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A Nigerian Origin Story
Boko Haram’s origins are shadowy and poorly understood. Even after nearly a decade in the limelight, most of its leaders—dead and alive—remain ciphers. The record of its creation and consolidation is filled with speculation, pseudonyms, and peripheral characters, and even credible sources differ on the specifics. But for all intents and purposes, the crisis of Boko Haram began in 2003 in the village of Kanama, in rural Yobe State just south of Nigeria’s long border with Niger.
Here a small group of Muslims (estimates range from about fifty to several hundred) angry about the sinfulness of Nigerian society attempted to withdraw from it. Their haphazard collection of tents and mudbrick houses were objects of bemusement to locals, who referred to them as the “Hijra Group” in reference to the hijra, the flight of the Prophet Mohammed from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE. They called themselves Al-Sunna Wal Jamma (People of the Prophet’s Example), a name that highlighted their relationship with Salafism, a global Islamic ideology that seeks to “purify” the faith by returning to the example of the Prophet (the sunnah) and the earliest Muslim community. Although Salafi movements are often seen as products of the Arab world, Nigerian Salafi preachers and organizations are among the most influential in Africa.
Globally, Salafis are divided about how their religious values ought to relate to the political world. Some use politics to establish their vision of a good society, while others (the so-called quietists) focus on promoting personal piety and religious education. Still others—a minority but a vocal one—see modern governments as beyond reform, justifying violent struggle against them. Initially, the very nature of the Hijra Group’s action—physical and symbolic retreat from Nigerian society—seemed to put it among the quietists. But the speed with which it turned to violence suggests that its members were divided over how to achieve their goals.
The Hijra Group’s actions were undoubtedly influenced by grievances it shared with many Nigerian Muslims. In 1999, following the inauguration of Nigeria’s first elected government in a generation, a handful of politicians in the northwestern state of Zamfara announced their intention to implement a strict version of shari’ah (Islamic law) in criminal law, with the goal of restoring it to the status it held prior to colonial rule. The subsequent outpouring of popular support turned the “shari’ah issue” into a movement, and between 1999 and 2003, twelve states enacted shari’ah-inspired legislation and policies that were met with high hopes by Muslim citizens.
A minority of Muslims clearly hoped that Zamfara’s proposal would be the first step in moving the country toward an Islamic theocracy. This possibility was also on the minds of Nigeria’s 85 million Christians (the country has a roughly equal proportion of Muslims and Christians), and the two religious communities clashed repeatedly over the next decade. For most Muslims, however, shari’ah’s popularity was rooted in the hope it might force Nigeria’s notoriously corrupt political class to address their demands for economic development, social justice, and political rights. Yet, whether because the benefits rarely materialized or because punishments for the wealthy and well-connected never seemed to equal those imposed on the poor and vulnerable, public opinion on shari’ah quickly soured. This letdown was especially crushing for the Salafi activists who had set aside their discomfort with formal politics in the hope of influencing the process. For them, shari’ah’s failure was an outright betrayal.
In Kanama, the Hijra Group and local citizens lived alongside each other peacefully for months. Locals reported that members occasionally took on farm labor jobs to earn money, but mostly they kept to themselves. Things unraveled in late 2003 when the group’s use of a fishing pond came to the attention of a local chief, whose request for an access fee was met with anger. Tempers rose, and the police got involved. On December 20, several members were arrested, and others were beaten and harassed. There is confusion about what happened next. Some point to provocations by local authorities, others to threats by group members against the local government chairman and the district head, the ranking local agents of the Nigerian state. On December 24, the group stormed a nearby police barracks and overpowered its defenses, killing at least one policeman and coming away with a cache of arms. From there, it raided the town of Geidam, gathered more guns, and prepared for war. By early January 2004, it had made its way overland 250 kilometers to the Yobe State capital of Damaturu, all the while engaged in a series of running battles with the police. Here it was dispersed but only after sacking yet more police stations and reloading its armory.
Over the next few days, police and military forces ramped up operations that claimed dozens of perpetrator deaths and arrests. There were also indications of the conflict’s mounting social costs, as ten thousand people fled their homes and farms during the fighting. It was also around this time that the name “Nigerian Taliban” appeared as the group’s “official” moniker. Some journalists claimed that they had seen fighters flying a Taliban flag, while others referenced a shadowy leader nicknamed “Mullah Omar” after the Afghan jihadist. However tenuous, the “Taliban” narrative grabbed the public’s imagination, driving the first global media coverage of the violence and kicking the interest of international intelligence agencies into high gear.
The first wave of attacks ended shortly after Damaturu. A month later, the police produced a man named Sheikh Muhiddeen Abdullahi, who was announced as the group’s mastermind and primary funder. Abdullahi was Sudanese and had worked in Nigeria as a representative of Al Muntada, an international Islamic charity based in London with ties to Saudi donors and a history of rumored (but mostly unsubstantiated) connections to terrorist groups. Subsequent inquiries found scant evidence of any direct involvement but some that Al Muntada had sponsored mosques in which Hijra Group (and later Boko Haram) members preached. While security forces followed up Abdullahi’s arrest with a declaration of victory, he was never tried and was later quietly released.
In September 2004, the “Taliban” reemerged near Bama and Gwoza in Borno State on the Cameroon border. Once again, they targeted police stations and were pursued by federal forces who announced inflated death counts following a series of indecisive engagements. By this time, authorities had also identified one of the group’s main leaders, a man named Muhammad Ali (sometimes Alli), a former student at the Islamic University of Khartoum and a Maiduguri native. In 2014, the International Crisis Group (ICG) issued a bombshell report that linked Ali to Osama bin Laden, whose February 2003 audio message had declared Nigeria to be one of the most “qualified regions for liberation” by jihad.1 Based on interviews with alleged Boko Haram participants (and later confirmed in its broad strokes by correspondence recovered by US forces during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden), the ICG claimed that in 2002 Ali returned to Nigeria with $3 million from bin Laden’s organization as “seed money” to establish an al-Qaeda cell.
Among the recipients of this funding, the ICG suggested, was a local Salafi cleric named Mohammed Yusuf. Yusuf was well known for both his preaching and his relationship with Sheikh Ja’afar Mahmoud Adam, arguably the most prominent Salafi thinker in Nigeria at the time. Yusuf was not at Kanama during the conflict, and his personal connections to those who were remain a matter of speculation. We do know that he preached at the Alhaji Mohammed Ndimi Mosque in Maiduguri, where Ali and some of the other Hijra Group members worshipped. Eventually some former members of the “Taliban” fell back into Yusuf’s orbit, part of a new movement eventually known as the Yusufiyya.2
Ali was most likely killed during or shortly after the events at Kanama. The remaining members scattered during an October 2004 artillery barrage on their hideouts along the Cameroon border, and after that little was heard of them. Local authorities were eager for the story to die down, and state