Boko Haram's Evolving Threat (2012)

* The Nigerian militant Islamist group Boko Haram has grown increasingly virulent since late 2010, reflecting a major transformation in its capacity, tactics, and ideology.* There are indications of expanding links between Boko Haram and international Islamist terrorist organizations.* Support for Boko Haram among some of northern Nigeria's marginalized Muslim communities suggests that security actions alone will be insufficient to quell the instability.HIGHLIGHTSThe reemergence of the Nigerian militant Islamist group Boko Haram is cause for significant concern. Since late 2010, the organization has been responsible for a brutal campaign of attacks targeting public officials and institutions and, increasingly, ordinary men, women, and children, wreaking havoc across northern Nigeria. At least 550 people were killed in 115 separate attacks in 2011, a grisly toll that has been accelerating. Meanwhile, Boko Haram's rhetoric and tactics indicate that the organization has expanded its reach well beyond its original base in northeastern Nigeria. Indeed, it may be evolving into a transnational threat with links to other terrorist groups and violent extremists in North, West, and East Africa.The group thus constitutes a wider threat to the political, economic, and security interests in Africa. Given that Nigeria is Africa's biggest oil exporter (it holds the world's 10th largest proven reserves) as well as the continent's most populous country, instability there has significant global implications.BOKO HARAM IN CONTEXTBoko Haram first received widespread attention for the armed attacks that it launched against police stations and other public buildings in the towns of Geidam and Kanamma in Nigeria's northeastern Yobe State in late December 2003. However, the emergence of the militant sect cannot be understood without reference to the social, religious, economic, and political milieu of northern Nigeria. While murky, some accounts link the group's origins back to the Maitatsine1 uprisings of the early 1980s, which left thousands dead and cut a path of destruction across five northern Nigerian states.The movement took its name from an Islamic preacher, Muhammadu Marwa, who moved from his native Cameroon to northern Nigeria around 1945. His polemical sermons, aimed at both religious and political authorities, earned Marwa the sobriquet Maitatsine (in Hausa, he who curses), as well as the ire of British colonial authorities who had him deported. eventually returned to Nigeria sometime after its independence and, by the early 1970s, had gathered a large and increasingly militant following, the Yan Tatsine (followers of Maitatsine), of youths, unemployed migrants, and others who felt that the official Islamic hierarchy was unresponsive to their needs. was killed by security forces during a December 1980 insurrection in Kano, but his followers rose up again in 1982, 1984, and 1985.Both Yan Tatsine and Boko Haram can be described as fanatical sects whose beliefs are not held by the majority of Nigerian Muslims. In their denunciation of Western civilization, both also came to reject the legitimacy of the secular Nigerian state, invariably described as dagut (evil) and unworthy of allegiance, and ended up waging war against it in an effort to replace it with a purified Islamic regime. In both cases, police were unable to quell the outbreak of violence, and military forces had to be deployed. The passage of time between the two movements has been marked by persistent corruption and relatively few improvements in the socioeconomic conditions of northern Nigeria, leaving many communities in the North with the perception that they are falling further behind their counterparts in the (mostly Christian) South.2 This has heightened the receptivity of Boko Haram's message promising a radical transformation of Nigerian society.The name Boko Haram is itself derived from the combination of the Hausa word for (as in book learning), boko, and the Arabic term haram, which designates those things which are ungodly or sinful. …