Introduction

Boko Haram, a diffuse Islamist sect, has attacked Nigeria’s police and military, rival clerics, politicians, schools, religious buildings, public institutions, and civilians with increasing regularity since 2009. Some experts view the group as an armed revolt against government corruption, abusive security forces, and widening regional economic disparity in an already impoverished country. They argue that Abuja should do more to address the strife between the disaffected Muslim north and the Christian south.

The U.S. Department of State designated Boko Haram a foreign terrorist organization in 2013. Boko Haram’s brutal campaign includes a suicide attack on a United Nations building in Abuja in 2011, repeated attacks that have killed dozens of students, burning of villages, ties to regional terror groups, and the abduction of more than two hundred girls in 2014. The Nigerian government hasn’t been able to quell the insurgency.



The Road to Radicalization

Boko Haram was created in 2002 in Maiduguri, the capital of the northeastern state of Borno, by Islamist cleric Mohammed Yusuf, who led a group of radical Islamist youth in the 1990s. The group aims to establish a fully Islamic state in Nigeria, including the implementation of criminal sharia courts across the country. Paul Lubeck, a University of California professor studying Muslim societies in Africa, says Yusuf was a trained Salafist (an adherent of a school of thought often associated with jihad), and was strongly influenced by Ibn Taymiyyah, a fourteenth-century legal scholar who Islamic fundamentalism and is an important figure for radical groups in the Middle East.

Boko Haram is so diffuse that fighters associated with it don’t necessarily follow Salafi doctrine.

The sect calls itself Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati Wal-Jihad, or “people committed to the propagation of the Prophet’s teachings and jihad.” It is widely known as Boko Haram, which is colloquially translated as “Western education is sin” for the group’s rejection of Western concepts such as evolution and the big bang theory.

Before 2009, the group did not aim to violently overthrow the government. Yusuf criticized northern Muslims for participating in what he saw as an illegitimate, non-Islamic state and preached a doctrine of withdrawal. But violent clashes between Christians and Muslims and harsh government treatment, including pervasive police brutality, encouraged the group to radicalize. Boko Haram’s hundreds of followers, also called Yusuffiya, consist largely of impoverished northern Islamic students and clerics, as well as professionals, many of whom are unemployed.

In July 2009, Boko Haram members refused to follow a motorbike helmet law, leading to heavy-handed police tactics that set off an armed uprising in the northern state of Bauchi and spread into the states of Borno, Yobe, and Kano. The incident was suppressed by the army and left more than eight hundred dead. It also led to the televised execution of Yusuf, as well as the deaths of his father-in-law and other sect members, which human rights advocates consider to be extrajudicial killings. In the aftermath of the 2009 unrest, “an Islamist insurrection under a splintered leadership” emerged, says Lubeck. Boko Haram carried out a number of suicide bombings and assassinations from Maiduguri to Abuja and staged a prison break in Bauchi, freeing more than seven hundred inmates in 2010.

Attacks continued to escalate, and by 2013 some analysts began to see greater influence by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Boko Haram operations. Terrorist acts against civilians, like the murder of sixty-five students while they slept at the agricultural college in Yobe state in September 2013, chainsaw beheadings of truck drivers, and the killing of hundreds on the roads of northern Nigeria raised doubts about the central government’s ability to control territory and amplified fears of protracted violence in the country. Violence returned to Abuja in April 2014 with the bombing of a bus station that killed nearly one hundred people, followed by the abduction of more than two hundred schoolgirls in northeastern Nigeria. Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said he planned to “sell” the girls in the market.

Nigeria assembled a joint task force (JTF) of military and police units to battle Boko Haram and declared a “state of emergency” in three northeast states—Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa—in May 2013. The move pushed the militants out of cities, but attacks in rural areas continued [PDF]. The JTF, augmented by vigilantes who were folded into officially sanctioned civilian JTF units, have been implicated in extrajudicial killings of militants and civilians, which may have galvanized support for the insurgents.

Boko Haram is so diffuse that fighters associated with it don’t necessarily follow Salafi doctrine. Many foot soldiers are drawn from impoverished, religiously uneducated youth, according to Jacob Zenn, an African affairs analyst at the Jamestown Foundation. Some fighters claim to have been trained in Iran and are part of a Shiite Muslim group, Zenn writes, while others were involved in other conflicts in Nigeria and the Sahel region and are now caught up in the latest violent extremist group.


Rising Against the State

The Nigerian government’s assessment that Boko Haram was an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist movement left it with few options other than using force to deal with the group. Analysts say the focus on a link to international terrorist organizations ignores the context in which Boko Haram emerged and emphasizes security issues that may only radicalize the group further.

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