This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Boko Haram's insurgency began in earnest in July 2009, when the group's founder Mohammed Yusuf led an uprising that Nigerian security forces crushed within days, killing hundreds of the group's members and, in police custody, Yusuf himself. His successor Abubakar Shekau rebuilt the group into a sustained guerrilla and terrorist campaign against the Nigerian state, security forces, schools, and both Christian and Muslim civilians the group regarded as insufficiently observant, chiefly across Nigeria's northeastern states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe, with attacks also reaching Chad, Cameroon and Niger. The 2014 mass abduction of 276 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok drew the insurgency international attention it had not previously received.
Boko Haram frames its campaign as a jihad to replace Nigeria's secular government with a state governed by its own reading of sharia law; its Hausa popular name is commonly translated as rejecting Western, non-Islamic education as forbidden. Thurston's academic history situates the group within a longer tradition of West African Islamic reform and protest movements while stressing that mainstream Muslim scholars and organizations across Nigeria have consistently and publicly rejected the group's theology and its violence. A 2015 pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State split the movement into a loyalist faction, the Islamic State West Africa Province, and a rump faction that remained under Shekau until his 2021 death; the insurgency remains active against both factions today.