Once again, Boko Haram has made news by kidnapping women and children in Nigeria.
As we all know, they are a terrorist group, and it is often easy for me to replace the
actual group name, Boko Haram, with the generic post-9/11 understanding of the word "terrorist".
I know this is just my instinct to group things together to make them easier to understand,
but I'd like to think that I can handle more than just the one word explanation "terrorist".
So, who are the Boko Haram?
First off, their real name is not Boko Haram.
That's just what the local people call them.
It roughly means, "Western Education Forbidden".
But the actual group's name is The Congregation of the People of Tradition for Proselytism
and Jihad.
That is how they self identify and it says pretty much everything.
They are a group of people, holding on to traditional Islamic values, spreading and
fighting for those values.
Which on it's face doesn't sound that violent.
And initially the group wasn't.
The group was started by Mohammed Yusuf in 2002, with the intention of creating a "true"
Islamic society under Sharia Law, which is the strictest most literal version of Islam.
They were always a radical group, but not always a dangerous one.
They were like a tiny motorcycle club of extreme Islamists, who'd have occasional and somewhat
escalating dust-ups with the authorities.
Then in 2009 everything came to a head.
Nigerian security forces killed Yusuf and numerous of his followers in what the media
at the time called the Boko Haram Uprising, but his followers think of this incident more
as a massacre of their people than an uprising.
And that is what turned them into the horrible, militant, biker gang we have terrorizing innocent
people today.
Their new leader, Abubakar Shekau hasn't changed the values of the group,
but he does have them more focused on the last word in their name.
Jihad.
Specifically, violent jihad against anyone not practicing their exact form of extremist
fundamentalism.
Basically, they want four things.
Nigeria to follow their strict version of sharia law.
The end of western education in Nigeria.
Death to people who don't share their beliefs.
And death to the current government, which they call corrupt and blasphemous.
So, they are very close to exactly what you thought they were... terrorists.
But these guys have motorcycles and focus a touch more on ending Western Education than
your run of the mill terrorist group, hence the kidnapping of school children from
Westernized schools in Nigeria.
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