Boko Haram

by Mike Smith

  Adam would also paint Yusuf as a hypocrite.

  He has an international passport to travel. Does the passport contain quotations from the Qur’an or Hadith? Does it open, ‘In Name of God, the merciful and compassionate?’ Does it have God’s Greatest Name? Or does it say Federal Republic of Nigeria, and bear the image of Nigeria’s coat of arms? Who gave him the passport? Was it not the authorities of the Nigerian government? Why did he accept it? Does that not indicate his acceptance of the government? He could have said, ‘I do not accept Nigerian government. It is worthless and any paper it issues is equally worthless’. He could have travelled to Saudi Arabia without his Nigerian passport. When asked, ‘Where is your passport? Where is your visa?’ He could have said, ‘Saudi Arabia is a Muslim country. I am a Muslim. I believe there is no god but Allah and Prophet Muhammad is his Messenger’ [...] He took his wife to a government hospital [...] and he rides on a road constructed by the government with revenues from usury, taxes collected from alcohol manufacturers and from petroleum, mixed all together to pay for road construction. Still, he uses water and electricity produced by government agencies. So he refused to enter the government through the door but gets in through the window. 82

  Worries grew over the intentions of Yusuf and his followers, and the intelligence and security agencies would say later that they were keeping an eye on them. A well-known Salafist cleric in Nigeria, Sheikh Muhammad Awwal Adam Albani, claimed he met with Yusuf to counsel him on his misguided beliefs, while Adam was said to have had a series of meetings with him for the same purpose in addition to their encounter in Saudi Arabia.

  ‘I was one of those who constantly talked to him about the ideology of Boko Haram’, Albani told Nigeria’s Sunday Trust newspaper in an interview published in January 2012.

  On some occasions, I sat with him with his students, and [on] other occasions, only two of us sat. The essence was to convince him that Islam doesn’t accept the ideology of Boko Haram. I tried to convince him that since he claimed to be the follower of Sunna, therefore Sunna has its teachings and principles, and the idea of Boko Haram is contrary to those teachings. All our efforts, because I know other scholars like late Sheikh Ja’far also engaged him on such issues, fell on deaf ears. He proffered some defenses, which are not authentic in the jurisprudence of Islam. 83

  In 2007, as Adam led dawn prayers in Kano, gunmen stormed the Dorayi Juma’at Mosque and shot him dead. Suspicions have remained that Yusuf acted against his former master and was behind the murder of the man who once mentored him. There have also been allegations of political motives for the killing as the murder occurred a day before governorship elections, with presidential polls set for the following week. Albani, too, would be murdered along with his wife and son years later in February 2014, with Boko Haram members also suspected.

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  The march towards a violent uprising by Yusuf and his followers moved ahead, and a number of his recorded lectures and sermons reflecting his militant rhetoric can still be found on the Internet and elsewhere. In one of his sermons, he portrays himself and his followers as in a struggle together against the evil of the world and the Nigerian state. He tells them to be ready for when the authorities come to abuse them based on their Islamic beliefs and says ‘do not leave your weapons behind’.84

  The date of the recording is not clear, though Yusuf references both the Abu Ghraib detainee controversy in Iraq, which became public in 2004, as well as the Prophet Muhammad cartoons published in September 2005 that led to protests across the Arab world. During the speech, Yusuf is dressed in a white robe and traditional cap with followers seated on the floor around him. A scroll with phone numbers runs across the bottom of the screen as well as a notice advertising video and audio.

  ‘Instilling fear in you, arresting you, beating you, killing you or killing someone else, torching the whole lot of you ablaze, tear-gassing you, whatever they will do to you, should not make you abandon your religion’, Yusuf says in the Hausa language.

  I swear to Allah it is important to know, for instance, one day out of the sheer hatred they have for you, they will be throwing tear gas at you, because there is the opportunity to do that to you, because they know that you can’t do anything. They will round you up and throw tear gas at you together with your children. The children will be coughing. They will do that to even the tiny kids that pass by here, including the toddlers who are strapped on the back of their mothers. I swear to Allah they will do that to you. That is what they are doing in all other countries.

  He continues later: ‘One day you will see your leader placed on the table being tortured. They will be hitting him with a club and he will be falling and rising up as a result. We know this is going to happen to us. We also know this will not be considered as humiliation, but as a test from Allah. This is the nature of Islamic path. If this is not done, people will not wake up.’ At that point, the audience chants ‘Allahu Akbar’.

  Towards the end of his speech, after referring to the Prophet Muhammad cartoons, he broadens his argument and encourages violence against those who ‘insult’ Islam. He also, however, tells his followers that they should not burn churches, since the buildings can be used for other purposes ‘after the jihad’. Chants of ‘Allahu Akbar’ also break out a couple times during this part of his speech.

  Once Islam is insulted, just go and fish out the leader of those people and slaughter him. All the individuals involved in the insult should be killed. Why is it so? It is because they are not trustworthy. Allah said if you do that they will desist from the act. Allah used a definitive term in the Qur’an here. If you kill even a few from among their leaders, they will stop the insult. I hope it is understood? You should not even bother yourself with burning and destruction of churches because the person who builds the church is still around. You have not done anything by burning churches. That is why it is counterproductive to do things without planning, by just waking up and going to burn a church. No, no! This is not what Islam is teaching. Everything requires careful planning, organisation, leadership, doing the right thing. You must know that when you start moving forward there is no turning back. I hope it is understood? Don’t just go and burn churches. After the jihad it can be turned into a storage space. Remove the leaders of unbelievers because they are not trustworthy if you want them to stop insulting your religion.

  An incident on 11 June 2009 in the Gwange area of Maiduguri would set off the uprising. It would occur after Boko Haram followers were killed in a traffic accident, with members of the group travelling to the cemetery for the funeral. In one of several different versions of what happened that day, a government committee of inquiry found that Yusuf’s followers spotted another Boko Haram member being ‘disciplined’ by security forces from Operation Flush II task force, originally formed to combat armed robberies and other such crimes. Police often force those they deem guilty of minor infractions to perform frog-jumps on the roadside or other humiliations. Various reports said the run-in occurred when police sought to enforce a new law requiring motorcycle riders to wear helmets. According to the government committee’s report, which was obtained by the anonymous scholar who studied Yusuf’s sermons, Boko Haram members then tried to ‘rescue’ the man being detained and steal the police officers’ guns, prompting them to open fire. The police officers said they shot only at the legs and did not try to kill them, and the report said 17 Boko Haram members were wounded.85

  In what would amount to a call for armed jihad, a deeply angered Yusuf would provide a sharply different version. He would appear before his followers and deliver a passionate and fiery speech labelled an ‘open letter’ to the government. He would lash out at Nigeria’s security forces and stir the audience with his forceful denunciations. The crowd repeatedly responded with either jeers at the mention of the Borno state governor’s name and others they deemed enemies or loud shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar’, and Yusuf would stoke their anger. He began calmly, but his voice built at vari
ous moments as he pointed and gestured forcefully with his hands. He said that on the previous Thursday, several Boko Haram members were taking four corpses for burial at Gwange cemetery.86

  ‘They ran into some Nigerian army members along with mobile policemen belonging to Operation Flush under the leadership of Ali Modu Sheriff, the governor of Borno state’, Yusuf said. He continued: They opened fire on the procession, and at the moment 18 brothers are in hospital receiving treatment. One was shot in the back. Two bullets were removed in an operation. There was one who was shot in the groin. A bullet brushed someone close to the eye. If it had moved an inch, he would have been killed. Another one had both his legs battered. Somebody was shot in the thigh [...].

  We said that we would not rely on rumours and stories reaching us, which was why we refused to comment yesterday until we went and saw for ourselves. We went and saw them drenched in their blood. They did nothing; they did not insult anyone; they did not commit any crime. But simply out of sheer aggression, which is the hallmark of the government of Borno state, which was the reason why they formed the Operation Flush unit, with the sole aim of creating obstacles to our movement and harassing other residents.

  We’ve been saying that this unit was formed purposely against us and it has now become evident. The blood of a Muslim is precious [...] It’s better for the whole world to be destroyed than to spill the blood of a single Muslim. The same way they gunned down our brothers on the way, they will one day come to our gathering and open fire if we allow this to go unchallenged. The way they did this, they will commit terrorist acts against women if they are allowed. We’d rather die than to wait for them to commit aggression against our women or to come to our gathering and humiliate us. You should know we would never keep silent and allow anyone to humiliate us. It’s not possible for someone to come and shoot our brothers. We take them to hospital and bear the medical bills while [the shooter] goes home, without giving a damn. It’s not possible [...] Mad soldiers. As long as they are not withdrawn from the city, there will be no peace.

  The first strike would occur on 26 July in the city of Bauchi, located south of Yusuf’s home state of Yobe. An estimated 70 Boko Haram members, armed with guns and grenades, descended on two locations: a police station and a mosque belonging to Izala. According to one account, police on duty at the station fled, but a larger deployment returned later and managed to keep the attackers from breaking into the armoury. A police raid in response on a shanty town where the Boko Haram members in Bauchi were believed to have lived then set off a gun battle. The death toll was put at 55, with as many as 200 people arrested.87

  It was only the beginning. After the Bauchi clashes, Yusuf told a reporter by phone that ‘we are ready to die together with our brothers’. He called a person killed in Maiduguri in an accidental bomb blast a martyr who was building a weapon in self-defence.

  What I said previously, that we are going to be attacked by the authorities, has manifested itself in Bauchi, where about 40 of our brothers were killed, their mosque and homes burnt down completely, and several others were injured and about a hundred are presently in detention. Therefore, we will not agree with this kind of humiliation. We are ready to die together with our brothers and we would never concede to non-belief in Allah [...].

  I will not give myself up. If Allah wishes, they will arrest me. If Allah does not wish, they will never arrest me. But I will never give up myself, not after 37 of my followers are killed in Bauchi. Is it right to kill them? Is it right to shoot human beings? To surrender myself means what they did is right. Therefore, we are ready to fight to die.

  The end of this crisis is: kafirci (apostasy) and the kind of harassment my people are facing must stop. Democracy and the current system of education must be changed otherwise this war that is yet to start would continue for long. 88

  Over the course of the next day, police stations in Potiskum in Yusuf’s home state of Yobe and in an area of Kano state called Wudil were attacked, while the worst would occur in Maiduguri, where a series of assaults targeted state police headquarters, police training facilities, a prison and two other police stations.89 Street battles broke out between Boko Haram fighters and police there, with residents taking cover, leaving roads deserted. The attacks, while using mostly basic weapons, nevertheless revealed a level of coordination and capacity that the authorities seem to have underestimated, with violence in four states: Kano, Bauchi, Yobe and Borno.

  My AFP colleague Aminu Abubakar, who was in Maiduguri at the time, compared the situation to war. Anayo Adibe, the Maiduguri lawyer for Baba Fugu Mohammed, said it was like being in ‘hell’. On the first night, Adibe took cover inside his house with his wife, his seven-year-old daughter and his three-year-old son. The gunfire quieted early the next morning, and when he saw soldiers had taken up positions on the streets, he thought calm had been restored and decided to go into his office.

  ‘While in the office, fighting broke out again’, Adibe told me. ‘Bomb fire, right at the roundabout. Two policemen were killed by close range, so there was a lot of pandemonium immediately. So I had to close the office.’

  He and others from the building waited until the fighting stopped just outside, then he ran for his car and rushed home. He decided he would take refuge at the army barracks, where many Christians living in Maiduguri were relocating out of fear that the extremists would target them. Most were simply setting up makeshift camps outside on the grounds of the barracks, but Adibe had friends in the army and they allowed him and his family to stay with them inside as gunfire echoed through the city.

  The fighting roiling the streets of Maiduguri was sporadic, and the breaks in the violence left residents unsure of what was occurring. Adibe and his family remained at the barracks for a couple of days. Conditions began to worsen there since many people did not have adequate food or water, so families began deciding to risk it and return home. Adibe and his family were among them. If you were going to die, ‘it was better to die at home’, he said. Besides, rumours were circulating that the situation was in fact finally being brought under control. Was it, I asked him? ‘No, at that time it wasn’t’, he said.

  Despite the mayhem, there had not appeared at the time to be attacks specifically targeting Christians, with the extremists focusing on retaliating against symbols of the Nigerian state. However, claims have emerged since indicating Christians may have in some instances been killed after being threatened with death and told to convert to Islam. Human Rights Watch, in an October 2012 report, quoted several witnesses who said Christians were abducted and killed, including one woman who told the organisation the attackers slit her husband’s throat after he refused to ‘do the Muslim prayer’. It is not clear how widespread such killings were and I have not personally come across such accounts in my reporting.90

  On Tuesday 28 July, the third day of the uprising, the security forces would seek to crush it once and for all – though President Umaru Yar’Adua would stick to his schedule and fly off on a visit to Brazil. Troop reinforcements from the central city of Jos would prepare for a brutal raid on Boko Haram’s mosque and headquarters. After gathering at a military barracks, they flooded into the Railway Quarters neighbourhood, arriving, according to one report, in ‘six armoured tanks and five military trucks loaded with troops’.91 Piles of dead bodies and wholesale destruction would result.

  The troops would raid Yusuf’s mosque and reduce it to rubble, with journalists who were there at the time saying it appeared the military used mortar fire. In the wake of that clash, authorities would also be accused of rounding up young men they suspected of being Boko Haram members, forcing them to kneel down or lie on the ground, then shooting them. In a particularly stomach-churning video, alleged security forces shoot dead a number of young men in that way. Such footage would later be used in Boko Haram propaganda, including in the UN suicide bomber ‘martyr’ video. One man identified as a Sufi activist, speaking to US embassy officials at the time, spoke of ‘excessive use of
force by security agents who alleged[ly] shot motorists and pedestrians “just because they have a beard”. “As a result”, he said, “residents are shaving their beards and changing the style of their dress to avoid being targeted.”’92 In another video, a man identified as Buji Foi, the former religious affairs commissioner for Borno state and prominent Boko Haram member, can be seen being forced to walk before being shot dead.

  Calm finally began to return by Thursday, but by then the toll was shocking. More than 800 people had been killed since Sunday across four states. Yet, somehow, Mohammed Yusuf had managed to survive and escape from his mosque. Soldiers were on his trail though, and they arrested him on 30 July apparently having located him in a barn on his father-in-law’s property not far away from the mosque. Before handing him over to police – alive – he would be interrogated as he stood shirtless, defending his beliefs.

  Later that day, images of what appeared to be Yusuf’s dead body were shown to journalists. They showed a man lifeless in the dirt, his torso riddled with bullet holes. In the hours after Yusuf’s death, Nigerian police officials offered at least two different versions of what happened: one claimed that he was shot while he had been trying to escape, another that he was killed in a shoot-out between Boko Haram members and security forces. However, witnesses said that police had carried out a summary execution on the grounds of state police headquarters. Human Rights Watch interviewed a 24-year-old woman who described seeing Yusuf handcuffed and sitting on the ground, saying that they should pray for him, when three enraged policemen opened fire.