Understanding Boko Haram

Terrorism and Insurgency in Africa

James J. Hentz, Hussein Solomon, James J. Hentz, Hussein Solomon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315525037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The primary objective of this book is to understand the nature of the Boko Haram insurgency in northeast Nigeria.

Boko Haram's goal of an Islamic Caliphate, starting in the Borno State in the North East that will eventually cover the areas of the former Kanem-Borno Empire, is a rejection of the modern state system forced on it by the West. The central theme of this volume examines the relationship between the failure of the state-building project in Nigeria and the outbreak and nature of insurgency. At the heart of the Boko Haram phenomenon is a country racked with cleavages, making it hard for Nigeria to cohere as a modern state. Part I introduces this theme and places the Boko Haram insurgency in a historical context. There are, however, multiple cleavages in Nigeria ? ethnic, regional, cultural, and religious ? and Part II examines the different state-society dynamics fuelling the conflict. Political grievances are common to every society; however, what gives Boko Haram the space to express such grievances through violence? Importantly, this volume demonstrates that the insurgency is, in fact, a reflection of the hollowness within Nigeria's overall security. Part III looks at the responses to Boko Haram by Nigeria, neighbouring states, and external actors. For Western actors, Boko Haram is seen as part of the "global war on terror" and the fact that it has pledged allegiance to ISIS encourages this framing. However, as the chapters here discuss, this is an over-simplification of Boko Haram and the West needs to address the multiple dimension of Boko Haram.

This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism and political violence, insurgencies, African politics, war and conflict studies, and IR in general.

Part I

The longue durée

2 Boko Haram

A jihadist enigma in Nigeria

Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos

Ilmin boko yana hana ibada

“Western learning hinders Islamic worship.”

Hausa proverb from the period of British colonization

Introduction: the challenges of investigation

Better known under the nickname Boko Haram (“Western education is sacrilege”), the “Sunni Community for the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad” (Jama’atu Ahlis-Sunnah Lidda’awati Wal Jihad) constitutes an enigma and a methodological challenge for researchers. This analysis comes up against military propaganda efforts and stereotypes about a global jihad in the Sahel, especially since one of the factions of the sect paid allegiance to Daesh in 2015 and decided to be called the Islamic State in West Africa (Wilayat Gharb Ifriqiyah). Moreover, restrictions to fieldwork hamper the possibility of cross-checking partial or contradictory information. Instead of trying to gain access to the Borno region where Boko Haram prevails in North-East Nigeria, many observers thus content themselves with recycling comments circulating on the Internet, generally giving preference to whatever stories are taken up and repeated the most by the media.

Ideally, analysis of the group should be based on fieldwork and a sociological investigation of the combatants. Faced with constrained feasibility, I must admit my limits in this respect, all the while arguing a position of caution before drawing hasty conclusions about the internationalization of the sect. My investigative work on the “Talebans of Nigeria,” the seeds of the organization that would later be nicknamed Boko Haram, began in 2005 along the Niger border. It ended in failure. After the extrajudicial killing of the founder of the sect in 2009, my fieldwork led me to Maiduguri, the group’s fiefdom, which I visited several times, with the exception of the period in 2013–2014 when the local airport was attacked and closed by the military. In the course of my investigation, I also met political and religious decision makers in Kano, Zaria and Abuja. In the same vein, I worked out of Diffa in the Republic of Niger, over 100 km north of Maiduguri, to interview refugees, internally displaced persons, Muslim clerics, and security officers. To this corpus should be added 51 interviews with presumed members of the sect in the Koutoukalé and Kollo Prisons in Niger at the beginning of 2015.

Between madness and conspiracy theories

Many analyses of Boko Haram oscillate between two pitfalls: on one hand, the theory of irrationality, which focuses on the group’s brutality and its religious fanaticism, and on the other hand, the conspiracy theory that sees in the sect a well-organized, highly structured group that was planted in Nigeria by al-Qaeda or Daesh. In the first case, the insurgency is reduced to its common law criminal dimension. Boko Haram constitutes a gang of furious madmen, and its combatants kill simply for the pleasure of killing. Beheading is not seen as the political accomplishment of a power of death or life under a strict sharia law, but rather as a sadistic act of cruelty.¹ According to such a theory, the sect falls more in the domain of psychiatry than in the political and military arena, and the speeches of its alleged leader, Abubakar Shekau, demonstrate the total aberration of an obscurantist, incoherent and backward group. Numerous media sources and human rights defense organizations in turn take up this narrative. For example, whatever may be the other merits of its inquiries, Amnesty International paints a portrait of bloodthirsty jihadists and fails to explain that Boko Haram kills civilians in order to dissuade them from informing or from joining the ranks of the governmental militias. Surprisingly, however, the NGO admits that the sect spares the inhabitants of locations that have not formed self-defense groups.²

As another variant of this hypothesis of extreme irrationality, the theory of religious fanaticism focuses on the intrinsic violence in radical Islam. According to Abdulbasit Kassim, for instance, the extrajudicial execution of the founder of Boko Haram, Mohammad Yusuf, only served to precipitate the descent of the group into terrorism.³ The horrendous violence of the sect was genetically programmed in the whims of jihad. Thus the military crackdown on other rebel movements in Nigeria did not provoke similar terrorist retaliations.⁴ During the 2003 and 2007 elections, however, negotiations between the governor of Borno and Mohammad Yusuf showed that the followers of Boko Haram did not envisage only armed struggle to impose their rigorous version of sharia, as with their jihadist predecessors led by Usman dan Fodio in North-West Nigeria in 1804. While he condemned any contact with the civil service, the leader of the sect had, in fact, accepted payment by the local authorities in 2001 to participate in a committee to establish Islamic tribunals. In addition, other fundamentalist sheikhs preached murder, yet their hate speeches did not push their followers to resort to terrorism.⁵

Regarding Boko Haram, the first skirmishes with the security forces were of a low intensity compared to the blind violence stirred up by a thirst for vengeance following the extrajudicial killing of the leader of the sect by the police in Maiduguri in July 2009. A review of these early confrontations illustrates the point. In November 2003, to start with, the founders of a jihadist base at Kanama, on the Niger border, were in fact fanatics who had left Maiduguri because they found Mohammad Yusuf too liberal. Just before the elections of April 2007 in Kano, stories then differed regarding the involvement of Boko Haram in the murder of a fundamentalist sheikh and the coordinated attacks on a suburb, Panshekara, known for its prostitutes and bars.⁶ At the time, rising tensions in Borno also pushed the sect to organize self-defense units. But according to a Maiduguri journalist who was witness to the troubles in July 2009 and spokesman of the Borno governor from April 2011 onwards (and thus hardly suspect of sympathies with the group), Mohammad Yusuf was in fact surpassed by the most radical elements of his sect.⁷ “He, it was believed, was a man who assembled a group that he could not control and, to remain in charge, he had to dance to the tunes of some key subordinates.”⁸

During the uprising of Maiduguri and Bauchi in July 2009, for example, Yusuf opposed the killing by his second-in-command, Abubakar Shekau, of a Protestant pastor who had been found innocent and released, whereas other Muslim clerics and Christians had their throats slit on suspicion of collaborating with the authorities. The crackdown on the sect and the execution of its leader nevertheless pushed Boko Haram to become an underground and terrorist group by favoring the emergence of hawks to the detriment of the doves willing to negotiate with the government.

As opposed to theories of bloodthirsty madness, the conspiracy theory in turn insists on the extreme rationality of a movement that subscribes to the logic of a global jihad and which is plainly connected to the Arab world in a fantasy Islamic International.⁹ Following this school of thought, Boko Haram is an off-shoot of al-Qaeda or Daesh. The professionalization of its terrorist actions proves a direct link as its combatants resort to suicide bombings and Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).¹⁰ In practice, however, the modus operandi of the group is still rudimentary, and the majority of its attacks have been carried out with cheap Chinese motorcycles and arms stolen from Nigerian security forces. The use of IEDs is not just the prerogative of jihadists. In 1968, Christian Biafra secessionists were already producing homemade landmines, called ogbunigwe in the Ibo language. In the case of Boko Haram, the use of IEDs dates to well before the allegiance of the group to Daesh in March 2015. As early as July 19, 2009, for example, nine members of the sect were arrested while assembling explosives in Biu. Two weeks after, in his sermon on Friday, July 21, Mohammad Yusuf was calling for vengeance for a police shooting, the perpetrators of which had remained unpunished since the burial of Boko Haram followers on June 11. That same night, a member of the sect set off a bomb in Unguwa Doki, a district of Maiduguri, and died due to improper handling of his device.¹¹ Like many others after him, the perpetrator of one possible attack disappeared before even being able to detonate his IED.¹²

Another important point to make is that suicide bombings are the weapons of the poor in a low-cost insurgency. It does not require foreign training or importing sophisticated armaments from Libya, Iraq or Saudi Arabia. The explosives being used are generally stolen from Nigerian quarries and mines, particularly in the Middle Belt region. In 2011, the Galtimari presidential inquiry committee thus proposed to amend the 1962 and 1964 laws regulating the certification of mining companies in order to tighten control on their purchases of explosives.¹³ Undoubtedly, suicide bombing, which is a novelty in Nigeria, bears witness to the influence of the modus operandi of a global jihad. However, this does not prove that the insurgents are acting on foreign instruction. In 2015, for example, perpetrators of suicide attacks in Maiduguri were largely widows or young people who desired vengeance to join in paradise their husbands or fathers killed in combat or tortured to death by the army.

An analysis of the sect’s attacks and targets also does not reveal any strategy to destabilize the whole of Nigeria, which is an ally of the West and a large Muslim nation, listed in 2004 by Osama bin Laden when he was looking for opportunities to create regional organizations to combat Crusaders.¹⁴ Virginia Comolli, for instance, states that Abubakar Shekau planned the famous kidnapping of the Chibok schoolgirls in order to embarrass the Nigerian government just before the opening of the World Economic Forum in Abuja in May 2014.¹⁵ In reality, the attack targeted Nigerian soldiers who had run away.¹⁶ The kidnapping was barely prepared and some 50 young girls immediately succeeded in escaping their captors, mostly by jumping from the trucks transporting them. Abubakar Shekau could in no way have known that this incident would gain global attention: just beforehand, his combatants had killed and burned around 60 schoolchildren without the least media attention. A deeper analysis shows that, in general, the sect mainly acted in retaliation, including when it attacked the headquarters of the Nigeria Police in Abuja in 2011 or abducted the French Moulin-Fournier family in Cameroon in 2013.

The speculations of social networks about a premeditated expansion of Boko Haram toward Central Africa, Gambia or the Democratic Republic of Congo deserve to be put into perspective in this regard. Some authors are so obsessed with foreign interference that they confuse everything and claim that Boko Haram hired South African mercenaries who were actually working for the government of President Goodluck Jonathan.¹⁷ In the case of the Republic of Niger, for example, it was alleged that the sect was involved in the attack against the Niamey Prison in June 2013, although in fact it was organized by jihadist groups from Mali. In the same vein, some observers saw the hand of Boko Haram in the anti-Charlie Hebdo riots of January 2015. Sparing the largest mainstream Catholic or Protestant churches in the capital city, which were better protected, the rioters targeted small evangelical houses of worship that were sometimes constructed just in front of mosques. Well planned, these riots were undoubtedly manipulated or, at the very least, exacerbated by opposition parties. But, in Niamey as in Zinder, there was no evidence of Boko Haram combatants from Nigeria. Yet conspiracy theories about a premeditated expansion remain popular because they justify the brutality of military responses, obscure local responsibility in the development of Boko Haram, and bolster authoritarian regimes in the eyes of the international community, notably in Cameroon and in Chad.¹⁸ Thus, during his electoral campaign, the president of Niger, Mahamadou Issoufou, argued that the link between the sect and al-Qaeda and Daesh constituted a “global menace” and proved the existence of a “Terrorist International” that required a large coalition to support his government.¹⁹

Often expressing anti-colonial sentiments, the vox populi has also spread numerous rumors about jihad manipulated by foreign, and more or less invisible, forces. In Nigeria, for example, Northern Muslims are hostile to American imperialism and accused the CIA of having financed the sect in order to tarnish the image of Islam, to justify a military intervention, to facilitate a sectarian...