in their pursuit to restoring the Ottoman Empire.

Europe has become an incubator for Islamist thought and political development. Since the early 1960s, MB members and sympathizers have moved to Europe and slowly but steadily established a wide and well-organized network of mosques, charities, and Islamic organizations.

Unlike the larger Islamic community, the Muslim Brotherhood’s ultimate goal is not helping Muslims be the best citizens they can be, but rather to extend Islamist ideology throughout Europe and the United States and infiltrate judiciary and legislative branches of governments.

Through four decades of teaching, grooming and cultivation paid off. The student refugees who migrated from the Middle East forty years ago and their descendants now lead organizations that represent the local Muslim communities in their engagement with Europe’s political elite, funded by diverted charity money and generous contributors from their wealthy members and others working in the Arabian Gulf States, they preside over a centralized network that spans nearly every European country.

These Muslim Brotherhood represent themselves as mainstream tolerant Muslims, even as they continue to embrace the Islamist radical views and maintain links to terrorists.

The Islamist grew their influence by maintaining false moderate rhetoric and well-spoken German, Dutch, and French, they have gained acceptance among European governments and media alike.

Politicians across the political spectrum rush to engage them whenever an issue involving Muslims arises or, the MB successfully started gaining positions in the political scene as aids and allies the political elite rely on to secure votes of the Muslim community.

But those tolerant and peace loving Islamist drop their facade and embrace radicalism when speaking Arabic or Turkish in front of their followers. While their “face” representatives like community leaders, future politicians and influential figures speak about interfaith dialogue and integration on television, their mosques preach hate and radicalized worshippers using the evil west analogy while they publicly condemn the terrorist attacks, they continue to raise money for Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations.

MB capitalize on Europeans, eagerness to create a dialogue with their Muslim communities, political correctness forced politicians to overlook this duplicity in fear of cancel culture, that’s particularly visible in Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

The MB capitalized on the victim card to retain and expand their place in Europe, the MB slowly but surely started to rebranding themselves distancing themselves from extremist groups and Islamist labels in public and sticking to it secretly.

What sets the MB apart from other political groups is their ability to adapt, circumvent, absorb crises and move towards new paths for it through their deep theoretical and ideological beliefs and its Machiavellian focus on the end that justifies the means.

From decline in Egypt and Syria in the 1960s to renewed activity in Europe and GCC states via old platforms such as the Islamic Group in Germany (GID) that was founded in 1958. The German branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe founded by the MB Godfather in Europe the son-in-law of Hassan al-Banna, Said Ramadan in 1958, and was chaired by the German-Egyptian Ibrahim Al-Zayat.

The Federation of “Islamic” Organizations in France, which was established in 1989 and the existing formations as well as some new pocket organizations funded by the State of Qatar in the early 2000s and indirectly managed by the Brotherhood, such as the ANELD Fund which was established and funded by Qatar with a total of one hundred million euros in coordination with the French government, to finance entrepreneurship projects for “Muslims” in the most marginalized suburbs of Paris that successfully lured the children of immigrants from the second and third generations into the fold of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Now you know, now the truth is out, what will you do?

Khaled Homoud Alshareef holds PhD in Business and he earned Masters in Philosophy. He often writes about Islamism, Islamist factions and modern Terrorism. He tweets under @0khalodi0.