Nigerian Militants Threaten the Country's Oil Industry

Threats against oil infrastructure by a militant group in Nigeria's oil-producing south have once again raised concerns about the reliability of Africa's top oil exporter. The Nigerian militant group Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, commonly known by its acronym MEND, threatened Jan. 27 to attack Nigerian oil infrastructure and halt crude oil production by 2015. The militant group retains the capability to conduct limited attacks against Nigerian military personnel and isolated energy infrastructure, but it no longer possesses the organizational cohesion and covert political backing it had in the mid- to late 2000s that enabled it to disrupt hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil production per day.