Many have wrongly assumed, and still continue to assume, that Boko Haram is about Islam but this is obviously not the case.
Most of the terrorist sect’s attacks are carried out in the North-East of Nigeria, an area which is largely populated by Muslims.
Boko Haram’s lack of regard for Islam can be seen through the fact that the sect also attacks mosques and prayer processions.
During the 2015 Ramadan fast, a period in which even the most decadent of Muslims embraces sobriety, Boko Haram claimed hundreds of lives in attacks specifically targeted at Islamic institutions.
In 2011, when the sect’s attacks escalated and became more sophisticated, we assumed that it had been hijacked by enemies of then President, Goodluck Jonathan to make the country ungovernable for him.
Until 2010, Boko Haram was largely a group of miscreants who seemed to truly believe that “Western education is forbidden” as the sect’s name implies.
The only mention of the group before that time was of young idle men armed with machetes and knives and doing no real damage. Fast-forward a few years and we have a mighty battalion armed with suicide bombers, AK47s and armoured tanks.
The theory was that somebody wanted to make a statement and didn’t want to create a new group because that would be too obvious.
Instead, they decided to take a stray cat and make it a genetically modified lion. They decided to take Boko Haram and make it the terrorist monstrosity that it has become today.
The theory at the time was that powerful Northerners were behind the hijacking because Jonathan had hijacked the Presidency despite the fact that it had been zoned to the North.
Boko Haram has barely moved beyond Borno, Adamawa and Yobe States and appears to only be using Chad, Niger and Cameroon as hideouts and escape routes.
Boko Haram doesn’t seem to want territory because it’s not moving very far, it doesn’t seem to want wealth because it hasn’t gone anywhere near Nigeria’s oil wells or its major cities, it obviously doesn’t believe in Islam because it’s annihilating mostly Muslims.
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