Boko Haram: A Growing Islamist Threat

Boko Haram, a shadowy Islamist insurgency, has haunted the predominantly Muslim region of northern Nigeria, surviving repeated, bloody efforts to eliminate it. It appears to be branching out and collaborating with Al Qaeda’s affiliates, alarming Western officials who had previously viewed the militants as a largely isolated, if deadly, menace. The group has called for a strict application of Shariah law and the freeing of imprisoned members in the region, where mass unemployment and poverty have helped fuel social discontent.

In 2009, the group seemed on the verge of extinction. In a heavy-handed assault, Nigerian soldiers shelled its headquarters and killed its leader, leaving a grisly tableau of charred ruins, with hundreds dead.

But by the summer of 2011, the group was striking the nigerian military, the police and opponents of Islamic laws striking the Nigerian military, the police and opponents of Islamic law in near-daily assaults and bombings, using improvised explosive devices improvised explosive devices that can be detonated remotely and bear the hallmarks in the  Islamic maghre. Beyond the immediate devastation, the fear is that extremists bent on jihad are spreading their reach across the continent and planting roots in a major, Western-allied state that had not been seen as a hotbed of global terrorism.

In August 2011, a suicide bomber driving a vehicle packed with explosives rammed the united nations headquarters rammed the United Nations headquarters in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, killing 23 people. Boko Haram took responsibility for the blast. The attack appeared to confirm the worst fears of Western analysts and diplomats — that repression is hastening its transformation into menacing transnational force.  repression is hastening its transformation into a menacing transnational force.

A series of Christmas Day church bombings rocked the country in what appeared to be a coordinated assault by Boko Haram. At least 25 people were killed. Until then, the group had mostly targeted the police, government and military in its insurgency effort, but the church bombings represented a new, religion-tinged front, a tactic that threatened to exploit the already frayed relations between Nigeria’s nearly evenly split populations of Christians and Muslims.

In January 2012, more than 100 people were killed in a series of attacks on Kano, northern Nigeria’s largest city by Boko Haram. The attackers struck eight government security buildings, the national police said, including the regional police headquarters, two local police stations, the local headquarters of the State Security Service, the home of a police official and the state police command headquarters. 

In June 2012, suicide car bombers attacked three churches in northern Nigeria, killing at least 19 people and wounding dozens, and setting off retaliatory attacks by Christian youths who dragged Muslims from cars and killed them, officials and witnesses said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombings, but Boko Haram has often attacked church services.

A few days earlier, militants attacked two churches in the central Nigerian city of Jos, spraying the congregation of one of them with bullets and killing at least one person, and blowing up a car in a suicide bombing at the other, wounding 41. Boko Haram claimed responsibility.

By the end of March 2012, the insurgent violence stalking northern Nigeria struck a new target: schools. At least eight public and private schools in the city of Maiduguri have been firebombed, apparently the work of Boko Haram. Crude homemade bombs — soda bottles filled with gasoline — have been hurled at the bare-bones concrete classrooms Nigeria offers its children.

The simple yellow facades have been blackened and the plain desks melted to twisted pipes, leaving thousands of children without a place to learn, stranded at home and underfoot, while anxious parents pleaded with Nigerian authorities to come up with a contingency plan for their education.

Boko Haram’s very name is a rallying cry against schools — “Boko” means “book” or “Western learning” in the Hausa language, and “haram” is Arabic for forbidden — but it has never gone after them to this degree before, analysts say.

Maiduguri, the birthplace of the Boko Haram insurgency, has become used to living under siege.  Fear and an army-enforced curfew empty the scruffy low-rise streets well before dark. Nervous public officials — prime assassination targets of the insurgents — avoid speaking the group’s name or blaming it. Army checkpoints are omnipresent. The soldiers, also a favorite target of snipers, are grim-faced and brusque.

Yet the destruction of Maiduguri’s schools has bewildered and demoralized students, parents and teachers in a way that other attacks have not. The targeting of children, even indirectly, is seen as a new and sinister twist