A week after Abubakar Shekau, the enigmatic
leader of Boko Haram, appeared in a grainy,
seven-minute YouTube video and declared,
“For me, the end has come,” the Nigerian
militant group released a second video that
seemed to say the opposite.
The difference between the two videos was
striking. The first one, released on March 24,
was of low quality and featured a melancholy
Shekau thanking his followers for their
dedication but declining to issue any of his
customary threats against the Nigerian
government. Unsurprisingly, it inspired
premature claims that he had surrendered or
was preparing to abdicate leadership. The
second video, released on April 1, was as
slickly produced as it was unambiguous about
the group’s intention to continue fighting.
“You should know that there is no truce, there
is no negotiations, there is no surrender,” says
a masked man who explicitly confirms that
Shekau remains in charge. (Shekau does not
appear in the video.) “This war between us
will not stop.”
Boko Haram is constantly evolving. As it has
come under increased pressure from a
regional military coalition, the group has
clearly pivoted — but it’s not yet clear in
which direction. Last year, it forged an
alliance with the Islamic State, but at the
same time it has embraced asymmetric
terrorist tactics not designed to capture or
hold territory, a move seemingly at odds with
its stated goal of establishing an Islamic
caliphate. Last week, the Pentagon pointed to
an arms shipment from Islamic State fighters
in Libya that was intercepted before it could
reach Boko Haram as evidence of deeper
cooperation between the two groups. But
much about the alliance, and about Boko
Haram’s ultimate intentions, remains
shrouded in mystery.
Central to that mystery is the mind of
Abubakar Shekau, who has led the Islamist
militant group for the past six years. Rarely
has so little been known about the life of such
an important political figure. If anything, he
has mostly been known for his talent for
escaping death. Nigerian and Cameroonian
troops claim to have killed him on multiple
occasions, but each time he has re-emerged
to taunt them. Some who knew Shekau as a
youngster claim he is not the same man who
appears in the group’s propaganda videos,
and that his name has been appropriated by a
series of body doubles. Before the somber
March 24 video, he had not been heard from
in more than a year.
What little we know about Shekau’s personal
trajectory tracks with the course of Boko
Haram’s evolution over the past six years. But
now, as the contradictory videos suggest,
Boko Haram could be finally outgrowing him.
What is known for certain about the leader of
Boko Haram is that he was born in a remote
village in Yobe State, near Nigeria’s
northeastern border with Niger, in the 1970s
or early 1980s. (Since birth certificates were
not common back then in this remote and
impoverished region, estimates of Shekau’s
age vary widely.) In 1990 his father sent him
away for Quranic study in Maiduguri, the
capital of Nigeria’s Borno State, where a
charismatic cleric named Mohammed Yusuf
would later found Boko Haram. Shekau spent
11 years studying in Maiduguri, much of it
engaged in fierce argumentation with his
teacher. Baba Fanani, the son of Shekau’s
teacher, told the New York Times that the
future militant leader was “the most
troublesome” of all his father’s students.
The teacher eventually became alarmed by
Shekau’s radicalism and expelled him from
the madrasa. Shekau then enrolled at the
Borno State College of Legal and Islamic
Studies, where he met and befriended
Mamman Nur, a future Boko Haram
commander, who introduced him to Yusuf,
the leader of the group. During this period,
Boko Haram was not the violent terrorist
organization it is today. It was a peaceful
proselytizing group, regarded as eccentric and
severe, but not a threat to national security.
Shekau quickly bought in to Yusuf’s stark
worldview, which revolved around a
puritanical brand of Islam free of the
i
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