Bank Robbery, Kidnapping, Drugs and Guns Fund Boko Haram's Bloody Ventures

Photo Credit: Fox News Dozens of gunmen wearing stolen police and military uniforms descended on the bank in Nigeria’s Yobe province, storming their way inside and forcing the manager at gunpoint to open the vault. As they fled, a security team chased after them, sending bullets flying over the northern town of Gashua.

When the dust settled following the brazen attack in April, 2013, five policemen and 20 gunmen had been killed and Boko Haram had netted $56,000. The attack, one of dozens carried out in the villages of Nigeria’s northern states of Yobe and Borno in recent years, provided one example of how Africa’s most notorious terror group funds its ruthless and bloody operations.

The organization, now believed to be holding nearly 300 Christian school girls it kidnapped a month ago in Chibok, is also into ransoming or selling women and children, and trafficking in drugs and weapons. The money that pours in goes to recruit more young men to fight, buy sophisticated weapons and sustain an army of terrorists who move through the rural hills of Northern Nigeria.

“It is a very well-funded organization, where it has so many sources of income including in Nigeria and that whole region,” Yan St-Pierre, CEO of the Counter-Terrorism Modern Security Consulting Group, told Voice of America.