Inside Nigeria’s Risky War

When the police truck pulled up at the morgue at the main hospital in the northeastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri on the morning of May 9, the doctors working there explained that they only had space for two more bodies. The government was about to launch a major offensive against the Islamist group Boko Haram, casualties were already rising steeply, and the hospital’s morgue — which could hold 40 bodies — was full.

That was not what the 10 grief-stricken police officers who accompanied the truck wanted to hear. Inside the truck were the swollen, decomposing bodies of more than 30 of their comrades, who had been killed by members of Boko Haram in an attack on a police station in the nearby town of Bama. All the staff at the Maiduguri Teaching Hospital could do for the dead, they explained, was treat the bodies with the preservative formalin before transferring them to another morgue. When the medics began pouring the liquid over the bodies, the increasingly agitated officers erupted in fury. “I heard gunshots and saw people running,” says Abba Kabir, a resident doctor who was recovering from the incident in a bed at the hospital when TIME visited recently. Even before the shooting began, an officer had beaten Kabir and two female health workers. While running away from the soldier, Kabir hit and fractured his leg on a door. “We will kill everyone in the hospital,” the policemen shouted, recalls Kabir, “because you are not treating our corpses with respect!”

The policemen stalked the dimly lit halls, firing shots into the ceiling and into doors, smashing windows and televisions. The hospital staff found themselves terrorized by the men who were meant to be protecting them. Eventually, at the insistence of soldiers who intervened, they left. “We were surprised that the police had turned on us,” says another doctor, Mohammed Yahaya.

On May 14, the Nigerian government expanded its fight against Boko Haram, declaring a state of emergency in three states in the northeast — including Borno, the capital of which is Maiduguri — and launching a full-fledged military campaign, with the assistance of the police, to defeat Boko Haram. So far, the offensive has destroyed bases belonging to the al-Qaeda-allied Boko Haram and captured more than 150 suspected insurgents, according to the military, which says the campaign has been a broad success.

(PHOTOS: Deadly Attacks in Nigeria 2012)

But a rare visit to the heart of the insurgency in Maiduguri by a reporter for TIME reveals a disturbing picture of a continuing battle marked by combatant deaths and human-rights abuses on both sides. Eyewitness allegations of summary arrest, torture and other abuses by the security forces — one barracks in Maiduguri is locally known as “the concentration camp” — have created ill feeling among residents of the northeast who generally feel little affection for the extremists. Analysts and Washington policymakers say the offensive may have pushed some Boko Haram militants out of Nigeria and into neighboring countries, giving them a chance to regroup and create ties with militants in other West African nations. The campaign may even have scattered Boko Haram members to parts of the country they have never previously attacked. And in spite of gains made by the security forces, the militants continue to attack in familiar locations. On Aug. 4 the insurgents launched assaults on a police station and a military base in Borno; 35 people — most of them militants — died in the assaults, the government said.

The escalation in violence and the potential spread of militancy in the region is of increasing concern in Washington. Boko Haram bombed the U.N. headquarters in the capital city of Abuja in 2011 and has attacked schools. After the attack on the U.N. headquarters, the group released a video decrying the U.S. President and “other infidels.” “Boko Haram’s repeated displays of brutality, its intent to commit terror attacks against an expanding list of targets and its relationships with al-Qaeda affiliates — all in a country of strategic significance to the U.S. — is an enormous counterterrorism and intelligence challenge,” said Representative Patrick Meehan, then chairman of the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, in a speech about the group to the Heritage Foundation in July 2012.

In June, the U.S. government offered a $7 million reward for information leading to the capture of Boko Haram’s leader. By comparison, that’s just $3 million less than the State Department is offering for Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and $2 million more than is on offer for one of the bombers of the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000. “Although [Boko Haram and other groups in the region] may not have the same transnational capacity that some of the earlier organizations did, they’re doing great harm in Africa and in the Middle East and in South Asia,” President Obama said on June 29 in Soweto, South Africa.

Washington’s contribution to the Nigerian government’s fight against Boko Haram comes in the form of shared intelligence, logistics, training, political backing and funding for law enforcement. The military claims that together, the U.S. and Nigeria have been remarkably effective. “Will you compare such a situation to what it was before the operation? Definitely not. They were terrorizing every member of society,” says Brigadier General Chris Olukolade, a military spokesman. “The success of the operation is that they are being rooted out of their various places, and they don’t have freedom of action anymore in Nigeria.”

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But it’s not just the hospital workers of Maiduguri who are suffering at the hands of the U.S.-backed Nigerian security forces. Rights groups and witnesses say the military and police regularly abuse innocent civilians. And on May 17, Secretary of State John Kerry said the U.S. defended Nigeria’s right to defend itself against terrorists, but he added, “I have raised the issue of human rights with the government, with the Foreign Minister. We have talked directly about the imperative of Nigerian troops’ adhering to the highest standards and not themselves engaging in atrocities or in human-rights violations. That is critical. One person’s atrocity does not excuse another’s.”

Origins of the Threat
The man with the $7 million American price on his head and numerous atrocities to his name is Abubakar Shekau, Boko Haram’s ruthless and ambitious leader. Bearded and wearing fatigues and a headscarf, he appeared in a video released in May, declaring, “We will never abandon this jihad until death … Our goal in this jihad is the establishment of an Islamic state or martyrdom.” In July, Shekau released another video, this time expressing his support for the attack that month on a northern school where at least 29 students and one teacher were burned alive after gunmen attacked the building. Shekau insisted his fighters targeted non-Islamic schools and their teachers, not children.

If Shekau’s extremism is now plain to see, the movement he leads has been a long time in the making. Boko Haram’s founder was a cleric named Mohammed Yusuf who, as a young firebrand in 2001, began preaching in Maiduguri against the government’s ills, such as the prevalence of corruption, the lack of adequate employment and education, and the high rates of poverty among the northern population. He railed against what he saw as Western-style education, which he said led to those ills, and said Nigeria’s system of government needed to be replaced by a strict form of Islamic law. Yusuf and like-minded clerics recruited followers — not only very young unemployed men, but also sons of prominent families and graduates of the University of Maiduguri, who burned their diplomas in solidarity. Most imams and Islamic scholars in Maiduguri openly disagreed with Yusuf’s teachings.

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Local media started to call the group Boko Haram, which translates as “Western education is forbidden” in the regional language Hausa. But the name the group gave itself was Jama’atu Ahl as-Sunnah il-Da’awati wal-Jihad (which means, in Arabic, People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad). They donned turbans and carried weapons on their shoulders as they rode motorcycles through the sandy streets of Maiduguri. An ancient center of Islamic learning and trade choked by dry heat, the city is a sprawl of low-level buildings and was home to a million people before the conflict. In April 2009, several Boko Haram members were involved in a lethal car accident. When the group gathered at the city cemetery to bury the dead men, government troops opened fire on them and killed several of the Islamists. Yusuf quickly declared war against the government in revenge.

In July of that year, his group bombed and set fire to government buildings in the city. Four days of battle ensued, during which more than 800 people were killed and thousands more fled their homes. Yusuf was taken into custody and soon after was shot dead. (Police say he was killed while trying to escape; Boko Haram maintains that he was summarily executed.) With Shekau as the group’s new leader, Boko Haram intensified its campaign of violence: it set fire to police stations and began a long streak of assassinating civil service workers and elected officials. It robbed banks, blew up cell-phone towers and bombed markets and dozens of churches in central and northern Nigeria. Militants shot guests at weddings and funerals. Over 3,000 people have died in the conflict.

At the sedate campus of the University of Maiduguri, some female students walk around wearing abayas and hijabs, others in knee-length skirts with uncovered hair. Mohammed Gujbawu, a balding professor with wire-rimmed glasses, received a threatening text from someone claiming to be Boko Haram late last year, telling him to advise his students not to wear clothes that exposed themselves. The text was traced back to the student hostels. “Lecturers now are very careful in class and do not mention anything related to Boko Haram or terrorism because they’re here,” Gujbawu says.

Fighting Fire With Fire
Faced with the kind of brutality Shekau espouses, the violence his group is capable of and the fear the militants create in the general population, Nigerians broadly support their government’s decision to launch the offensive. But in a country that often suffers from tension between its mostly Muslim north and predominantly Christian south, the campaign has often seemed oblivious to the need to win over the hearts and minds of the Muslim population in the north.

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One victim of the military campaign is a 33-year-old mechanic with patient eyes and grease-stained hands, who asked to be identified only by the name Baba, for fear of retaliation. A Muslim member of the Hausa ethnic group, Baba grew up in Maiduguri. He was working in his garage, a breezy lot covered in brown dirt and filled with sedans, on a Friday morning last December when government troops drove up in an armored vehicle and cordoned off the area. They then rounded up at least 30 men, including Baba. The soldiers accused them of being members of Boko Haram and beat them with the sticks to the point that Baba fainted. He denied, as he does now, having any links to the group: “I am not Boko Haram. I don’t have any friends who are Boko Haram.” Baba and six others were packed in the armored vehicle and moved to a barracks. There the soldiers tied the men to pillars, stripped them of their clothes and held burning strips of leather over their bodies, Baba recalls. It was the cold season, and freezing water was poured on them. “Tell us the truth,” the soldiers said. By Tuesday evening, only Baba was still alive.

He says he was then moved to a cramped space where nearly 800 people, some as young as 12 and others older than 65, were handcuffed together. Fed only handfuls of food and regularly beaten, “we found dead bodies among us daily,” he says, standing near the garage where he has gone back to work. He was in detention for 45 days, let out only because he had friends working for the police and state security. One of his grease-covered hands does not close; the thumb on that hand is gnarled, and it is covered with a gaping, raw pink-yellow wound. “I thought I would die before I was released,” he says. “Once they dump you there, they forget about you.”

The experience has soured Baba on helping the army. “The military has not made anything better,” he says. “If I had information about Boko Haram, I could not tell the military because I do not trust them.”

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Femi Adefila, special assistant to the Minister of State for Defense, denies that the military commits abuses of the sort described by Baba. “Nobody can be summarily arrested and executed,” he says. “No, that does not happen. People can definitely be questioned and detained.” But the allegations in the past months have mounted. At Maiduguri Teaching Hospital, medical workers say the bodies of militants the military was leaving there last year and earlier this year often showed signs of beating, bruising from shackles and cigarette burns — possible signs that the men were killed after being captured and tortured. Babangida Labaran Usman, of Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission, estimates that the military has detained more than 7,000 people since 2011 at Maiduguri’s Giwa Barracks. He has a thick book of the biographical details and photos of missing boys and men, who are of the mostly Muslim Kanuri and Hausa ethnic groups. Despite Usman’s efforts to follow up with the military, “I can’t tell you whether these boys are alive or dead,” he says.

A Pyrrhic Victory?
The whereabouts of Shekau and the other top leaders of Boko Haram are unknown; they could be hiding in Nigeria, or they could now be based in a neighboring country. The military seems content with the idea that some Boko Haram members are no longer on Nigerian soil. “Our business is to clear the nation of insurgents. If they choose to relocate elsewhere, unfortunately that will not be our business,” said Olukolade, the military spokesman.

Not immediately, perhaps, but analysts say the Islamist group’s time in exile may not last. “Boko Haram may just take a little time to regroup, perhaps do a bit of recruiting and ask their al-Qaeda sympathizers for help, and plan a comeback for a later stage,” says Virginia Comolli, research associate for transnational threats at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “Some Boko Haram members have trained in al-Qaeda and [Somali militant] al-Shabab camps and received weapons and money from them.” Last year a Boko Haram splinter group calling itself Ansaru began kidnapping Westerners in Nigeria and Cameroon.

Some Boko Haram members have fled to other parts of Nigeria. On July 29 several bombs exploded in Kano, the largest city in the north, killing at least 24. And on July 30 a military spokesman announced the arrest of 42 suspected Boko Haram members in the country’s largest city, Lagos, and in a neighboring state in the southwest of the country. “Their camps have been detonated in the east, so they’re running down south,” says Adefila.

Comolli and other analysts and policymakers say in the long term, the military campaign against Boko Haram will not be enough to solve the problem of militancy. “The most sustainable way to advance long-term peace and security is through peaceful resolution, coupled with massive job creation to fight the youth’s restiveness and poverty,” Isa Umar Gusau, adviser to Maiduguri Governor Kashim Shettima, tells TIME.

For now, the fighting has only further impoverished the north, Nigeria’s poorest region, driving many businesses southward and sending food prices skyrocketing. Up to 40% of Maiduguri’s population has left the city since 2009; entire sections have been reduced to rubble. Numerous road-construction projects sit abandoned, giving the city a postapocalyptic feel. Soldiers stand at fortified checkpoints, guns pointed at oncoming traffic. There has been a drop in the violence in Maiduguri, but as Boko Haram continues its bombings and shootings elsewhere in the country, the Nigerian military may be facing a new reality: a once localized conflict spreading all over the most populous country in Africa.

— with reporting by Katie Harris and Qhelile Nyathi / London

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