Boko Haram terror attacks have swelled in Nigeria’s northeastern Borno State over the past few months. Hilary Matfess, who is author of the forthcoming book, Women and the War on Boko Haram, which will be available in November 2017, tells The Cipher Brief’s Kaitlin Lavinder what it was like on the ground and why we’re seeing this worrying trend.
The Cipher Brief: You just returned from Nigeria – what’s your sense of what the situation on the ground in Nigeria is like right now with regards to Boko Haram related terror attacks?
Hilary Matfess: There was very recently a three female suicide bomber attack on a market in Borno State that killed 30 people or so and injured a number more. Despite the government’s insistence that Boko Haram is on its back foot and that the war is nearly done, what we’re seeing is a group that is powerful, that retains a lot of its capacity to engage in these sorts of destructive attacks. It’s even harder to get information about what the situation is like outside of urban centers, where media coverage is even more sparse. There, unfortunately, we’re even more subject to the government’s interpretation of events.
But having been on the ground in Borno State fairly recently, insecurity is pervasive. There’s definitely fear in some areas that Boko Haram will return and engage in more territorial raids, as they did around 2014-2015, when they declared allegiance to ISIS and declared a caliphate in the northeast. Following that, the Nigerian military made great headway against them and retook some territory, but the issue has been holding that territory since then. We’ve seen a real unwillingness or inability on the Nigerian government’s part to deploy police and soldiers and really hold territory outside of urban centers.
TCB: Are the attacks concentrated in Borno State?
Matfess: Yeah, especially now. In past years, Boko Haram had more of a general spread across the northeast. In 2013, when a state of emergency was declared by the Nigerian government and they deployed a joint task force to respond in the urban centers, it was declared across three states: Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa. I was recently in Adamawa State working on a research project. With the exception of some remote areas in the far north, most of Adamawa State is passable at this point. Stability has returned to a number of those communities.
But in Borno State there are still areas where you have incursions, you have active attacks on Maiduguri, trade is still subject to crackdowns or control by the Nigerian government for fear that it’s enriching the insurgency. At this point, I would say that the majority of the attacks are confined to Borno State.
Boko Haram is also still fairly active in northern Cameroon, as well as Diffa in Niger. But Borno definitely bears the brunt of it still.
TCB: What caused the shift out of other states. Was it increased capabilities and manpower in the Nigerian military? Was it U.S. military assistance? Was it a change in strategy on the part of Boko Haram?
Matfess: It’s a combination of a number of factors. But it might just be that these cells are inactive at this point, focusing on other aspects, or that they’ve now been dispersed and now concentrating into Borno State. It’s not clear why this has happened. Certainly there was a renewed effort by the Nigerian military and the Nigerian government in Yobe and Adamawa, but it’s worth remembering that Boko Haram was founded in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State. It appears that its social networks have generally been more concentrated in that area, so it might just be a return to its strongholds.
TCB: When was that renewed effort by the Nigerian military and government?
Matfess: There have been fits and starts. You see this throughout the history of Boko Haram. The first big effort against the insurgency was in 2009 during the crackdown where they killed between 700 and 1,000 people in door to door raids. The second was the declaration of a state of emergency in 2013. That was under President Goodluck Jonathan. And then President Muhammadu Buhari, who is the current president despite having been in London most of the year, when he first came to office in 2015, he was really forward leaning on the insurgency. His first couple months of office were marked by an increased effort in the northeast. Since then, it has tapered off a bit. You've got complaints from soldiers that they’re not being paid, you’ve had difficulty like I mentioned earlier actually holding the territory that’s been cleared. So it’s been quite a cyclical conflict – a big military push and then it backs off, and then Boko Haram either regains a bit of territory or regains capacity to engage in these attacks, and then it gets to the point where the Nigerian military cracks down again, and so on and so forth.
TCB: It sounds like it’s largely based on political will, to some extent at least?
Matfess: It is certainly at the elite level. On the ground, a lot of the soldiers do complain that they’re not compensated sufficiently or regularly. So there’s a lack of political will to engage with this insurgency in a manner befitting the most lethal crisis that the country has faced since its return to democracy in 1999. And then on the ground, you certainly have difficulty generating the troop morale on the frontlines, when payments are delayed or insufficient or haven’t been forthcoming for a series of months.
TCB: Are the mispayments due to alleged corruption, or is it sheer mismanagement?
Matfess: Why not both? For different units, you’ll have different explanations. But the problem of civil servants, government workers not being paid in general in Nigeria, as well as in other sub Saharan African countries, is a perennial issue, so it’s perhaps unsurprising – even though on the face of it, it does seem absurd you would not make an effort to make good on the contract that you have between the government and its soldiers.
TCB: Has the United States provided increased assistance over the past couple of years? And if so, how?
Matfess: We do have some military assistance to Nigeria in terms of surveillance. And the United States has given support to the multi-national joint task force, which is a coalition of countries in the Lake Chad Basin in West Africa who are cooperating to prevent the spread of Boko Haram and combat Boko Haram. A lot of that assistance has been funneled through Chad. We also have trained a number of Nigerian military members. But unfortunately, it looks like the next bout of assistance will be the sale of the Super Tucano planes, which in my opinion is a profoundly misguided idea.
The estimates of the cost of the planes is half of Nigeria’s annual defense budget. The case for the planes is that they’re propeller planes with more accurate weapons attached to the wings. The case against the planes is that it’s not insufficient air power that has made Boko Haram such a persistent issue. Moreover, from the U.S.’s own legal point-of-view, there’s the Leahy Amendment, which prevents the U.S. from selling military equipment or engaging in military training or assistance to units who commit human rights abuses. And the fact is that the Nigerian government has committed gross human rights abuses and has gone so far as to bomb an IDP [internally displaced person] camp in Rann a few months back.
The investigation into that affair recently released its findings, which was not, in my view, a satisfying account of what occurred. There’s a lot of rumors in the northeast that are fairly credible that the government knew it was an IDP camp, and bombed it because they believed there were insurgents inside of it. There have also been some grumblings that this wasn’t the first time that such an assault had occurred. Furthermore, just last week, we had the Nigerian military raid a UN compound on alleged suspicion there were Boko Haram commanders there – but regardless of the motivation, an unauthorized raid of a UN command is not really a sign of someone acting in good faith. That signifies that we need better diplomatic relationships with the Nigerian military’s leadership and the Nigerian government, and better training of its soldiers on human rights guidance, rather than propeller planes and bigger guns.
TCB: Was the aircraft deal signed under the Obama Administration?
Matfess: The Obama Administration called it off because of human rights concerns.
TCB: And so now the Trump Administration is re-implementing it?
Matfess: Yes. Congress was recently notified of the sale.
TCB: Do you think this is representative of Trump’s broader strategy of fighting terrorism in Africa, which is a shift toward selling weapons to African governments and letting them deal with it on their own?
Matfess: I won’t comment on that specifically, but what I will say is it’s hard to speak to a Trump Administration’s doctrine in Africa just because there’s so few people staffed up there. It’s difficult to comment on an Administration’s policies when they don’t have people in the post to make that policy.
TCB: Do you think that that fact, that there aren’t people in Africa posts, is representative of some of the thinking on Africa from the Trump Administration?
Matfess: I certainly do. It’s a little bit out of my lane to speculate on the anemic state of the State Department, but there’s a phrase, personnel is policy, and if you don’t have personnel that’s obviously not a policy priority for you.
TCB: I want to jump back to what you mentioned at the beginning about the recent attack with three female suicide bombers – is this kind of attack typical, or has there been a shift in Boko Haram’s attack strategy over the past few months or years?
Matfess: In the report “Exploding Stereotypes” that I and my colleague Jason Warner just released, we unpack the group’s evolution of the use of suicide bombers in general and note a real marked trend toward the use of female bombers and underage bombers and groups of bombers. We’re working on a paper now on the insurgency’s use of these groups of bombers to attack a single target. What’s interesting about this particular attack is that it’s one of the more effective of the group attacks. It’s not typical in terms of how many people it has killed. But it is a sign of the way the insurgency is starting to deploy suicide bombers, which is more and more women, and often in groups against soft targets, like markets.
TCB: With this change in usage of suicide bombers – using more women, younger people, targeting soft targets – do you think we’re going to see an increase in the number of Boko Haram related deaths in the coming months? Does there seem to be some kind of movement toward more and more attacks and deaths?
Matfess: Suicide bombing in general is a low cost strategy. It doesn’t necessarily take a lot of insurgent resources to deploy them, so they could certainly increase in coming months. But we have to distinguish between attacks and deaths, which seems counterintuitive at first, and it kind of is, but Boko Haram’s suicide bombers are not particularly effective compared to other suicide bombers deployed globally. While they might engage in a number of attacks, overall deaths might not be of a breathtaking figure, though certainly destabilizing.
It’s difficult to say what coming months will bring. The end of the rainy season might also alter the ways in which the group chooses to alter attacks. I do think that the use of female and child bombers, though, appears to be a direction in which the group is heading, and something that not just the Nigerian security sector, but the world has to figure out a means of responding to.
There is a spectrum of consent of participation in these bombings, and there’s an important analytical distinction between a suicide bomber who volunteers and is ideologically committed, and someone who’s sent off with IEDs strapped to them under threat of violence, other means of coercion, or even unknowingly. So we need to start defining the latter camp as Person-Borne IEDs, or PBIEDs, and then figuring out what are the different counterinsurgency and counterterrorism strategies when you’re engaging with suicide bombers as opposed to when you’re engaging with PBIEDs.
