Boko Haram Is Wounded And Dangerous

By Max Siollun

Less than a year ago, the militant group Boko Haram controlled an area of northeastern Nigeria the size of Belgium. It was “a mortuary for the uncooperative and prison for the conquered,” as one unlucky resident described it to me at the time, and it threatened to engulf ever more of the country. The brutal Islamist insurgency had sapped the morale and discipline of the Nigerian army and seemed poised to carve out a caliphate that rivaled the one it had pledged loyalty to in Iraq and Syria.

Fast-forward just 10 months and the idea of an Islamic caliphate in northern Nigeria seems a distant memory. Delusions of statehood caused Boko Haram’s leaders to overreach, inviting a powerful regional military response and bolstering the candidacy of former Nigerian military leader Muhammadu Buhari, who set about crushing the Islamist insurgency after winning the presidency in March. A regional military coalition led by Nigeria has recaptured much of the territory Boko Haram once controlled and driven its fighters into remote regions in Nigeria’s northeastern corner.

But if Boko Haram has seen its territorial ambitions dashed in recent months, it is hardly on the verge of defeat. In a way, Boko Haram has come full circle, reverting back to the kind of asymmetrical warfare that was once its grisly hallmark. As a result, the group poses as much of a danger to civilians now as it did when it fought to control cities and towns. In the last six months alone, Boko Haram has killed nearly 1,500 people.

What explains the rollercoaster ride of the last 10 months? Part of the answer is hubris. Last month, a senior Nigerian military officer told me that the publicity Boko Haram garnered from its 2014 kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok emboldened the group’s leaders to be more ambitious, resulting in costly mistakes. Instead of sticking to the hit-and-run tactics that it had used to successfully torment the Nigerian military for years, Boko Haram began to seize and hold territory, boldly declaring an Islamic “caliphate” in the areas it had conquered. This stretched the group’s resources too thin and forced it into a conventional war with the Nigerian military that it could not win. Boko Haram also shed its domestic focus, launching cross-border raids into neighboring Cameroon, Chad, and Niger, all of which eventually joined a five-nation military coalition against it (along with Benin and Nigeria).