Nigeria’s Boko Haram sets new tone in control areas

Boko Haram has massacred scores of children, gloated about the kidnap and enslavement of more than 200 teenage girls and killed thousands more in a brutal five-year uprising to create a strict Islamic state in northeast Nigeria. 

But the Islamist rebels’ latest video aimed at showing an unidentified community happy to be under their control is a departure for a group whose trademark has been brutal hit-and-run attacks against defenceless civilians. The extremists are believed to have taken more than two dozen towns and villages in the northeast, including Chibok, in Borno state, from where 276 schoolgirls were abducted in April, provoking global outrage. Residents in the affected areas have told AFP that people are desperately seeking the chance to flee, sometimes under the cover of darkness, after watching their neighbours suffer brutal corporal punishments administered by the new rebel leadership. 

There are, however, indications that Boko Haram is trying to persuade people that they will be safe under its so-called caliphate, provided everyone adheres to the group’s medieval interpretation of Islamic law. 

Boko Haram ‘appears to be moving in the direction of providing services, especially security for the residents in the territories it controls,’ John Campbell, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on the think-tank’s blog. 

‘They have stepped in as an alternative government following the withdrawal of government institutions from the areas now under their control,’ added security analyst  Bawa Wase. Parts of the latest video obtained last weekend were almost certainly orchestrated for propaganda purposes.