Boko Haram Insurgency Begins
Boko Haram turned from a sect into an insurgency in 2009 after the police killed its founder in custody. Mohammed Yusuf had built a following in Maiduguri in Borno state from about 2002 around a rejection of Western education and secular government — the name Boko Haram is a Hausa and Arabic phrase meaning roughly that Western schooling is forbidden, and it was applied by outsiders. The appeal was material as much as doctrinal in a region with the worst poverty, literacy and health indicators in Nigeria and a state apparatus that residents encountered mainly through extortion. A confrontation over motorcycle helmet laws in July 2009 escalated into five days of fighting in which some 700 people were killed, and Yusuf was arrested by the army, handed to the police and shot. The video was on the internet within days. What re-emerged in 2010 under Abubakar Shekau was a different organisation: bombings in Abuja and Kano, attacks on churches and mosques, mass killings in villages, and from 2013 the seizure of territory in the north-east. The abduction of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok in April 2014 produced a global campaign and did not produce most of the girls. Some 35,000 people have died and over two million have been displaced. The group pledged allegiance to Islamic State in 2015 and split in 2016 over the killing of Muslim civilians. Shekau blew himself up in 2021 when the rival faction cornered him. The insurgency has also crossed into Niger, Chad and Cameroon and drawn all three into a regional force. Nigeria's north-east remains among the largest humanitarian emergencies in the world, and the schools the group set out to close have in many districts been closed by the fighting.
- Year: 2009 CE
- Category: Political
