The survivors of the slave-raid had gathered under the uncertain shade of a clump of trees rising from the rough, red earth: “All the huts were burnt down,” the French military officer Lieutenant Fauré would report to his superiors, “Every gourd, jar and piece of pottery was broken.” Locusts and drought, Lieutenant Fauré recorded, had raged through the lands of the ethnic-Sara people through the summer of 1902. Then, as the weather turned to spring, a new plague emerged: Ethnic-Fulbé raiding groups set out from the Emirate of Bornu, ripping apart the villages of the Lake Chad basin for ivory, gold and slaves.
From his throne in Bornu, the warlord Rabih az-Zubayr bin Fadlallah had proclaimed slave-raiding a religious obligation, a jihad against the pagan tribes of the Lake Chad basin. French soldiers responded by sticking Rabih’s severed head on a pike in 1900, and then packed his skull off for display at the Musée de l’Homme anthropological museum in Paris.
Two years later, though, hundreds of small children and women were still being captured in raids. Large numbers died of thirst and starvation, French officials reported. Fauré explained how his troops survived: “Fortunately there were a number of hippopotami in the Logone, and these served as food.”
This weekend, President Donald Trump announced that the United States special forces and the Nigerian military had worked together to eliminate Nigerian jihadist Abu-Bilal al-Minuki in a helicopter-borne assault on a compound near Metele, in the northeastern Borno province. Earlier claimed to have been killed in September 2019 and November 2022, Al-Minuki was a symbol of the Islamic States’ growing power and lethality across Africa.
For the Trump administration, the killing is an advertisement for the new counter-terrorism doctrine announced earlier this month. The sixteen-page document vows to abandon “neocolonial policies focused on globalist left-wing cultural hegemony.” Even as Trump pulls back troops and downsizes America’s global presence, allies will be assisted “with actionable intelligence and CT [counter-terrorism] partner-force development.”
Even though the document’s language is meant to suggest America is preparing to take new directions, it consists of worn clichés. America needs to ask itself why taking the hammer to the problem has failed to demolish it.
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Evil rising
Local preachers sometimes called the city that had risen from the sweltering, mosquito-ridden swamp Al-Mu’tafikat, the subverted cities of the Quran, whose citizens rejected the prophet Lut’s warnings against corruption, criminality and sexual degeneracy.
From the 1980s, merchants and migrants flooded the town of Maiduguri in the far northeast of Nigeria, turning it into the economic heart of the Lake Chad basin. Lebanese merchants, con-men, pickpockets and sex-workers, Maiduguri-born journalist Jimeh Saleh recounted, turned the town’s Babban Layi—‘The Broad Street’—into a hub for electronics and cloth that drew merchants from Chad, Cameroon, and even Sudan.
The problems, though, mounted: Large-scale youth unemployment provided a pool of surplus labour to criminals; rape and robbery became common; the Nigerian military government’s response, a crackdown known as Operation Zaki, bred a brutalisation of society that politicians would struggle to undo after democracy was restored in 1999.
For much of the nineteenth century, the scholar David Robinson has recounted, power was held by Emirs who emerged on the margins of the empire of Timbuktu. Five great phases of jihad, Robinson shows, brought about the Islamisation of Fulbé society, and an expansionist ideal that cast its ambitions as a war against paganism. The Emirs sometimes collided with French imperialism, but largely made their peace with the new order, and secured their position.
Through the 1970s, a new class of Saudi Arabia-trained clerics took on the Emirs, and their syncretic folk Islam. This, together with fears of the growing influence of Christianity, led to large-scale communal violence from the 1980s. Among the movements to emerge from these upheavals was Boko Haram—sometimes described as the ‘Nigerian Taliban’—a mobilisation against the western, secular values of the élite.
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Boko Haram’s birth
Led by the clerics Muhammad Yusuf and Abubakar Shekau, political scientist Alexander Thurston writes, Boko Haram’s messianic polemic drew a generation of frustrated, young Muslims, angered by the inability of Nigeria’s elites to use its oil wealth to bring about equitable development. From 9/11 to 2008, Yusuf was able to preach openly. Then, in 2009, when Boko Haram turned to armed attacks on the state and key officials, Yusuf was killed in an extrajudicial encounter. The violence, however, continued to escalate: This phase would see Boko Haram’s most infamous operation, the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok in April 2014.
The son of a small-time village cleric, the 1973-born Abubakar Mohammed Shekau had little that marked him out for great power: Forced to beg for food, his mother Falmata Abubakar said, the Boko Haram leader went on to become an Almajiri, or religious schoolteacher. The reputation Shekau developed for violence, though, marked him out. He would lead Boko Haram into the embrace of the Islamic State. Figures like Abu Musab al-Barnawi and Abu Abdullah Umar al-Barnawi challenged Shekhau’s use of violence against Muslims, which repelled many jihadists.
Large numbers of recruits were available to fill the gaps left by the killing of leadership. Following the death of Shekau and his rivals, the quiet, bespectacled Al-Minuki fluidly filled the gap. Likely born in the mid-1980s, Al-Minuki is thought to have been among the followers Boko Haram drew in its early years.
Even though a succession of leaders would be killed, the movement became one of the most savage to emerge in the post-9/11 period: By 2016, the conflict was estimated to have claimed more than 16,000 lives, and turned 2.5 million people into refugees. The African Union responded by creating a coalition of Nigeria, Chad, Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, and Benin—Multinational Joint Task Force—to fight the Islamic State. French soldiers and American special forces also operated in the region.
Funding issues, human rights violations and, most important, the lack of a coherent state-building strategy, meant the mission to defeat Boko Haram achieved little. Large-scale violence and massacres—targeting both Christians and Muslims—still continue.
Fighting words
Language similar to the new Trump policy has figured in successive American counter-terrorism doctrinal documents. The first doctrine, issued soon after 9/11 in 2003, vowed to help allies “vigorously in their efforts to build the institutions and capabilities needed.” The second iteration, released in 2006, promised to dismantle safe havens in malign regimes and establish “effective democracies.” The 2011 doctrine again flagged the threat from “the physical sanctuary of ungoverned or poorly governed territories.” Trump’s 2018 doctrine emphasised “collaborating so that foreign governments take the lead wherever possible.”
Ever since 2024, regional governments which had pushed out French peacekeepers—imagining Russian mercenaries would do a better job—began quietly bringing back American military advisors. The bottom line, however, is that French and American peacekeepers failed to defeat jihadism, despite years of presence in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Guinea.
There’s little doubt troops are needed to contain and fight the insurgency. From years of experience, though, it’s clear soldiers are not the solution to the crisis. The stage for the ascendant jihadist movement was set over the course of centuries, involving complex problems of ethnicity, colonialism, and the distribution of economic resources. From the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is clear America won each battle, but had no clear vision of what was needed to end the war.
A successful counterinsurgency programme needs local political actors, national governments and international institutions to work together to build the institutions of functional society and state.
Ever since 9/11, American counter-terrorism policy has become hostage to the ritual incantation of largely-meaningless mantras. Things haven’t been helped by the desire of politicians to hype limited successes, like the killing of Abu Bilal Al-Minuki.
he arrest and trial of Afghan jihadist Muhammad Sharifullah was another such limited success. The US claimed he was a key figure in multiple bombings, but could not convince even an American jury of his importance. They couldn’t agree if he had actually played a role in the bombing of American troops during the chaotic retreat of 2021.
The truth is killing a terrorist, or even several, rarely influences the outcome of a conflict. That needs an attention to detail, to strategy and, above all, persistence that America has been unable to so far muster.
Praveen Swami is Contributing Editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)