Women in Abuja, Nigeria, attend a demonstration to call on the Nigerian government to rescue the missing Chibok schoolgirls. Sunday Alamba/AP
How To Defeat Boko Haram
The Nigerian military must find the schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram -- but it also has to address the underlying issues that fuel the terror group. By Isobel Coleman and Sigrid von Wendel
The abduction last month of 276 schoolgirls in northeastern Nigeria by the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram has become international news. In a video that surfaced last week, Boko Haram’s leader issued a chilling message in which he called the girls “slaves” and threatened to “sell them in the market.” Soon after, a social media campaign called #BringBackOurGirls went viral. And this week, First Lady Michele Obama even tweeted a photo of herself holding a sign with the campaign’s hashtag. Governments around the world, including those of the United States and China, have offered to help track down the terrorists.
It is surprising that it has taken so long for Boko Haram’s murderous rampages to garner such attention. Although linked to various al-Qaeda groups, Boko Haram is a homegrown movement in impoverished northeastern Nigeria. It was born of desperation and anger at the government’s corruption and ineffectiveness. As one Nigerian journalist put it, Mohammed Yusuf, the group’s first leader, “would have found it difficult to gain a lot of these people if he was operating in a functional state. But his teaching was easily accepted because the environment, the frustrations, the corruption, [and] the injustice made it fertile for his ideology to grow fast, very fast, like wildfire.”
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