The group has since been pushed back with the help of offensives launched by troops from Chad and Niger while Cameroon has fought off militants along its borders.
Many of the retreating militants have murdered their so-called "wives" – the women and girls they held as slaves – and other captives as military offensives by Nigeria and its neighbours advanced, al-Hussein said.
"Offensives by the military forces of neighbouring countries have helped to overstretch the insurgents and thus undermine their ability to withstand Nigerian military offensives," he added.
The cartel is one of Mexico's newer organized criminal gangs, formed in 2010 from the remnants of older groups that fell apart after their leaders were captured in earlier offensives.
Scorched-earth offensives starved them off their land: since hunting them down was too time-consuming, one white soldier wrote, "It was therefore decided that the best policy was to destroy their huts and stores, with a view of starving them out".
Despite at least three army offensives and peace deals with the Mehsud and other militants, the region has been a jihadist haven, more or less, since 2001.
As ISIS, which is led by Iraqi veterans of al-Qaeda and largely manned by foreign fighters, has retreated to a stronghold around the city of Raqqa in north-central Syria, nationalist rebel groups have resumed local offensives.
Also known as Jorge Briceño, he is believed to have been behind the FARC's direct offensives against army posts in the early 1990s, a wave of kidnappings of politicians and many of the organisation's cocaine-trafficking operations.Since Juan Manuel Santos was sworn in as Colombia's president last month, the FARC had stepped up attacks on the military as a show of strength to the new government.
And I regret to say they are doing so with increased support from Iran, from Hizbullah and from Russia .Backed by Hizbullah, the Lebanese Shia movement, Mr Assad's army has stepped up offensives in Qalamoun and Yabrud, close to the border with Lebanon.
It was no comfort that North Korea pulled out of military-to-military talks with the south on February 9th, even though, as one official put it, weeks before it had been engaged in "peace offensives" with all-and-sundry.
On May 6th the court noted that "every order was consistently and systematically disobeyed", that the pleas mounted by Sahara were "patently false" and that it had subjected the court to "calculated psychological offensives and mind games".Yet Sahara's finances remain a mystery.
