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Boko Harem attacks the UN: the suicide vehicle’s front wheel is still visible in the main lobby

Anthony Tucker-Jones reports on the growing menace posed by the Nigerian militant group Boko Haram

The car loaded with explosives came crashing through the two exit gates outside the main reception of the United Nation’s four-storey building in the Nigerian capital Abuja. As the vehicle came to a halt, the suicide bomber detonated his deadly cargo. The guards had given chase but it did not good; the blast and resulting shock waves engulfed the front of the building.

Chunks of concrete, steel and glass rose up in a hail of death. The car itself was flung forward with such force that it was embedded into the concrete wall. An entire wing came crashing down, killing 23 people and injuring 70 others. All those working in the basement died. It was 11am on 26 August 2011, and militant Islam had attacked the UN for the first time in Nigeria.

Nigeria’s history has been characterised by communal violence, coups and corruption. In recent years it has been plagued by militant groups nationwide and by pirates in the vast oil rich Niger Delta west of Port Harcourt, but this attack was something different. It was an echo of a rift that has troubled Nigeria ever since independence.

The group responsible for the bombing are known as Nigeria’s Taliban. The goal of Boko Haram (which translates as “no to Western education”) is the implementation of Sharia law across the country and the creation of an Islamic state. The organisation’s official Arabic name is Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad, which means “People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and jihad”.

This violent militant group originates in Nigeria’s Muslim north and normally concentrates it activities in the northern states of Bauchi, Borno, Kaduna, Kano and Yobe. Tragically, the country is split on a fault line created by a largely Christian south and Muslim north. Perhaps foolishly, the Nigerian Department of State Security (DSS) in 2008 moved to try and pre-empt the growing Islamist threat by cutting a secret deal with one of the key Islamic leaders in the country, the Sultan of Sokoto. He and the other northern emirs gained the release of all militant suspects, on the condition that the latter agreed to reform programmes. Many in the south felt these suspects had escaped prosecution because of the excessive political and religious influence of the northern leaders.

The results of this agreement were not long in manifesting themselves. Boko Haram launched attacks in the north-eastern cities of Bauchi and Maiduguri in the summer of 2009 after some of its members were once again arrested by the federal authorities. People took to the streets, and in five days of violent clashes with the police and army around 800 were killed. Shortly after, the group’s leader Mohammed Yusuf was seized by the security forces and shot dead. The Nigerian government hoped this would finally decapitate Boko Haram.

But, in December 2010, there was a wave of retaliatory bombings in central Nigeria. Indeed, the Abuja attack was the third large bombing in the capital in 12 months. In June, Boko Haram launched its first major attack outside Borno when a suicide car bomb devastated part of the federal police headquarters in the capital. Then, in October, militants from the Niger Delta disrupted Nigeria’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

Nigeria has been an uneasy federation of different peoples and religions ever since gaining independence from Britain in 1960. The Ibo-dominated military government led to sectarian violence in which at least 10,000 Ibos were slaughtered in the Muslim north. These tribal tensions boiled over into a three-year civil war in 1967 when the Ibo declared independence with the Republic of Biafra. Initially both sides had about 6,000 men under arms, but the Nigerian armed forces quickly expanded to 80,000. Following a successful blockade by the Nigerian Navy the Biafrans were overwhelmed and forced to surrender in January 1970. This north-south divide and the scars of the civil war never really went away.

Today as a ratio of Nigeria’s population, which numbers around 130 million, the Nigerian Army is tiny with just 62,000 men under arms. Similarly the police and the security and civil defence corps only number 82,000. Trying to keep law and order in a country as huge as Nigeria is no easy feat. Most of its equipment consists of aging British, French and Soviet weapons, which are just about adequate for internal security and border security.

The Nigeria air force (NAF), like so many others in the region, remains starved of funding despite the country’s considerable oil revenues. Serviceability of its MiG-21, Jaguar and Alpha jets remains chronic, and all need replacing. Attrition replacements are also a problem. In 2002 the NAF sent three Alpha jets to support loyalist Ivorian troops, but they were reportedly deployed without any ammunition. During an attack on rebel positions in Sierra Leone in 1999 the NAF lost at least one Alpha jet. The small Navy is not much better and struggles to maintain about half a dozen patrol craft at sea.

The armed forces have suffered years of neglect, and defence budget boosts have attempted to professionalise them and enhance their welfare. Since the late 1990s Nigeria’s defence expenditure has averaged about $700-$800m a year, which has averaged just over one per cent of gross domestic product. Notably, the last major weapons deliveries occurred in the 1990s.

As a result of the shortcomings of its armed forces the DSS has struggled to keep on top of groups such as Boko Haram and the rebel Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (known as Mend). In the delta, illegal oil bunkering is rampant and the oil companies pay private armies of militia fighters to protect their assets. While the Nigerian Navy conducts anti-piracy and anti-bunkering patrols, these do little to stamp out the ever-present problem.

The north has done little to placate the south’s anxieties and insecurities. Against the wishes of local Christians, several of the northern states adopted Sharia law in 2000. This led to violent clashes that spilled south two years later into the city of Lagos. In 2004 a state of emergency was declared in the central Plateau state, with trouble in Yelwa that sparked revenge attacks in Kano.

Muslim cleric Mohammed Yusuf formed Boko Haram about a decade ago in the north-eastern city of Maiduguri. It lies not far from the borders with both Cameroon and Chad. Initially, Boko Haram set up a mosque and Islamic school which attracted the children of poor Muslim families. But as well as receiving an education they were also politicised toward the goal of creating an Islamic state free from the meddling of the south.

In part as a hang-up from colonial days, many Muslim families even today refuse to send their children to what they see as government-run Western-style secular schools. While Boko means “fake” it has come to symbolise Western education, and Haram means “forbidden”. Ever since the Sokoto caliphate, that controlled parts of northern Nigeria, Niger and southern Cameroon, came under British control in 1903 there has been this opposition in Nigeria’s Muslim areas to Western education.
The tipping point came in 2009 when government buildings and police stations in Maiduguri were attacked and Yusuf was killed. Perhaps a little too optimistically, the Nigerian security forces thought that was the end of Boko Haram. Instead, its fighters regrouped under a new leader. During 2010 the central city of Jos was the scene of communal violence as Christian and Muslim gangs set about each other.

In November that year Nigeria intercepted an arms shipment from Iran that was thought to be en route to Boko Haram. It was very evident that the group was getting outside help. During the summer of 2011, the commander of US operations in Africa, General Carter Ham, warned that Boko Haram is forging links with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. It is also thought to have links with the Somali Islamist militant group al-Shabaab.

Southern Nigeria also has its share of problems. Inter-communal violence broke out in the Niger Delta in 2003 and troops had to crackdown in the port city of Harcourt after clashes between rival gangs the following year. There was fighting between the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force and the Niger Delta Vigilantes and, although there was a ceasefire in October 2004, fighting over oil proceeds continued. Militants attacked oil facilities and the pipelines again in 2006. Three years later, a ceasefire between the army and the main militant group Mend proved short-lived.

In the meantime, Nigeria and its western neighbour Benin set up joint naval patrols in an effort to counter piracy in their territorial waters in 2011. But the commitment of six Nigerian warships simply pushed the pirates’ attacks westward into the Bight of Benin and the Gulf of Guinea off Benin’s coast. No such attacks were recorded in that area the year before. Previously Nigeria has attempted to co-ordinate patrols with the South African Navy along the Atlantic Coast with mixed results.

Nigeria’s Taliban and other such groups will continue to thrive as long as the Nigerian government fails to address the north’s crippling poverty and comes up with an education system that is acceptable to the Muslim community. Boko Haram’s bombing of the UN headquarters in Abuja was the group’s first international target and may herald a worrying change in tactics.

The organisation is clearly getting bolder and more ambitious. Its supporters are alleged to have received training from al-Shabaab in Somalia. Its fighters have graduated from conducting drive-by killings of policemen and politicians to suicide bombing. Although the Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has suggested talks with Boko Haram, such dialogue is unlikely to do any good. In the meantime, Nigeria’s Taliban continue to terrorise the country.

Anthony Tucker-Jones spent his career in the British intelligence community before establishing himself as a leading military historian and defence writer. In his latest book The Rise of Militant Islam he examines from an insider’s perspective how Western intelligence misinterpreted every landmark event on the road to 9/11.