Boko Haram Read Free

an episode two and a half years before the attack in Kano.
    In a video from 2009, Yusuf can be seen building his argument, the crowd before him off camera but roaring its approval. He describes a confrontation between security forces and his followers when they were on their way to a funeral, and soon he is lashing out at the soldiers and police, accusing them of shooting membersof his sect. It is time to fight back, he says, and to continue fighting until the security task force he believed was set up to track them is withdrawn.
    â€˜It’s better for the whole world to be destroyed than to spill the blood of a single Muslim’, he says. ‘The same way they gunned down our brothers on the way, they will one day come to our gathering and open fire if we allow this to go unchallenged.’ 1
    Yusuf was thought to be 39 at the time and the leader of what had come to be known as Boko Haram. Some had considered him to be a reluctant fighter, content to continue expanding his sect through preaching, but the brutality of the security forces and pressure from his bloodthirsty deputy, Abubakar Shekau, who would later be known as the menacing, bearded man on video threatening to sell kidnapped girls on the market, pushed him toward violence. Not long after the video was recorded, Yusuf would be dead.
    His call for his followers to rise up against Nigeria’s corrupt government and security forces would lead them to do just that, beginning with attacks on police stations in the country’s north. Nigeria’s military, not known for its restraint, would soon respond. In July 2009, its armoured vehicles rolled through the streets of the north-eastern city of Maiduguri toward Boko Haram’s mosque and headquarters, soldiers opening fire when they drew within range. What resulted was intense fighting that saw soldiers reduce the complex to shards of concrete, twisted metal and burnt cars spread across the site. Around 800 people died over those five days of violence, most of them Boko Haram members. Security forces claimed Yusuf’s deputy, Shekau, was among those killed, but they would soon be proved wrong. Yusuf himself somehow survived the brutal assault, but was arrested while hiding in a barn and handed over to police. They shot him dead.
    Years later, rubble remains at the former site of the mosque. Shekau has repeatedly shown up on YouTube or videos distributed to journalists to denounce the West and Nigeria’s government and Boko Haram, once a Salafist sect based in Nigeria’s north-east, hasmorphed into something far more deadly and ruthless: a hydra-headed monster further complicated by imitators and criminal gangs who commit violence under the guise of the group. Throughout years of renewed violence, it had been building toward a headline-grabbing assault that would shock the world, and it would do just that in April 2014 with the kidnappings of nearly 300 girls from a school in Chibok, deep in Nigeria’s remote north-east. The abductions and response to them would lay bare for the world to see the viciousness of Boko Haram as well as the dysfunction of Nigeria’s government and military. But for Nigerians, it was yet another atrocity in a long list of them.
    Boko Haram had been dormant for more than a year after the 2009 military assault which killed Yusuf, with Shekau, believed to have been shot in the leg, said to have fled, possibly for Chad and Sudan. During that time, authorities in Maiduguri remained deeply suspicious and on the alert for any new uprising. Academics and others in the area with knowledge of the situation predicted a return to violence, saying underlying issues of deep poverty, corruption, a lack of proper education and few jobs left young people with very little hope for the future. Journalists, including myself, visiting Maiduguri one year after the 2009 uprising were made to understand they were not welcome, with secret police trailing our movements. The police