Despite Abuja’s welcome for the designations, Washington has also voiced concern about a heavy-handed crackdown by Nigerian military forces.
“All of our assistance to Nigeria stresses the importance of protecting civilians and ensuring that human rights are respected,” the State Department said.
Both groups were officially designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations which bars any Americans from assisting them as well as freezing any assets in the United States.
President Barack Obama met Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan in September on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly and urged him “to pursue a comprehensive counterterrorism approach,” Monaco said.
Roughly translated, Boko Haram means “Western education is sin,” and the insurgents have been blamed for a series of bloody attacks on schools, killing dozens of children.
An earlier version of the group – known then in local reports as the “Nigerian Taliban” – was formed in 2004 and is now believed to have a number of different factions, with differing aims.
Local and Western analysts have long argued that improving living conditions in the mainly Muslim north holds the key to curbing the insurgency.
Boko Haram is blamed for indiscriminate attacks in Benisheikh, Nigeria in September 2012 in which some 160 people were killed, and was also said to be behind the suicide bombing of a UN building in Abuja in August 2011.
Ansaru has focused attacks on Nigerian military and Western targets, kidnapping several foreigners. They are believed to have been behind the kidnapping of a French family seized on the border of Cameroon and Nigeria in February and released in April.
Representative Chris Smith, who chaired a hearing Wednesday on Boko Haram, welcomed the designation which US lawmakers have long sought.
“What these murderers have brought to Nigeria and surrounding countries is misery and death with no redeeming outcome,” he said.
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