of the violence and kicking the interest of international intelligence agencies into high gear.
The first wave of attacks ended shortly after Damaturu. A month later, the police produced a man named Sheikh Muhiddeen Abdullahi, who was announced as the group’s mastermind and primary funder. Abdullahi was Sudanese and had worked in Nigeria as a representative of Al Muntada, an international Islamic charity based in London with ties to Saudi donors and a history of rumored (but mostly unsubstantiated) connections to terrorist groups. Subsequent inquiries found scant evidence of any direct involvement but some that Al Muntada had sponsored mosques in which Hijra Group (and later Boko Haram) members preached. While security forces followed up Abdullahi’s arrest with a declaration of victory, he was never tried and was later quietly released.
In September 2004, the “Taliban” reemerged near Bama and Gwoza in Borno State on the Cameroon border. Once again, they targeted police stations and were pursued by federal forces who announced inflated death counts following a series of indecisive engagements. By this time, authorities had also identified one of the group’s main leaders, a man named Muhammad Ali (sometimes Alli), a former student at the Islamic University of Khartoum and a Maiduguri native. In 2014, the International Crisis Group (ICG) issued a bombshell report that linked Ali to Osama bin Laden, whose February 2003 audio message had declared Nigeria to be one of the most “qualified regions for liberation” by jihad.1 Based on interviews with alleged Boko Haram participants (and later confirmed in its broad strokes by correspondence recovered by US forces during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden), the ICG claimed that in 2002 Ali returned to Nigeria with $3 million from bin Laden’s organization as “seed money” to establish an al-Qaeda cell.
Among the recipients of this funding, the ICG suggested, was a local Salafi cleric named Mohammed Yusuf. Yusuf was well known for both his preaching and his relationship with Sheikh Ja’afar Mahmoud Adam, arguably the most prominent Salafi thinker in Nigeria at the time. Yusuf was not at Kanama during the conflict, and his personal connections to those who were remain a matter of speculation. We do know that he preached at the Alhaji Mohammed Ndimi Mosque in Maiduguri, where Ali and some of the other Hijra Group members worshipped. Eventually some former members of the “Taliban” fell back into Yusuf’s orbit, part of a new movement eventually known as the Yusufiyya.2
Ali was most likely killed during or shortly after the events at Kanama. The remaining members scattered during an October 2004 artillery barrage on their hideouts along the Cameroon border, and after that little was heard of them. Local authorities were eager for the story to die down, and state security agencies alternated between taking credit for “crushing” the group and avoiding any explanation of how they had allowed it to emerge in the first place. For the moment, peace returned.
What Boko Haram Is—and Is Not
With Boko Haram rated in 2015 by the Global Terrorism Index as the world’s deadliest terrorist organization, there has been no shortage of explanations for its bloody success. Three are especially important. First, as part of a region—the Sahel—considered one of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, northern Nigeria has poverty and weak governance that, many argue, make it especially susceptible to extremist violence. Second, security analysts and policymakers immersed in the global war on terror tend to see the group’s rise through a global lens, with special attention to its connections (some shadowy, others more public) to groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), to which a portion of the group first pledged allegiance in March 2015. Third, local Nigerian conspiracy theories about Boko Haram’s under-the-table sponsorship by politicians and military men have circulated for years, part of an effort to place the group’s actions within accepted local notions of how Nigerian politics “works” and who wields “real” power.
What is the truth? Research on the causes of violent extremism finds that simple stories rarely capture the complexities behind how terrorist organizations emerge, recruit, and operate. Take poverty, for example. If poverty were a key driver of violence, Nigeria would be a likely candidate. In 2012, Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics reported that over 60 percent of its citizens lived on less than a dollar a day. And despite more than $600 billion in oil revenue since 1960, many Nigerians lack access to basic social services and infrastructure, such as a steady supply of electricity, safe roads, and effective law enforcement. In the northeast, the story is even bleaker. There the poverty rate was upward of 75 percent before the conflict, and no one is certain how much worse it has gotten. Primary school attendance rates are half those in the rest of the country, and so are average incomes. Childhood vaccination rates hover around 10 percent, and nearly a quarter of children suffered from symptoms of chronic malnutrition even before the conflict. It is not surprising that many domestic and international observers identity the region’s economic circumstances as a key source of Boko Haram’s strength.
The most visible symbol of these challenges are the ten million children—the almajirai—sent away from home to study in informal schools where they memorize the Qur’an and learn the basics of Islamic theology. Although almajirai are technically the responsibility of their parents and teachers, many live in the most extreme poverty. And, indeed, many leading Nigerian public figures, most famously Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, have argued that the almajirai are especially vulnerable to radicalization.
But although this relationship might seem obvious, a growing body of research casts a skeptical light on a simple or straightforward relationship between poverty and terrorism. Not only are the poorest countries around the world not especially likely to suffer from terrorist attacks, but individuals in extreme poverty are not particularly likely to join or even support terrorist groups. Indeed, a surprisingly high proportion of the members of groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS have university and postgraduate educations, particularly in fields such as engineering and medicine. Reports in the aftermath of the Hijra Group’s wild ride suggested that some of its members hailed from the wealthiest families in the region.
These findings line up with what we know about Boko Haram’s efforts to recruit supporters and fighters. From its earliest days, the group has marketed itself as a friend to the poor, targeting young men and families in need of welfare assistance and even extending small business loans to youths willing to aid the cause. Yet researchers who have spoken with former members have found that those who took Boko Haram up on its offers often saw themselves as economically equal to or even better off than their friends and neighbors who resisted.3 In Nigeria as elsewhere, the poorest of the poor do not have a monopoly on feelings of disenfranchisement or a lack of opportunity.
These findings also hold up in the case of the almajirai. The anthropologist Hannah Hoechner has found that for many Muslims, becoming an almajiri is less a choice of poverty and desperation than it might seem. Hoechner’s interviews with with almajirai and their parents find that many of the families who send their children to these schools distrust Western-style, governmentrun education—and for good reason, given its poor quality.4 What limited face-to-face information we have from former fighters confirms that while some almajirai have joined Boko Haram, they make up a small percentage of the group’s membership.5 The idea of a radicalization pipeline running directly from Qur’anic schools into Boko Haram’s clutches is a myth.
There are similar problems with the “international influences” story. To be sure, transnational Islamic extremist groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS have clearly attempted to both influence and take credit for Boko Haram’s rise. Aside from bin Laden’s 2003 declaration that Nigeria was ripe for jihad and the alleged seed money he provided to Mohammed Ali, documents recovered from the al-Qaeda chief’s compound in 2011 suggest that Boko Haram’s leadership had reached out to him as early as 2009. By the early 2010s, US and Nigerian intelligence reports suggest that al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) was providing tangible support, particularly in the form of training members who traveled to camps in AQIM-occupied territory during the 2012–13 crisis in northern Mali. Soon after, both Boko Haram and Ansaru, an AQIM-affiliated Boko
