EXTREMIST GROUPS
Boko Haram is the term used to describe a terrorist organisation which formed in the city of Maiduguri, the capital of the northeastern Nigerian state of Borno.
Borno was under British rule until 1960, and has a history of interethnic and interfaith violence. This includes the civil war of 1967-1970 to rioting by Muslims in 1980 which resulted in 4-5,000 deaths. These indicate long-standing patterns of political violence in the region which is treated with impunity by the state. The area is also riven by social inequalities and extreme poverty, within a period of disruptive urbanisation and political insecurity, marked by violent and corrupt elections.
Although the phrase Boko Haram is widely used to describe this movement, members themselves may use alternative names. Boko Haram reflects a rejection of education, which its members consider sacrilegious. Founder Muhammad Yusuf was inspired by a millenarian Islamic preacher who regarded the reading of any books other than the Qur’an as a sin. Boko Haram also consider Sufis, Shi’ia and mainstream Sunni Muslims as apostates from true Islam. Sufism is a particular target, due to being an influential and well-established branch of Islam in northern Nigeria. Globalisation has also resulted in the redefinition of the Muslim community, increasing solidarity while also spreading extremist rhetoric. According to Olusegun Obasanjo, former president of Nigeria, the organisation recruits illiterate and uneducated children and youths.
Even as a terrorist organisation, Boko Haram is known for its brutality, having killed tens of thousands of civilians and security forces in Nigeria, and carried out several massacres. Their most notorious act was the mass abduction of nearly 300 schoolgirls in Chibok, snatched from their beds on the night before their exams. Yet well before this, Boko Haram were regularly kidnapping young women and forcing them into sexual slavery as ‘wives’ to their fighters.
Originally founded to spread sharia law and challenge corruption through preaching and activism, they grew more radical after 2009, making a decisive turn towards violence following a confrontation with police forces. The Nigerian army were brought in to bolster the struggling police forces, and their operations killed more than 700 followers of Boko Haram and destroyed their headquarters. Their leader was arrested, and died in captivity. His corpse was displayed publicly to humiliate the group. Abubakr Shekau then took leadership of the group, vowing revenge for the killings. He gave the group its first official, Arabic name: Ahl al-Sunna li-l-Da‘wa wa-l-Jihad. The group announced their aim to establish an Islamic caliphate in northeastern Nigeria. This signalled a turn towards extreme violence. From then, the group launched assassinations and liberated former members from prisons. They mounted an attack upon Christians on Christmas Eve 2010, bombing a church and several taverns, and similar attacks at Christmas 2012. In 2011, they bombed the United Nations building in Abuja, killing over 20 people and injuring more than 100. Coordinated attacks in Kano in 2012 killed more than 185 people.
By 2013, it became clear that the Nigerian military were unable to quell Boko Haram’s entrenchment in rural government areas, after they had been expelled from urban areas by vigilantes. Boko Haram developed strongholds, where villagers were forced to follow their brutal version of Islam on pain of death. The military’s attempts to suppress extremism were brutal and indiscriminate. This heightened tensions between the groups, and increased the sense of grievance in the community, likely acting to recruit more disaffected youth towards extremism, and diminishing cooperation with the state from community members.
In the same year, Shekau defied a presidential offer of amnesty for his fighters by mounting a series of coordinated attacks on Bama, a town and local government area in Borno State, destroying buildings and leaving dozens dead. They briefly captured the town, and enacted brutal massacres upon the population. Escalating violence between the military and Boko Haram led to the terrorists killing 1,200 people by the end of the year – some of them in targetted violence against schools. Just as many died of starvation in and illness in refugee camps after fleeing Bama, according to Medicins Sans Frontiers in 2016.
The Nigerian president toughened his response, declaring Boko Haram a terrorist organisation and enacted laws to allow Boko Haram supporters to be prosecuted. However this action, and sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council, had little impact upon Boko Haram’s continued campaign of mayhem. Lacking the coordinated campaigning of other Islamist organisations, Boko Haram has tended towards unstructured violence. Despite its bloodthirsty campaign to occupy territory, it did not establish the trappings of an Islamist state through creating shari’a courts and madrassas.
After the kidnapping of the Chibok schoolgirls in 2014, Boko Haram became notorious on a global scale. Shekau even capitalised on his international notoriety, threatening to sell Barack Obama and Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan as slaves. Due to this attention, Boko Haram’s atrocities became a major electoral issue in Nigeria. Nigeria’s neighbours supported a military campaign to remove Boko Haram from their territories, which had come increasingly under threat as members of the group dispersed. Besides their presence in northeastern Nigeria, Boko Haram were causing disruptions in the neighbouring states of Niger, Cameroon and Chad, all of which have significant Sufi populations. In Cameroon, for instance, they kidnapped the vice-president’s wife and the hereditary Muslim leader of the border town Kolofata.
Over this period, Boko Haram pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, changing its official name to the Islamic State in West Africa (ISWA). This occurred after substantial territorial losses, and the similar linking of the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab with al-Qaida. During this period of retrenchment, Shekau’s control was challenged by Abu Musab al-Barnawi, son of the original founder, who had the support of the Islmaic State. Al-Barnawi protested the impacts of indiscriminate attacks upon Muslims by Skekau, and the impacts of demanding monies from Muslims, as well as declaring them to be apostates which were eroding Boko Haram’s support. Many in the organisation felt that Boko Haram should focus more closely upon violence against Christians and the state rather than against other Muslims. Due to these tensions, the organisation split into two factions after an intense period of debate between the two, engineered by the Islamic State. Al-Barnawi’s faction adopted the new designation, ISWA. Nevertheless, attacks by either faction frequently continue to be attributed to Boko Haram due to the difficulties of distinguishing the two groups.
Abubakar Shekau died in 2021. He activated a suicide bomb during a confrontation with ISWA – under the aegis of the Islamic State – rather than risking being captured alive. This is likely to have left ISWA the dominant faction of the Boko Haram movement. ISWA continue to conduct roadside ambushes. They have organised attacks moving southward into Nigeria, including Abuja, the nation’s capital. ISWA are suspected to have killed 40 Christian worshippers in an attack on an church in June 2022.
By 2019, the president of Nigeria declared Boko Haram ‘technically defeated.’ However, jihadists are able to shelter in impassible forests and swamps, and launch attacks, including seizing the city of Baga by Lake Chad for a fortnight in the same year; their attacks killed over 1700 people in the first half of the year. Despite splits and the combined efforts of various governments, Boko Haram remain resilient. Nigeria’s military are under-equipped, and the state infrastructure is riven with corruption; Boko Haram meanwhile is equipped with a mixture of captured weaponry and vehicles and drones. It is able to access resources for its violence via complicit members of the security forces, its influence with communities and its embeddedness in local and transnational trading networks.
With climate change impacting gravely upon Africa, particularly impacting those living on the margins of Lake Chad, many young men are tempted to join the organisation to access resources. Around 90% of the residents of the Lake Chad Basin are reliant upon agriculture for their survival, and are impacted by the drying of the lake, one of Africa’s largest bodies of water. This erosion of the environment coincides with the massive impacts of Boko Haram’s campaign of violence, making life in the region increasingly marginal. Some two million villagers have been displaced by Boko Haram and many are fearful of returning to their homes. Meanwhile, Borno State confronts the problem of over 90,000 imprisoned Boko Haram members, stretching the capacity of the government to accommodate and rehabilitate them. Nearly half of the primary schools in the state have been destroyed by Boko Haram insurgents, according to the state governor, killing over 530 teachers and making more than 52,000 children orphans. This destitution is a humanitarian disaster, increasing the risk of further radicalisation. Boko Haram’s fighters remain embedded within communities, impossible to detect or bring to justice for the violent offences they have committed. Hence, Boko Haram and its successors remain a significant threat to peace and the security of citizens in Nigeria and its surrounding regions.”