Boko Haram Assignment

III – The outcome of Boko Haram approximately 14 years after its creation

A. Boko Haram’s attacks through different means of action

The outcome of the group’s victims is enormous. 13, 000 deaths since 2009 and 1.5 million displaced. Despite the use of suicide bombings, Boko Haram is an expert of kidnappings, human trafficking, and thefts. According to a report released in October 2014 by the NGO “Human Rights Watch”, over 592 people have been kidnapped during this year. Its members melt with civilians in places like big markets. Some are perpetrated by young women wearing long veils which allow to hide explosives.

If we look at the past few years, one attack has been conducted abroad. It was “the February 2013 kidnapping of a French family

Indeed, they recruit mercenaries and militarize refugees, they trade natural resources, and they recycle different types of weapons. But other aspects falls into the concept of transnational terrorism. Financial support from abroad is also a major characteristic of its network. It benefitted from the transactions of weapons from other actors. Training is also important as members of Boko Haram come from various countries like the Sahel region, Somalia, Mali or Niger. Some of the fighters may have come to Mali to participate in the war against the French and African forces. Training abroad helped strengthening the group has it provided them with knowledge and skills which helped them provoking more important attacks. All those aspects contribute to Boko Haram’s growth and remaining though it is difficult to verify as all the funding and transactions are informal. Some experts state that it is a domestic phenomenon, others that it is a transnational phenomenon because of its links with groups such as Al Qaeda. It has some transnational aspects related to training, recruitment, weapons, but it remains, on the whole, a domestic issue, sometimes crossing the

Created in 2002 it gained influence only after 2009 with a turning point in its strategy. Since then it did not stop to expand itself perpetrating mass murders in the country but also across the borders. In this case “the movement Boko Haram is not so much political: not because he is carrying a project of an Islamic society, but because it catalyses the anguish of an unfinished nation and reveals the intrigues of an illegitimate power”. The aspects which made its expansion viable, as stated in the second part, are the following: a weak state unable to counter the phenomenon, its sources of financing coming from different parts of the society and the world, and an important communication in order to diffuse its propaganda and attract more and more people. Eventually, its specificity compared to its Islamic forerunners is essentially its terrorist drift in a country which during the 1980s and the 1990s experienced a few attacks but until now no suicide bombing. The attack against the UN offices also marks a split. Indeed, the internalisation of the targets oblige to reconsider its modus operandi. Boko Haram remains the biggest security threat for Nigeria but also for its neighbours, with which borders are porous, involving as well to find rapidly new strategies to counter the movement which is not