The Boko Haram Insurgency (2009 to Present)

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.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Two independently maintained conflict-event datasets, the Council on Foreign Relations' Nigeria Security Tracker and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, tracked the insurgency across the same June 2011 to June 2018 window and recorded thirty seven thousand five hundred thirty and thirty four thousand two hundred sixty one deaths respectively, both far higher than the twenty thousand figure often cited in earlier reporting; both trackers note their own counts likely understate the true toll given limited access to affected areas. A separate and much larger figure, a United Nations Development Programme assessment's estimate of nearly three hundred fifty thousand deaths in Nigeria's northeast through the end of 2020, measures a different quantity: it adds indirect deaths from the malnutrition and lack of medical care that followed mass displacement to the roughly thirty five thousand direct conflict deaths it separately counts, and this atlas names it rather than folding it into the direct-conflict bounds above.

Boko Haram lost most of the fixed territory it held at its 2014 to 2015 peak to a Nigerian and multinational military counteroffensive drawing on Chad, Cameroon and Niger, but the group and its Islamic State West Africa Province offshoot have continued a sustained campaign of attacks, kidnappings and displacement across the Lake Chad basin region since. No international genocide or crimes against humanity determination covers the insurgency as a whole, though the United Nations and numerous individual governments have designated both factions as terrorist organizations, and human rights bodies have documented mass atrocities against civilians throughout the conflict's now more than fifteen years.