Boko Haram

Boko Haram was founded in 2002 by Mohammed Yusuf, a charismatic Salafist preacher, in the impoverished northeastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri. Yusuf established a mosque and Islamic school — the Ibn Taimiyyah Masjid — that attracted young men radicalised by chronic government corruption, economic marginalisation, and the perceived failure of Nigeria's secular state. His central doctrine held that any education, governance, or cultural practice rooted in Western concepts was haram — forbidden under Islamic law — encompassing not only Western secular education but Western-style democracy, science, and even the concept of a spherical earth.

For several years the group operated openly, building a following of thousands and attracting young men from across Nigeria and neighbouring countries. Nigerian authorities largely tolerated its presence, a failure of early intervention that would prove catastrophic. The movement's relationship with the state collapsed violently in 2009, when Nigerian security forces killed Yusuf in extrajudicial custody following a brief but bloody uprising in which hundreds died. Far from destroying the movement, Yusuf's killing radicalised its membership and handed leadership to his deputy, Abubakar Shekau — a far more violent and nihilistic figure who transformed Boko Haram from a preachy sectarian movement into a full-blown terrorist insurgency.

Under Shekau, Boko Haram launched a systematic campaign of mass atrocities beginning in 2010 that escalated dramatically through 2014–2015, when the group controlled a territory roughly the size of Belgium in northeastern Nigeria — declaring a caliphate, massacring entire villages, enslaving women and girls, and conscripting children as soldiers and suicide bombers. At its peak, Boko Haram was conducting more mass-casualty attacks than any other terrorist group in the world, including the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

In 2015, Shekau pledged allegiance to ISIS, rebranding the group as the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP). The relationship subsequently fractured over governance and tactics — ISIS leadership objected to Shekau's indiscriminate killing of Muslim civilians — leading to a formal split in 2016. Shekau retained the Boko Haram name while ISWAP emerged as a separate, better-organised, and increasingly dominant faction. Shekau died in 2021, reportedly detonating a suicide vest rather than surrender during an ISWAP assault on his position. Today, ISWAP controls much of the Lake Chad Basin and poses the primary jihadist threat in West Africa.

Boko Haram's founding ideology drew on a radicalised interpretation of Salafism — a puritanical Sunni movement that advocates a return to the practices of early Islam — fused with a comprehensive rejection of modernity, Western civilisation, and the Nigerian secular state. Its founding tenet that Western education is haram was not merely rhetorical: the group has systematically destroyed hundreds of schools, murdered thousands of teachers and students, and abducted thousands of children — girls for sexual enslavement and forced marriage, boys for military conscription — as a deliberate strategy to collapse Nigeria's educational infrastructure in the northeast.

Under Shekau, the group developed a theology that legitimised the mass killing of Muslim civilians who cooperated with the state, placing it in direct tension with mainstream Salafist doctrine and eventually with ISIS itself. This theological nihilism — the view that apostasy was so endemic that virtually any target was permissible — drove the group's exceptional civilian casualty rate and distinguished it even from most other jihadist organisations in its barbarity.

ISWAP, by contrast, adopted a more disciplined approach informed by ISIS's governance model: taxing civilian populations, providing rudimentary services in controlled areas, and restricting gratuitous killings of Muslims in an attempt to build a broader social base. This strategic shift has made ISWAP considerably more durable and harder to uproot than its predecessor, embedding it within communities rather than simply terrorising them.

Both factions rely heavily on the abduction and exploitation of women and children as a structural feature of their operation — not merely as a byproduct of violence but as a deliberate tactic. The mass abductions of Chibok (2014) and Dapchi (2018) were not opportunistic crimes but planned strategic operations designed to terrorise communities, destroy girls' education, and generate propaganda, slave labour, and forced combatants simultaneously. Hundreds of abducted women and girls remain missing.

Boko Haram and ISWAP have conducted thousands of attacks across the Lake Chad Basin since 2009, with a particular focus on civilian populations, schools, churches, mosques, markets, and military installations. The group pioneered the use of women and children as suicide bombers — a tactic adopted from its own captive populations.

Boko Haram and ISWAP's violence has devastated communities across Nigeria's northeast and the broader Lake Chad Basin, producing one of the world's worst humanitarian crises and targeting numerous populations documented by IFC regional desks.