Join us or die: the birth of Boko Haram
How the tattered remnants of an Islamist sect transformed into a relentless terrorist army that Nigeria cannot defeat
By Andrew Walker

In February 2009, I was at a motor park in Maraba, a satellite of the Nigerian capital Abuja, looking for motorcyclists wearing dried vegetables on their heads. The Nigerian Police Force had recently tightened laws requiring drivers and passengers of motorcycles to wear helmets. In the case of motorcycle taxis – known as achabas in northern Nigeria – drivers would now have to provide helmets for their passengers. There was an uproar. Everyone knew that taking a trip on an achaba could be a dangerous thing; the drivers had a reputation for recklessness. But many Nigerians did not like the new rules.

Above all, the law gave the police an opportunity for extortion. One motorcycle taxi driver told me it was going to cost him 10,000 naira (around £40) to buy two helmets. As he made between 300 and 400 naira per day (less than £2), there was no way he could afford to obey the new law. Everyone knew what would happen. The police would set up flying checkpoints, near markets, motor parks and busy thoroughfares. They would swoop down on motorcyclists, flailing sticks and canes as the riders madly accelerated out of their traps.


People who drive achabas are close to the bottom of society. They are men (and only men) without much formal education, often without any other marketable skill. Many sleep rough, under bridges or awnings, some sleep on their motorcycles, guarding their source of income. Their passengers are also mostly poor. The vast number of achabas on the roads is a symptom of Nigeria’s economic problems. The new helmet law was, in the minds of most, just another squeeze on people already in perilous circumstances.

When the regulations came into force, something strange happened. As hardly anyone had helmets to wear, achaba drivers took to the streets in all manner of improvised headgear. There were pictures in the press of people wearing paint cans and buckets; but best of all were riders wearing hollowed-out watermelons and calabash bowls – rustic utensils made out of dried gourds that, before the advent of plastic, were ubiquitous as water vessels.

These achaba drivers had stood up against barely disguised official extortion. Their resistance was characteristically subversive. But most Nigerians simply added the new legislation to the long list of things that made their lives difficult – then they prayed, hoped the police would quickly lose interest and carried on as normal.

In one part of the country, however, this cat-and-mouse game between police and Nigerian motorists would have much more serious consequences. In Maiduguri, the capital of the north-eastern Borno state, enforcement of the helmet law caused an incident that would spark a violent conflict between the police and members of a radical Islamist sect that was then unknown to the world. This, in turn, would pitch Nigeria into war.

In one part of the country this cat-and-mouse game between police and Nigerian motorists would have serious consequences

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Two years later, I watched as a slight young man entered the office of Maiduguri’s Special Armed Robbery Squad. The building is known locally as “The Crack”, ostensibly because it houses the elite police force. It is also a place from where, once a person falls in, they might never emerge.

The young man, whose name was Mohammed Zakariyya, was led inside by two plainclothes officers. He had been arrested a few days before, after the car he was driving was stopped at a police checkpoint. He was thin and looked to be barely more than a teenager. His long pink, kaftan-like shirt was dirty and flecked with small spots of dried blood.

“They discovered the weapons we had hidden underneath the seat,” Zakariyya told me and my fellow BBC journalist, Abdullahi Kaura Abubakar. When his companion was ordered out of the vehicle to let the police search it, he tried to drive off. The Police Mobile Force officers opened fire, killing him. (The red hatchback, now full of holes, sat in the yard of the Borno police headquarters.)

Zakariyya said that he had been on three arms smuggling missions. Each time, he and his accomplices drove 120km out of Maiduguri to meet a man who ferried weapons in a canoe downriver from the mountainous border with Cameroon. Each time, he brought them half-a-dozen AK-47s and a handful of boxes of ammunition. They loaded the car, then Zakariyya drove it through Maiduguri to a large house in the suburbs of Damaturu, the capital of the neighbouring state of Yobe.

The men he was working for had approached Zakariyya at the end of 2010 while he was selling shoes and phone chargers. “They used to preach in the open, so everyone was aware of who they were,” he said.
Weapons seized from Boko Haram by the Nigerian military.

“They” were members of the hardline Islamist sect that had established itself between 2005 and 2009 at a compound in Maiduguri’s Railway district. Known as Boko Haram, which translates as “Western education is forbidden”, the group had gradually brought more and more people under its influence.

The man we had come to Maiduguri to speak with was a member who called himself Abu Dujana – his nom de guerre was taken from one of the companions of the prophet Muhammad. He described the atmosphere of the sect’s Maiduguri headquarters in cult-like terms. The pace of life inside was dictated by the charismatic leader Mohammed Yusuf, who set and enforced strict standards of religious practice. “Yes, I lived there,” Abu Dujana said proudly. “There wasn’t a mosque like this in the whole of the country, where you could go and attain as much knowledge.”

On 20 February 2009, members of the sect were travelling to a funeral in a large group. The convoy was made up of many motorbikes, and the police stopped them. The police were part of a state-wide task force, named Operation Flush and set up in 2005 to combat political thugs who had run amok in elections two years before. The dispute between the group and the police about their refusal to wear helmets became heated. Some reports of the exchange say that the police shot first, others that a member of the group disarmed a policeman and tried to use his weapon on the other police officers. In any case, the police opened fire, and several people in the travelling funeral party were killed and wounded.

This was not the first time that Operation Flush had crossed paths with Boko Haram, and the group’s leadership had already concluded that the purpose of the Joint Task Force was to harass them directly. In the weeks following this encounter, Yusuf made a series of speeches, circulated widely on tapes and DVDs and over Bluetooth connections, calling on Muslims to prepare to “come to Jihad”. This, he said, included “material preparation such as learning shooting, buying rifles and bombs, as well as training the Islamic Soldiers to fight the infidels. You should sacrifice your souls, your homes, your cars and your motorcycles for the sake of Allah.”
Nigerian army storms Islamist sect's base

Yusuf also had a large farm in Bauchi state, which he used as a base. The state government responded to these speeches by ordering the police to raid the farm, capturing hundreds of Boko Haram members and killing several more. The police laid siege to the sect’s headquarters in the Ibn Taymiyyah mosque compound in Maiduguri. “They did not engage us fully, but tried to provoke us, driving along the side of the compound in a jeep,” Dujana told me. “We waited until we had our chance and then we took it.”

When they saw the state’s forces had pulled back and commenced shooting at them from a distance, the men inside armed themselves and broke out of the compound. Dujana said they split into groups – he led one detachment, which roamed the city looking for military and police units to attack. For four days Boko Haram rampaged through the streets of Maiduguri. As well as killing police and soldiers, they slaughtered scores of civilians who were caught out in the open, slitting their throats like animals.
The Borno state task force, Operation Flush, stands guard during a religious celebration in Maiduguri, in 2013.

The Borno state task force, Operation Flush, stands guard during a religious celebration in Maiduguri, in 2013. Photograph: Sunday Alamba/AP

As the authorities re-established control of the town, Mohammed Yusuf was captured by the military. He was interrogated in front of journalists who filmed it with their phones. He was then handed over to the police. Within minutes, Yusuf was dead – shot, the police said, while trying to escape. Nobody believed this. Yusuf’s bullet-ridden body was then displayed to journalists, who took pictures.

This was just the beginning of a tide of violence that has left thousands of people dead and at least 1.5 million people displaced from their homes. Seven years after Yusuf’s killing, the war between Boko Haram and the Nigerian state has changed and developed. From late 2014 to early 2015, the sect controlled an estimated 70% of Borno state – the authorities, meanwhile, seemed incapable of dislodging it.

After his election in 2015, President Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress party tried to reinvigorate the military leadership by replacing a number of top generals. This, he hoped, would bolster the state’s response to Boko Haram. By August 2015, the military had reversed many of the group’s gains and pushed it back to more remote areas. But the war is by no means finished.
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In November, during attacks 48 hours apart, suicide bombers killed scores in the eastern city of Yola and Kano in the north, targets that lie hundreds of miles apart. These attacks show the extent of the group’s reach, even outside the area it once controlled. There have been continual, under-reported, skirmishes in the border regions of north-east Nigeria. Just last Friday, on 29 January, the group launched an attack on Dalori, a small town close to Maiduguri. As many as 80 people were killed. Witnesses said they heard the screams of dying children as their houses burned down around them. These attacks are in spite of Buhari’s announcement in December that the war was “technically over”.
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Further reading...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/04/join-us-or-die-birth-of-boko-haram

The fight with boko haram is no way over. But I think the ability of the group to over ran the armed forces and take control of towns and cities, and putting the army on the run is over.
The government need to carefully watch the Shiite to avoid even a splinter group metarmophosing into an armed group like boko harms.

Very hard for our local media to produce this kind of work. Them no gat time. Sometimes I wonder if oyibo know us more than we know ourselves.