and reports that his followers were stockpiling weapons in preparation for jihad. Tensions finally came to a head in July 2009 when members of the group battled police and soldiers in Maiduguri when they were stopped during a funeral procession for not wearing motorcycle helmets. Yusuf had found an excuse for an uprising, and launched attacks across five northern states. The government brutally put down the revolt after a few days, leaving more than a thousand dead and others captured. Troops surrounded Yusuf’s compound and executed him. The government declared Boko Haram “crushed.”
That was not the case. The leadership simply went underground in various Salafi jihadist camps in Somalia, Sudan, Mali, and even as far away as Afghanistan, learning valuable terror techniques (including bomb making) which it would put to use a year later when Boko Haram reemerged under its new leader, Abubakar Shekau. Even more violent, remorseless, and unpredictable than Yusuf, Shekau typified the attitude of the resurgent terror group. In one of his propaganda videos in 2012, he said, “I enjoy killing anyone that God commands me to kill, the way I enjoy killing chickens and rams.”
Not much is known about Shekau except that he had married Yusuf’s widow and adopted his children, symbolically taking over Yusuf’s household and his mission. His video appearances show him cradling a Kalashnikov assault rifle, sometimes while sitting down in a room with a neutral background, sometimes strutting in front of war tanks and firing off shots, but always flanked by silent, well-armed lieutenants with faces covered. His speeches are mostly taunts at the Nigerian government, with threats toward Barack Obama, the West in general, and other world leaders thrown in almost at random, and pledges to kill whoever stands in the way of “Allah’s mission.” Ideologically, the group continued Yusuf’s theological views, remaining completely against all forms of democracy (perceiving it as “a challenge to God’s sovereignty”) and insisting on sharia as the only acceptable code to live by.
Shekau’s early efforts centered on prison breaks to free some of the Boko Haram members who had been arrested during the 2009 uprising. In September 2010, over 700 inmates were released in Bauchi. More followed in Maiduguri, Kano, Gombe, and other northeastern cities.
In June 2011, Boko Haram turned to suicide bombings, first targeting the Nigeria Police Force Headquarters in Abuja. The bomber, Mohammed Manga, a thirty-five-year-old well-to-do businessman who in his will left four million naira to his five children, was an early convert of Mohammed Yusuf. Manga drove more than 500 miles from Maiduguri to Abuja overnight to target the Nigerian police boss Hafiz Ringim, who had earlier vowed to go after members of Boko Haram. Ringim wasn’t killed, but the attack marked the first ever suicide bombing in Nigeria. Boko Haram claimed responsibility by having a spokesperson make a phone call to the media to provide them with information about the killer.
A second suicide bombing followed in October, at the UN headquarters building in Abuja. A sedan loaded with explosives crashed through the gates of the compound and into the front doors before exploding, killing at least eighteen people. Until then, Boko Haram had focused their terror on local targets; this was its first and still only high-profile attack on an international organization.
Despite widespread condemnation, the U.S. State Department did not bother to place Boko Haram on its list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. There were a number of reasons for this, one of which was the Nigerian government’s refusal to cooperate with international organizations in the fight against Boko Haram. The U.S. would not designate the group “FTO” for another two years, following a spate of bombings in late 2013 that demonstrated the group’s increased abilities to wreak havoc. The targets now included hospitals, churches, mosques, and markets. Boko Haram would often announce publicly beforehand the time of the attack and the target: They believed victory or loss came from God, and no power could stop them unless God willed it. Announcing their plans in advance was a test—and proof of the justness of their cause.
To raise funds, they raided banks, mostly in rural areas, hauling away millions of naira, which they used to sponsor their insurgency. The group also tried to capitalize on existing tensions between Christians and Muslims in Jos and other parts of northern and central Nigeria, hoping to provoke a full-scale war between the two religions by bombing churches and killing hundreds of Christians.
At the height of its power, Boko Haram controlled over 70 percent of Borno State and many other areas in neighboring states. With the annexing of towns and villages, the group’s ambition had expanded; it was now intent on establishing a Caliphate, ISIS style. This ambition wasn’t idle, and the group made rapid advances, routing the military in Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe states. By 2015, it controlled twenty out of the twenty-seven local government areas in Borno State. The emir of Gwoza, one of the major emirates in Borno State, was killed by the sect, and they declared the town their caliphate’s headquarters. It was an ideal location, in terms of defense, high up in the mountainous region near the Cameroonian border in northeastern Nigeria.
Boko Haram professes links to foreign terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and more recently, ISIS, after Shekau pledged his allegiance to the group in a 2015 video. But apart from leading to a brief name change to the Islamic States of West Africa, and a noticeable improvement in the quality of its propaganda videos, it didn’t amount to much in terms of material support.
By 2013, the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan, which had responded indifferently to the Boko Haram threat since his election in 2010, finally began to take the fight more seriously. A state of emergency was declared in the northeastern states of Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe. Troops were mobilized and sent to the war front; Boko Haram responded by changing its tactics, looking for even softer targets.
On February 25, 2014, about fifty Boko Haram insurgents invaded the Federal Government College, a coeducational secondary school, in the town of Buni Yadi in Yobe State. They came in pickup trucks at around 9:00 at night, and threw explosives into the boys’ dorm rooms, then shot and stabbed the boys as they tried to escape. Meanwhile, they rounded up the girls, lectured them on the “evils of Western education,” ordered them to get married, burned down the school buildings, then left. They didn’t touch the girls, but fifty-nine boys were murdered in cold blood.
Buni Yadi looked like a rehearsal for Chibok two months later. This time there were no boys to kill, and the girls were simply taken. As the government troops pushed Boko Haram further into the forest, ransom payments became an easier way to raise money, and kidnappings had already become more frequent. Boko Haram fighters also needed children and older women to cook and clean for them, and the younger women became “wives”—sex slaves and mothers to the next generation of fighters. Men too old to be conscripted were simply lined up against the wall and shot.
Chibok became the most symbolic of all the kidnappings, especially because the girls were under the care of the government when they were taken. The war against Boko Haram would never be won until the victims were at least accounted for. The government understandably continues to restrict access to Chibok town, and I was lucky to get in at all.
We climbed up a narrow dirt road past what looked like a military camp to our right, and suddenly we were inside Chibok. The dirt road cut through the tiny town like a river and exited at the other end; to the left of the road at the edge of town stood the Government Secondary School. The heart of the town was the marketplace. As in most African towns, the market was more than just a place for buying and selling. It is the town’s social center. To get to one part of Chibok from another part one must pass through the market square, and in the course of the day almost everyone in town passes through the market at least once.
Since the kidnapping, the market has been dominated by soldiers patrolling or loitering on foot and in trucks; a pickup filled with vigilantes bearing their trademark Dane guns was parked in front of a store. There were individual vigilantes standing in storefronts or passing by on foot or on bikes. Everybody rode bicycles, men and women and boys and girls. Motorbikes have been outlawed since the kidnapping, since they were Boko Haram’s vehicle of choice, and
