That oil prices can collapse while bloody militancy ravages three important members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries shows dominance of market fundamentals over geopolitical worry. But geopolitics never can be ignored.
In one troubled country, Libya, civil war keeps oil production gyrating well below potential exceeding 1 million b/d. In Iraq, supply losses are proportionately smaller than those in Libya and intermittent, resulting mostly from spotty attacks on pipelines and other facilities in the north while the main producing areas in the south remain unscathed by Islamic State aggression.
Proximate threat
In the third affected OPEC country, as in Iraq, jihadist violence so far hasn't hurt oil production to the extent it might. Actual disruption to oil supply in Nigeria results mainly from larcenous vandalism of onshore pipelines in the oil-producing south. Much of that is the work of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. The jihadist group active in Nigeria, Boko Haram, terrorizes the impoverished north. Like Islamic State in Iraq, though, it represents a proximate threat to facilities accounting for supply enough to shock the oil market if it suddenly vanished.
Islamic State expansion into Iraq's major oil-producing regions faces natural barriers: Kurdish Peshmerga fighters in the north and Shia resistance in the south. The group's oil-related conquests, some temporary, remain close to its foothold along the Iraq-Syria border. Giant oil fields south of Baghdad seem not to be immediate targets.
Boko Haram, like Islamic State, seeks to establish a regime based on a radical version of Islam, which it invokes in defense of persistent barbarity. Outside Nigeria, the group was relatively unknown until its thugs kidnapped 219 girls from a boarding school in Chibok last April. Although some have escaped, most of the girls remain captive. Abubakar Shekau, Boko Haram's leader, says they're now wives of his warriors or slaves.
Unlike Islamic State, Boko Haram expresses no global ambitions beyond the death of anyone with a contrary view. It specializes in local mass-murder. According to a study by Prof. David Cook of Rice University, mass attacks by Boko Haram, usually on villages, claimed at least 2,053 lives during the first half of this year. On Nov. 29, a suicide bombing of the Great Mosque of Kano, apparently responding to calls by the local emir to resist Boko Haram, killed at least 120.
According to Cook, whose study was published this month by the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice, the group in many ways shadows Islamic State. In August, for example, it claimed to have established a caliphate. Cook suggests the group's success comes from some combination of five factors: poverty in Nigeria's Muslim north, Islamic radicalism, frustrations of the Kanuri people dominant in Borno state and northern Cameroon, emergence as a standard African guerrilla movement, and desertification of northern Nigeria as the climate changes.
Since its beginning in 2009, Boko Haram has progressed from local targets, such as bars and markets selling non-halal meat, to larger establishments, such as churches around Kano and Zaria in northwestern Nigeria, and most recently to concentrations of population promising maximum loss of life. Cook estimates the group has 10,000-15,000 soldiers, possibly as many as 50,000. He says the Nigerian military's response to Boko Haram atrocities, which increasingly involve female suicide bombers, has been impotent and sometimes indifferent.
Aims unclear
Beyond establishing the caliphate and brutally enforcing jihadist Salifism, a branch of traditionalist Islam, Boko Haram's aims are unclear. Cook's study makes clear, though, that the Nigerian government faces an Islamic insurrection with chilling parallels to the Iraqi incursion and has mustered no effective response.
Engines of death and destruction thus rev up in two countries together producing more than 5 million b/d of crude. They represent geopolitical menace able to make supplies from Iraq and Nigeria as unstable as Libya's is now. While fundamentals dominate markets, they can change with the flash of a bomb.
