Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement
352
Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement
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Overview
A comprehensive history of one of the world's deadliest jihadist groups
Boko Haram is one of the world’s deadliest jihadist groups. It has killed more than twenty thousand people and displaced more than two million in a campaign of terror that began in Nigeria but has since spread to Chad, Niger, and Cameroon as well. This is the first book to tell the full story of this West African affiliate of the Islamic State, from its beginnings in the early 2000s to its most infamous violence, including the 2014 kidnapping of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls.
Drawing on sources in Arabic and Hausa, rare documents, propaganda videos, press reports, and interviews with experts in Nigeria, Cameroon, and Niger, Alexander Thurston sheds new light on Boko Haram’s development. He shows that the group, far from being a simple or static terrorist organization, has evolved in its worldview and ideology in reaction to events. Chief among these has been Boko Haram’s escalating war with the Nigerian state and civilian vigilantes.
The book closely examines both the behavior and beliefs that are the keys to understanding Boko Haram. Putting the group’s violence in the context of the complex religious and political environment of Nigeria and the Lake Chad region, the book examines how Boko Haram relates to states, politicians, Salafis, Sufis, Muslim civilians, and Christians. It also probes Boko Haram’s international connections, including its loose former ties to al-Qaida and its 2015 pledge of allegiance to ISIS.
An in-depth account of a group that is menacing Africa’s most populous and richest country, the book also illuminates the dynamics of civil war in Africa and jihadist movements in other parts of the world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400888481 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/31/2017 |
| Series: | Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics , #65 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Lifeworld of Muhammad Yusuf
It is grimly ironic that Muhammad Yusuf, one of the most divisive figures in Nigerian history, was born at the start of a decade when Nigeria's government undertook a quest to rebuild national unity. Yusuf was born in 1970, and his future companion Abubakar Shekau was born around 1969. In those years, Nigeria's civil war was ending, and an oil boom was approaching.
Yet for many Nigerians, the promise of the early 1970s gave way to disappointment. Inequality widened. Corruption worsened. Religion became increasingly politicized. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed repeated instances of mass intercommunal violence. Authorities, urging citizens to look to the future and forget the past, chronically failed to enforce accountability. This chapter shows how, after living through these troubled decades, Yusuf and Shekau could come to make statements like "the government of Nigeria has not been built to do justice. ... It has been built to attack Islam and kill Muslims."
Sources on the early lives of Yusuf and Shekau are thin. One hagiographical account of Yusuf's early years, purportedly by one of his sons, says that Yusuf first studied Islam under his own father, memorizing the Qur'an by the time he was fifteen years old. "Then he traveled and went around the country seeking knowledge. He was, may Allah have mercy on him, openhearted and deeply acquainted with books, and just as he employed all his time in seeking knowledge, so he employed it also in spreading it." Whether or not this account is true, what seems clear is that both Yusuf and Shekau were born in rural settings, but then they became mobile as young men, developing a growing political and religious consciousness.
We can tell some of the developments from this period that marked them. First, in their preaching, they would bitterly recall the Muslim-Christian violence that occurred at Kafanchan in 1987 and Zangon-Kataf in 1992. These two towns were far from their homes in geographic terms but close in emotional ones. Yusuf said later that he had been horrified by authorities' handling of those incidents and others. Second, both men would be absorbed, by the eve of the new millennium, by the Salafi current that gained force beginning in the late 1970s. Finally, both men would seize on the deeply felt ambivalence toward Western-style education in northern Nigeria. That ambivalence found voice even in the north's Western-style universities, where Yusuf may have attracted his first followers.
What we know about Boko Haram's social base is also limited, but we do know that in early postcolonial northern Nigerian Muslim society, various trends — political, economic, and social — were intertwining with shifts in Muslim identity and politics. What it meant to be a northern Muslim was increasingly up for grabs. This uncertainty, combined with rapid urbanization, altered relationships between elders and youth, patrons and clients, and people and their neighbors. These trends were particularly disruptive in the northeast, including in Maiduguri, where Boko Haram later emerged. Young migrants to the city — such as Yusuf and Shekau, who likely arrived in the early 1990s — often encountered poverty and inequality. The poor and the young increasingly drifted beyond the control of the classical poles of religious and political authority: the emirs, the Sufi shaykhs, and the politicians. As part of showing how religion and politics interacted to shape Boko Haram, this chapter argues that Yusuf and Shekau's revolutionary understanding of Islam reflected the context of political failures, religious fragmentation, and dashed expectations in northeastern Nigeria.
Dashed expectations were acute when it came to education. Successive administrations, regional, state, and national, cultivated false hope about education even as many Muslims remained skeptical about the moral orientation of Western-style schooling. Muslim activists — even many who would later express horror over Boko Haram, and who never promoted violence — increasingly criticized Western-style education starting in the 1970s. In this atmosphere, a rising generation of Muslims was primed to view government and Western-style education with mistrust and even hatred.
A Quest for Unity amid Division
Optimism at Nigeria's independence in 1960 gave way to tragedy. In the political system of the time, based around three (later four), regions, prominent politicians in the Western and Eastern Regions of Nigeria chafed under the domination of the Northern Region, whose conservative politicians had been closer to the British colonial administration than their more radical southern counterparts. Politics became a winner-takeall affair. The federal government imposed a state of emergency in the Western Region in 1962, targeting opposition politicians there. After the North and its allies swept the elections of 1964–65, they marginalized the major parties of the West and East. In January 1966, junior officers from the Igbo, the largest ethnic group in the East, led a coup. They killed prominent northern Nigerian politicians and sought to undo the northern-dominated political system.
The new military government's Unification Decree abrogated Nigerian federalism, sparking fears in the north that Igbo domination would follow. Pogroms broke out in northern cities against the Igbo, and northern officers led a successful countercoup. In 1967, civil war broke out. The Igbo-dominated Eastern Region — rebaptized the Republic of Biafra by its leaders — attempted to secede. During the 1967–70 civil war, Biafra was reintegrated into Nigeria at tremendous cost: in addition to military casualties, over a million civilians died of starvation and disease during a blockade. Although most of these events occurred far from where Yusuf and Shekau were growing up, the boys' lives would be shaped in multiple ways by postwar policies.
Authorities' handling of postwar reconstruction reinforced what was to become a deep-seated pattern in Nigerian political culture: the idea that after collective trauma, looking forward was preferable to looking back. At the war's end in January 1970, military head of state Yakubu Gowon proclaimed the "dawn of national reconciliation" and a policy of "no victor, no vanquished." The civil war was to be forgotten, as were the events that precipitated it. A 1968 pamphlet from the government of North Eastern State, where Yusuf and Shekau grew up, put an optimistic spin on the violent elections, coups, and pogroms of the 1960s: "The events we witnessed prior to and after 1966 can be said to be part of a process in the evolution of an acceptable system of government to our people." This pattern of avoiding accountability, when it was applied to Muslim-Christian intercommunal conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s, would contribute to Yusuf and Shekau's conviction that the Nigerian state was incapable of doing justice. Yusuf would later express contempt for some of the signature unity-building initiatives of the 1970s, such as the National Youth Service Corps, which assigned college graduates to do service projects outside their home states. Nigeria's authorities and their Western backers had hoped such initiatives would build "brotherhood ['yan'uwantaka]," Yusuf said. But, he continued, "God, Glory to Him, the Most High, did not agree, because He had His [own] goal"— replacing the "school of democracy" with Islam.
In the 1970s, alongside high-flown rhetoric about Nigeria's "federal character," there were recurring signals that the country remained profoundly uncertain about what form its government should take. Gowon was deposed in the bloodless coup of 1975, after his promises to restore civilian control had worn thin. Under Murtala Mohammed (1975–76) and Olusegun Obasanjo (1976–79), the military organized a transfer of power back to civilians. Soon, however, the civilian-led Second Republic of 1979–83 collapsed amid regional antagonisms, corruption, recession, and electoral fraud. The military regime of Muhammadu Buhari (1983–85) was initially hailed for its effort to restore "discipline," but it soon lost favor: the economy sputtered under austerity, and Buhari proved authoritarian. Buhari was removed by another general, Ibrahim Babangida. He ruled from 1985 to 1993, manipulating and dividing key constituencies while enriching himself and his circle. Although Babangida initiated a transition of sorts in 1993, the short-lived, nominal Third Republic soon fell prey to General Sani Abacha, who ruled until his death in 1998. Abacha instituted new levels of political repression.
Nearly all the heads of state from 1960 to 1999 were from the north, but the region's political dominance did not translate into prosperity or security for ordinary northerners. Amid the many coups and transitions, configurations of power shifted among Nigeria's elites. Yet the system remained an oligarchy.
Uncertainty and predation also characterized local politics. During Yusuf and Shekau's youth, Nigeria's internal boundaries were repeatedly redrawn. Yusuf was born in Jakusko Local Government Area (LGA), likely in a village called Girgir. His future deputy was born in Tarmuwa LGA, in a village named Shekau — making his name effectively "Abubakar from Shekau." Until 1967, Jakusko and Shekau villages were part of the Northern Region, but in the military's administrative reorganization they became part of the newly created North Eastern State. In 1976, another reorganization broke North Eastern State into three smaller units. One of these was Borno State, which at the time contained Jakusko. When Yusuf was twenty-one, a new state, Yobe, was carved out of the old Borno State; Jakusko and Shekau now fell inside Yobe. These repeated administrative reorganizations helped to make local politics more cutthroat.
The recurring pressures for new state creation between the 1960s and the 1990s illustrate a core tension in Nigerian politics: authorities felt that the only way to keep Nigeria united was to further divide it. State creation exercises were meant to give greater political representation to constituencies that felt stifled by the major ethnic groups — the Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo. In this way, authorities hoped to weaken smaller groups' calls for autonomy and secession. In practice, however, the new states became "arena[s] of exploitation" for local elites. Corruption thrived at multiple levels of the federal system. State governments were supposed to rely on internal tax revenue, but most states depend on federal revenue allocations for 80 percent or more of their operating budgets. This political and financial structure made state governors powerful and wealthy. Elections became "do-or-die" not just at the national level, but also in gubernatorial contests. As the next chapter discusses, the fierce nature of state-level politics would contribute to Boko Haram's rise.
For the first three decades of Yusuf's lifetime, Nigeria seemed doomed to political failure. Military dictatorships bred repression. Civilian rule, whether parliamentary or presidential, bred strife. Governments leaned left or right, but economic crisis worsened. By the mid-1980s, some Nigerian Muslims felt that their country had tried all the major secular forms of government (military, parliamentary, presidential) as well as capitalism and a bit of socialism. Yet nothing seemed to work.
The political uncertainty paralleled and spurred a growth in Muslim political and social activism in the north. As the Nigerian nation was repeatedly reimagined, the idea that Nigeria was directionless fed into forms of Islamism — projects aimed at suffusing state policies with Islamic values and rulings. Some activists' language foreshadowed claims that Boko Haram would make later. "Islam," one northern intellectual wrote in 1988, "stands out clearly from man-made ideologies as the only lasting hope for mankind."
In 1999, when Yusuf and Shekau were on the threshold of their thirties, Nigeria returned to civilian rule. This time, the integrity of the political system held. The Fourth Republic has withstood severe tests: disputed elections, the unexpected death of President Umaru Yar'Adua in 2010, and the transfer of power from one party to another in 2015. Yet when the initial transition occurred, there were reasons for disaffected young northern Muslims to feel cynical and angry. The presidency rotated to the south, to the former military ruler and born-again Christian Olusegun Obasanjo. Corruption showed no sign of abating, even as multiparty politics allowed the public more space to express anger about financial crimes. Poverty increased, including in the north. Nigeria secured $18 billion in debt relief in 2005, but many ordinary Nigerians remained unemployed. From the perspective of down-and-out youth in urban northeastern Nigeria, who had grown up witnessing a string of failed transitions, the notions of "democracy" and "economic liberalization" may have seemed abstract, meaningless, or even sinister.
Disruptive Urbanization
Yusuf and Shekau spent their childhoods in Yobe, one of the most rural and isolated states in the north. As young men they came to Maiduguri, the largest city in northeastern Nigeria. It is not known when Yusuf settled in Maiduguri, but he was prominent there by 2001, suggesting that he arrived by the mid-1990s at the latest. Shekau reportedly moved to Maiduguri in 1990, to the Mafoni Ward. In Maiduguri, Yusuf and Shekau joined thousands of other immigrants from surrounding regions.
Urbanization brought massive social change to a region that had previously been isolated from the rest of Nigeria and even from other parts of the north. Politically and culturally, precolonial Maiduguri belonged to a different world, more oriented to the Lake Chad basin than to Hausaland. For perspective, Maiduguri lies approximately 250 kilometers from Chad's capital, N'Djamena, but nearly 600 kilometers from either Kano or Jos, the two nearest Nigerian cities of greater size.
British colonialism had a profound impact on Maiduguri. British administrators turned Maiduguri from a site "empty of life save on the weekly market day" into the capital of Borno Province in 1907. Maiduguri grew rapidly, from an estimated population of 10,000 in 1910 to 60,000–80,000 people by independence. At the same time, linguistic and infrastructural barriers marginalized Borno Province. Colonial administrators paid only intermittent attention to Kanuri, the province's main language. Meanwhile, the railway did not reach Maiduguri until 1964, whereas Kano had been connected to Southern Nigeria in 1911. Even present-day Yobe State, far to Maiduguri's west, had joined the rail network in 1930. As one Maiduguri resident put it to me, in a quasi-metaphorical sense Borno has five "borders"— one each with Chad, Niger, and Cameroon, one with the rest of Africa, and one with the rest of Nigeria.
If Borno was isolated from the rest of the north, Maiduguri was nevertheless a magnet for the surrounding countryside. As one account put it, with a bit of exaggeration, "From the 1940s on Maiduguri was rapidly swept from a remote provincial town steeped in traditional ways that had hardly changed for hundreds of years into a thriving town with all the urban equipment and responsibilities of the twentieth century."
In the late twentieth century, there was much to drive northeastern Nigerian villagers toward towns. When Yusuf and Shekau were growing up, the North Eastern State was poor and heavily agricultural. As of 1968, the Maiduguri Oil Mills was "the only industry of any importance" in its massive territory. Already in the 1950s and 1960s, an American anthropologist working in northern Borno found that many people "said ... that they farm because they can do nothing else." Around Gwoza, southern Borno, villagers in the hills lived in households with an average size of ten persons. These villagers faced an environment with scarce water, little arable land, and pervasive theft of livestock. Some of Boko Haram's recruits later came from the Gwoza Hills.
By the late 1960s, northeastern cities faced an influx of migrants, mostly from elsewhere in the north. For example, the population of Potiskum, present-day Yobe State, doubled from 31,000 in 1963 to nearly 60,000 in 1976. Many migrants had jobs awaiting them, facilitating their integration into the city. Many migrants did not. The Max Lock Group, a British firm hired by the North Eastern State government to conduct planning and household surveys in seven cities from 1972 to 1976, found that between a third and a half, or more, of migrants were job hunting in the northeast's largest cities. These migrants were largely unskilled: in Maiduguri, only 3.3 percent of all workers had administrative, professional, or managerial occupations, only 1.4 percent were "business or trades merchants," and only 7.9 percent were in "skilled services" or "building trades." Many migrants found only low-status work. As one study of people from the Gwoza Hills commented, "Lacking in education and marketable skills, the bulk of those immigrants are absorbed as daily paid manual labourers in such fields like road construction, and building." The lack of skilled workers, the Max Lock Group's planners wrote, "will not stop Maiduguri developing. ... But the standard of living, comfort and health of its future citizens will depend on the skills available now and in the immediate future."
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 The Lifeworld of Muhammad Yusuf 34
2 Preaching Exclusivism, Playing Politics 83
3 “Chaos Is Worse Than Killing” 142
4 Total War in Northeastern Nigeria 197
5 Same War, New Actors 241
Conclusion 300
Selected Bibliography 307
Index 329
What People are Saying About This
"A must for anybody interested in Nigeria’s recent past as well as the dynamics of political and religious development in the larger West African region."—Roman Loimeier, Africa Spectrum"May well become the definitive work on the group . . . . Thurston convincingly debunks theories of Boko Haram that would deny its uniquely Nigerian nature."—James H. Barnett, Weekly Standard"Offers an authoritative take on [Boko Haram's] murky origins and wisely situates its rise within the context of Nigerian political history."—Nicolas van de Walle, Foreign Affairs"Thurston's account of Boko Haram's rise and how it 'interacted dynamically with the political dysfunction and economic malaise that surrounded it' is key to understanding its survival."—Siona Jenkins, Financial Times"As balanced and comprehensive a treatment of Boko Haram as we are likely to see for many years."—Robert L. Tignor, Michigan War Studies Review