The Deradicalised (1): One Man’s Journey From Almajiri To Jihadist And Then IDP

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Bye, Boko Haram

“We started hearing about the Safe Corridor programme over the radio and they also threw flyers in the bush, which contained messages about it in English, Kanuri, Arabic, and Hausa,” narrates Usman.

Nigeria’s Defence Headquarters had launched Operation Safe Corridor (OSC), a multisectoral programme, in 2015 and kickstarted it a year later. Its aim was to “rehabilitate repentant Boko Haram militants and reintegrate them back into their respective communities as ..

productive law-abiding citizens”.

Despite widespread criticism from those who consider the programme premature or a misplacement of priorities, it has since gone on to graduate about 2,000 former Boko Haram members.

Usman had started regretting leaving the city for Boko Haram’s Daulat especially as his economic fortunes took a downturn. The routes outside the group’s territory were not easily accessible and, in his words, “things by then were not moving well”.

Defining The Massacres In North West Nigeria

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Since 2014, several communities in some of the states in the Northwest of Nigeria have witnessed aggravated plunder and killings. Nigerians and non-Nigerians have been massacred in unrestrained orgy within these locations.

From Kaduna to Sokoto, Katsina to Zamfara and Kebbi, it has been a cauldron of beastly killings.

In the run-up to the 2015 general elections, Zamfara state became the epicentre of the daily horror. The killings soon spread to Katsina state with some intensity.

Also across the state boundaries, Niger State in the North Central zone witnessed similar attacks.

By 2019, the savagery reached a crescendo with the erstwhile Governor of Zamfara, Abdulaziz Abubakar Yari confessing that he had lost control of the state. What started as rural banditry in which poor farmers lost their flock to rustlers soon attained a frightening scale.

Nigeria’s Terror King, Shekau, Connects East, West And Centre In A Puzzling Agenda

Published on July 12, 2020

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Scorned and underrated, Abubakar Shekau, the leader of #BokoHaram is currently pulling a massive stealth strategy in an organisational makeover destined to connect the northeast, the north-west and the north-central in a bewildering expansionist agenda.

Defined by welcoming former apostates; engaging in factional reconciliations; admitting of modest ideological shifts; and proposing a balanced role for clerics and combatants in his group,

Shekau is on the move to consolidate his ranks and establish himself as the ‘African Jihadi Caliph’ after his 2011-12 falling out with Al Qaeda, the embattled Islamic State in Iraq and the Levent.

Often portrayed as a silly sick bag, on account of his frequent melodramatic video appearances, where he is either dancing, singing, mimicking others or indiscriminately shooting machine guns into the air,