Maiduguri, 2009: How a Preacher's Death Ignited Nigeria's Forever War

By the time you reach the edge of Maiduguri today, you can see where the city ends and the insurgency begins. The last police checkpoint is a heap of sandbags and rusted oil drums. Beyond it, the road to Bama is empty. No one drives that road anymore unless they are military or mad. This correspondent met a woman at that checkpoint in January 2026. Her name was Fatima Bukar. She carried a plastic bag containing three dresses, a Quran, and photographs of her two sons. She had not seen them since 2014. She did not know if they were alive. She knew only that Boko Haram had taken them from Chibok on the night of April 14, and that the Nigerian government had promised to bring them home. That was twelve years ago.

The war that stranded Fatima Bukar at that checkpoint did not begin in 2014. It began in July 2009, in a police station in Maiduguri, when Nigerian security forces executed a man named Mohammed Yusuf. He was 39 years old. He was a charismatic preacher who had built a following among Borno State's unemployed young men by condemning corruption, Western education, and the Nigerian state. He called his movement Jama'atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'awati wal-Jihad — People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet's Teachings and Jihad. The police called it Boko Haram, which means "Western education is forbidden" in Hausa. The name stuck.

Yusuf was not a jihadist in 2002 when he founded his mosque in Maiduguri. He was a salafi preacher funded by Saudi Wahhabist charities and local businessmen who wanted an alternative to Nigeria's corrupt establishment Islam. He built a compound in the Railway Quarters neighborhood. He offered young men free housing, meals, and a sense of purpose. By 2009, he had thousands of followers. When police arrested him on July 26 that year, after clashes between his followers and security forces left more than 700 people dead, they had a choice. They could charge him, try him, and imprison him. Instead, they shot him in the courtyard of the Borno State police headquarters while journalists filmed. His body was displayed on state television. His father-in-law, Baba Fugu Mohammed, was also executed. So were dozens of his followers.

What the police created that day was not peace. It was a martyr and a cause.

What Rose From the Grave

Within a year, Boko Haram had regrouped under a new leader: Abubakar Shekau, Yusuf's former deputy. Shekau was 41 years old, a Quranic scholar with a reputation for violence and apocalyptic rhetoric. Where Yusuf had been calculating, Shekau was fanatical. Where Yusuf had avoided mass civilian casualties, Shekau embraced them. In 2010, Boko Haram began bombing police stations, churches, and markets across northeastern Nigeria. In 2011, they bombed the United Nations headquarters in Abuja, killing 23 people. In 2013, the United States designated them a Foreign Terrorist Organization. By 2014, they controlled territory the size of Belgium across Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa states.

On the night of April 14, 2014, Boko Haram fighters arrived in Chibok, a town in southern Borno State, and abducted 276 schoolgirls from their dormitories. The abduction made global headlines. #BringBackOurGirls became a hashtag campaign endorsed by Michelle Obama and Malala Yousafzai. The Nigerian government promised swift action. Then it did almost nothing. President Goodluck Jonathan waited three weeks before visiting Chibok. The military claimed it had located the girls, then admitted it had not. Fifty-seven girls escaped in the first days. Of the 219 who remained captive, 112 have been released or rescued over the years through negotiations and military operations. As of April 2026, 107 girls remain missing. Most were forced to marry Boko Haram fighters. Most had children. Most will never come home.

The Chibok abduction was not an anomaly. It was a tactic. Between 2014 and 2020, Boko Haram and its offshoot, Islamic State West Africa Province, abducted more than 10,000 women and girls from towns and villages across the Lake Chad Basin. Some were used as suicide bombers. Some were sold. Some were ransomed. The Nigerian military's response was to declare victory repeatedly while losing ground. In March 2015, President Jonathan announced that Boko Haram had been "technically defeated." His successor, Muhammadu Buhari, used the same phrase in December 2015, and again in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Meanwhile, Boko Haram continued to operate across four countries.

The Split That Made Two Wars

In August 2016, Boko Haram fractured. The Islamic State's central command in Syria, dissatisfied with Shekau's indiscriminate killing of Muslims, announced that it was replacing him with Abu Musab al-Barnawi, the son of Mohammed Yusuf. Al-Barnawi's faction became known as Islamic State West Africa Province. Shekau's loyalists retained the name Boko Haram but became increasingly isolated. The two groups began fighting each other as well as the Nigerian military, Chadian forces, and civilian self-defense militias.

The split changed the war's geography and tactics. ISWAP focused on attacking military bases and checkpoints, avoiding civilian massacres to win local support. Boko Haram under Shekau became more apocalyptic, burning entire villages and executing anyone suspected of cooperating with the government. In May 2021, Shekau died—either by suicide vest during an ISWAP attack on his Sambisa Forest stronghold, or in ISWAP captivity. His death did not end his faction. It splintered into smaller cells led by commanders who had spent a decade learning how to survive in the forests and swamps of the Lake Chad Basin.

ISWAP, meanwhile, evolved. It taxed fishermen and farmers. It administered a brutal version of sharia law in territories it controlled around Lake Chad. It ambushed military convoys with tactics learned from Islamic State manuals. Between 2020 and 2025, ISWAP killed more than 2,400 soldiers from Nigeria, Chad, Niger, and Cameroon, according to data compiled by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. The regional military response—the Multinational Joint Task Force, created in 1998 and revived in 2015—has been hampered by poor coordination, insufficient funding, and mutual distrust among member states.

The Money That Kept It Alive

Boko Haram's early funding came from the same sources that funded Mohammed Yusuf: Saudi Arabian charities promoting Wahhabist Islam, and wealthy Nigerian businessmen seeking religious legitimacy. After Yusuf's death, the movement's financing became more predatory. Boko Haram began kidnapping for ransom, extorting local businesses, and taxing farmers. They looted banks in towns they overran. By 2014, they had stolen an estimated $100 million in currency and goods, according to Nigerian banking officials.

But the insurgency's most lucrative revenue stream was not in Borno State. It was 700 kilometers to the southwest, in the creeks and swamps of the Niger Delta. There, criminal syndicates were stealing an estimated 150,000 barrels of crude oil per day from pipelines operated by Shell, Chevron, and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. Some of that oil was refined in makeshift facilities and sold domestically. Most was loaded onto tankers at night and sold to international buyers through a web of middlemen and shell companies. Nigerian security officials estimate that between 2010 and 2020, oil theft cost the government more than $50 billion in lost revenue. A portion of that money—how much remains disputed—flowed to Boko Haram and ISWAP through smuggling networks that moved fuel, weapons, and cash across Nigeria's porous borders.

International connections also sustained the insurgency. After Boko Haram pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in March 2015, it received tactical guidance, propaganda support, and limited financial assistance from IS central command. When ISWAP split from Shekau, it inherited those ties. Weapons flowed in from Libya, where the collapse of Muammar Gaddafi's regime in 2011 had flooded the Sahel with looted armories. Fighters moved across borders with ease, training in camps in northern Mali and western Niger before returning to Nigeria. The regional security architecture—built for interstate war, not counterinsurgency—could not adapt.

The Election That Changed Nothing

On February 25, 2023, Nigeria held its most controversial election in decades. Bola Tinubu, a former governor of Lagos State and political fixer for the ruling All Progressives Congress, won the presidency with 36% of the vote. His main opponents—Atiku Abubakar of the People's Democratic Party and Peter Obi of the Labour Party—alleged widespread rigging, voter suppression, and manipulation of the electronic results portal managed by the Independent National Electoral Commission. International observers from the European Union and the Carter Center documented irregularities but stopped short of declaring the election illegitimate. Domestic observers were more blunt. The Centre for Democracy and Development, a Nigerian civil society group, reported that in Borno and Yobe states—the epicenter of the insurgency—voter turnout was below 20%, and results from more than 400 polling units could not be verified.

Tinubu took office in May 2023 promising to end the insurgency. He replaced the service chiefs, increased defense spending, and authorized a new offensive in Borno State. By December 2025, the offensive had recaptured several towns and killed an estimated 600 insurgents. It had also displaced another 120,000 civilians, destroyed farmland with airstrikes, and alienated the very communities the military was supposed to protect. In January 2026, ISWAP attacked a military base outside Maiduguri, killing 34 soldiers and capturing two armored vehicles. The base had been declared secure two months earlier.

What the Official Story Omits

The Nigerian government's narrative about Boko Haram has been consistent for seventeen years: the insurgency is a security problem that will be solved by military force. That narrative ignores the political, economic, and social conditions that made Boko Haram possible. Borno State, the insurgency's birthplace, has a poverty rate of 76%, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Youth unemployment in the northeast exceeds 50%. School enrollment in Borno is the lowest in Nigeria. In 2009, when Mohammed Yusuf was preaching against corruption and Western education, those complaints resonated because they were true. The government that killed Yusuf had no answers to the grievances he articulated. It still does not.

Meanwhile, the institutions meant to address those grievances have collapsed or never existed. In Borno State, there are 47 secondary schools for a population of 5.8 million. The state hospital in Maiduguri has 200 beds and no functioning intensive care unit. The roads connecting towns to markets are impassable during the rainy season. The police are outnumbered, outgunned, and widely perceived as corrupt. The courts are backlogged with cases dating to 2012. Boko Haram offered young men something the Nigerian state could not: purpose, structure, and the illusion of justice.

The Camps Where Nothing Grows

This correspondent visited the Teachers Village displaced persons camp outside Maiduguri in January 2026. The camp holds 18,000 people in shelters made from UN tarps and scavenged wood. There is one borehole for every 400 people. The latrines overflow during the rains. Malnutrition is endemic. Children sit in the dirt with distended bellies and blank stares. Their mothers queue for food rations that arrive late or not at all. No one has a plan for what happens next. The displaced cannot return to their villages because those villages no longer exist. They cannot work because there are no jobs in Maiduguri. They cannot leave the camp because they have nowhere to go.

A woman named Aisha Musa told this correspondent that she had been in the camp for nine years. She was 31 years old. She had four children. Her husband was killed by Boko Haram in 2017 when they overran her village near Bama. She fled with her children on foot, walking for three days until they reached Maiduguri. The government gave her a tent and a bag of rice. Then it forgot about her. Her oldest son, now 14, has never been to school. He begs for money at the market. Her youngest daughter, three years old, has chronic diarrhea from drinking contaminated water. Aisha said she prays every night for a miracle. She did not say what kind.

What Happens Next

Seventeen years after Mohammed Yusuf's execution created this war, there is no end in sight. ISWAP controls territory. Boko Haram splinter groups operate across the northeast. The Nigerian military claims progress but cannot hold ground. Displaced persons camps grow larger. The international community offers humanitarian aid but no political solution. The Nigerian government announces offensives, victories, and defeats in rotation. None of it changes the fundamental fact: the state that killed Yusuf in 2009 is the same state that cannot defeat his successors in 2026.

The war will continue because the conditions that caused it remain unaddressed. Poverty, unemployment, corruption, and state absence have not improved. In some areas, they have worsened. Every year, a new generation of young men in Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa states comes of age in a landscape of ruins and displacement. Some will join the military. Some will join the insurgency. Most will simply try to survive. That is what war does when it becomes permanent: it stops being an event and becomes a condition.

Fatima Bukar is still waiting at that checkpoint outside Maiduguri. She goes there every week. She asks soldiers if they have news of her sons. They tell her to go home. She has no home. Her village was burned in 2015. The camp where she lives is not a home. It is a place where people wait to die or wait for a miracle. She is 52 years old. She has been waiting for twelve years. She will likely wait until she dies. That is the war Nigeria created when it executed Mohammed Yusuf. It is the war Nigeria cannot end.