Origins: Mohammed Yusuf and the 2009 uprising
Boko Haram was founded in 2002 in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State in Nigeria's north-east, by the preacher Mohammed Yusuf, whose movement's Hausa nickname — commonly translated as "Western education is forbidden" — reflected its rejection of secular schooling and its call for strict application of sharia law even in a country nearly evenly divided between a largely Muslim north and Christian south, twelve of whose northern states had adopted Islamic law by 1999 S1. The group carried out coordinated attacks across four northern states in July 2009, prompting a security-force crackdown in which, according to contemporaneous reporting, hundreds of people were killed in clashes between Boko Haram and Nigerian forces S1. Yusuf himself was captured and died in police custody on 30 July 2009; police said he was shot attempting to escape, but a Reuters reporter and other journalists said they had seen him alive and uninjured in military custody shortly before his death, and Human Rights Watch called the killing "an extra-judicial killing" and "a shocking example of the brazen contempt by the Nigerian police for the rule of law" S1. Yusuf's death, rather than ending the movement, is widely credited by subsequent reporting with radicalising its successor leadership under Abubakar Shekau S1
Escalation: mass-casualty attacks and the Chibok abduction
Violence escalated through the early 2010s into a sustained insurgency across Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states, with Boko Haram increasingly targeting schools and education infrastructure as symbols of the secular state it opposed; Human Rights Watch documented that between 2009 and 2015 more than 910 schools were destroyed or forced to close, at least 611 teachers were deliberately killed, and roughly 952,000 school-age children lost access to education as a result S3. The insurgency's best-known single incident came on the night of 14–15 April 2014, when Boko Haram fighters abducted 276 schoolgirls from a government secondary school in Chibok, Borno State; Human Rights Watch's 2016 accounting found 219 of the Chibok girls still missing at the time of its report, alongside a separate abduction of roughly 300 children from a school in Damasak in November 2014 S3. Human Rights Watch's contemporaneous count found more than 2,000 people abducted in the conflict overall and put a running estimate of roughly 10,000 civilian deaths since the insurgency began by the time of its 2016 report, a figure that predates the far higher cumulative tolls later attributed to the conflict by United Nations agencies S3
Documented abuses in the counter-insurgency response
Nigerian security forces have themselves faced documented criticism over civilian harm during counter-insurgency operations. Human Rights Watch's analysis of the first quarter of 2015 — based on interviews with 26 displaced people and 13 additional witnesses including journalists and aid workers — attributed at least 1,000 civilian deaths to that period, overwhelmingly to Boko Haram's own attacks and cross-border raids into Cameroon, Chad and Niger, while also documenting at least one instance in which Nigerian soldiers killed five civilians, including an elderly blind man burned in his home, during a December 2014 operation in Bauchi State's Mundu village S2. Human Rights Watch's 2026 country chapter documents more recent instances of similar concern, including a January 2025 Nigerian Air Force strike on Tungar Kara village in Zamfara State that killed at least 20 people, among them civilian vigilantes responding to a separate bandit raid, and notes that comparable airstrikes have "killed hundreds in Nigeria" over the years "without transparent, clear, and meaningful steps towards accountability" S8. The same report also records Boko Haram's JAS faction killing at least 57 people in a May 2025 attack on Mallam Karamti and Kwatandashi villages and at least 60 people, including soldiers, in a September 2025 attack on Darul Jamal, illustrating that both militant attacks and disputed military conduct have continued into the conflict's second decade S8
The ISWAP–JAS split and the death of Shekau
In 2016, Boko Haram fractured into two rival factions: Jama'atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'awati wal-Jihad (JAS), which remained under Abubakar Shekau, and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), whose then-leader Abu Musab al-Barnawi went on to join the Islamic State's Shura Council and whose faction the Institute for Security Studies describes as one of the Islamic State's "most successful affiliates," receiving financial support from the parent organisation S4. Shekau died on 19 May 2021 after detonating an explosive device rather than surrender when ISWAP fighters overran his hideout; ISWAP's own confirmation, issued through a recorded message from Abu Mus'ab al-Barnawi, stated that ISIS leadership had ordered action against Shekau over what it characterised as his excessive violence against fellow Muslims S5. Shekau's death allowed ISWAP to absorb much of JAS's remaining territory and fighters, and the Institute for Security Studies notes that ISWAP-linked fatalities rose by 27% in 2023 compared with the previous year, alongside efforts to expand into additional Nigerian states and high-profile operations such as the 2022 Kuje prison break S4
Casualties and displacement: what the counting bodies say
Figures for the conflict's overall toll vary by source, cutoff date and method, underscoring the difficulty of arriving at a single authoritative number. The UN's resident and humanitarian coordinator for Nigeria put the death toll at more than 40,000 since the insurgency began in 2009, attributing the deaths to Boko Haram and its splinter factions, in a January 2026 UN News account that also recorded more than 2 million people displaced in the north-east alone and 3.5 million displaced nationally once north-western banditry, central-belt farmer-herder violence and other conflicts are included — describing Nigeria's insecurity as no longer confined to any single region S6. That figure sits well above the roughly 10,000 civilian deaths Human Rights Watch's 2016 education-focused report had recorded through that point, and above the intervening estimate of at least 35,000 deaths through August 2023 that Nigerian reporting attributed to UNHCR and the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, illustrating how running tallies have risen as the conflict has continued and as counting methods have broadened S6S3
Current status and the surrender debate
By 2026, Nigerian authorities were emphasising counter-insurgency gains: President Bola Tinubu said more than 124,000 fighters and their dependants had entered a formal surrender process since 2023, while Defence Headquarters reported more than 300,000 total surrenders between 2016 and 2025 and roughly 2,615 people completing rehabilitation programmes, according to Al Jazeera's reporting on the trend S7. That same reporting raised a documented concern about the imbalance this creates: former fighters have received counselling, education and vocational training under reintegration programmes, while an estimated 3.7 million people displaced by the conflict lack adequate food, medical care and steady employment, and communities have expressed fear of reintegrating people linked to killings, kidnapping and rape without a matching programme of victim support or redress S7. The insurgency's course connects directly to the structure of Nigeria's counter-insurgency response described at nigerian armed forces, to the Commander-in-Chief's constitutional authority over military deployments addressed at nigerian presidency, and to the north-eastern states' place within Nigeria's federal system covered at federal structure of nigeria S7