Boko Haram Insurgency Begins
Boko Haram, a Salafi-jihadist movement whose name is glossed as 'Western education is forbidden', emerged in Borno State in the 2000s preaching against the secular Nigerian state and the corruption of its elites. After the extrajudicial killing of its founder Mohammed Yusuf in police custody in 2009, the group re-formed under Abubakar Shekau as a violent insurgency, launching bombings, assassinations, and mass-casualty attacks across the northeast. By the mid-2010s the insurgency had become a full-scale internal armed conflict: Boko Haram controlled territory the size of a small country, declared allegiance to the Islamic State (as ISWAP), and carried out atrocities including the 2014 abduction of more than 270 schoolgirls from Chibok. Tens of thousands were killed and over two million displaced across Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon. Structurally the insurgency was an organised armed faction fighting the state for control of territory and a competing political-religious order — a civil war in archetype terms. It fed on the same conditions that drove the earlier Sharia crisis: extreme poverty in the north, a youth bulge with few prospects, weak state institutions, and resentment of a southern-dominated federal centre that captured the country's oil revenue. It remains one of the central drivers of Nigerian instability.
- Year: 2009 CE
- Category: Political
