Inside the vigilante fight against Boko Haram

For months before the girls were taken, refugees flooded into Maiduguri, fleeing almost-daily Boko Haram raids on nearby villages. The militants arrived on motorcycles and Toyota Hilux trucks, sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes in broad daylight, destroying homes and businesses and killing villagers. By May, a month after the kidnappings, the rebels […]

For months before the girls were taken, refugees flooded into Maiduguri, fleeing almost-daily Boko Haram raids on nearby villages. The militants arrived on motorcycles and Toyota Hilux trucks, sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes in broad daylight, destroying homes and businesses and killing villagers. By May, a month after the kidnappings, the rebels were coming closer, striking surrounding villages and towns. Maiduguri could only be next.
Kalli was trying to stay calm, but he couldn’t keep the anxiety and paranoia at bay. Recently, the stress had become so intense that he was hospitalized for eight days. Why was the military not protecting his people? He had grown tired of asking the question. Kalli, a wiry, energetic man of 50 with an affable manner, worked as a government auditor. He was also a unit commander in the Civilian Joint Task Force, a thousands-strong vigilante battalion that was formed in June 2013 to combat Boko Haram. The Civilian J.T.F., as it is known, is made up of volunteers — professionals, civil servants, students and traders — and arms itself with machetes, locally sourced guns and homemade weapons. Kalli led a unit of 8,000.
Just after the girls were kidnapped, Kalli and his volunteers, whom he affectionately calls his “boys” — they call him “Elder” — arranged to meet local soldiers in Alagarno, a village near the expansive Sambisa Forest, where Boko Haram had set up camps and the girls were thought to be held. But the military’s promised aircraft never arrived, he said. Kalli was angry but not altogether surprised. It wasn’t unusual for the military to fail to keep its promises. The government’s ineffectiveness in fighting Boko Haram was why he joined the Civilian J.T.F. in the first place.
Since the insurgency began in 2009, the military’s response has been both slow and inadequate. Residents report seeing soldiers running away during confrontations with Boko Haram. Soldiers say they do not have enough equipment — they often appear to lack protective gear — and do not get paid on time, if at all. Recently, a military tribunal sentenced 12 soldiers to death for attempted murder and mutiny; they had shot at their commanding officer after a convoy of their fellow soldiers was ambushed by Boko Haram. The governor of Borno State, Kashim Shettima, angered federal government officials this year when he remarked that Boko Haram outmatched troops in the northeast in both weaponry and motivation. John Campbell, a senior fellow for Africa policy studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former United States ambassador to Nigeria, makes a similar point: “We are talking about a body that is relatively weak,” he says, one that “has been starved of training and resources for a very long time.”
In the absence of an effective military response, the job of combating Boko Haram has fallen to the Civilian J.T.F. “We are responsible for fighting them,” Kalli said. Widely credited with pushing Boko Haram out of Maiduguri a year ago, the Civilian J.T.F. dispenses a summary justice. Much of Kalli’s time was devoted to tracking down and turning over to government authorities the men and boys suspected of having joined Boko Haram.
One Sunday in May, hours before I met up with him at a hotel in Maiduguri that is popular with the military and considered secure, his contact in Yola — the capital of neighboring Adamawa State, where Boko Haram has also waged attacks — called to say someone suspected of being a Boko Haram member was returning to his home in Maiduguri. Kalli guessed that the young man was coming to pick up supplies, perhaps weapons he had stashed somewhere. He gathered his boys and dispatched them to the suspect’s house in one of the unit’s blue pickup trucks.
A few hours later, while Kalli and I sat talking in the hotel, his phone rang. As he listened, he became agitated, twitching with excitement. “We got one,” he said, hanging up. His boys had captured the suspect. Kalli told me he had to go and rushed out of the hotel.
Two days later, I visited Kalli at one of his two homes, a modest bungalow. The power was out, and his third and youngest wife lay on the floor with their three children, fanning them as they napped. I joined Kalli on the couch as he pulled up the cellphone video he shot of the Yola suspect. It showed a young man in black athletic shorts and a red T-shirt, surrounded by men shouting questions at him. The suspect, Mohammed Umar, who could not have been much older than 20, looked dazed. “He confessed that he was a member of Boko Haram and that they have been hiding AK-47s in one house,” Kalli said gleefully. “We asked him to take us to the house. At the first house, we went in and dug but didn’t find anything. He took us to three houses. At the third house, we found two AK-47 magazines.”
When it was over, Kalli and his men, who’d been joined by another Civilian J.T.F. commander, handed Umar over to the authorities. “He ran away from Maiduguri when we started chasing Boko Haram last year,” Kalli explained. “Most of them fled. Even now, many of them are living in Lagos, many of them are living in Abuja, many of them are living in Kano.” During his first operation in June 2013, Kalli and his boys captured 10 suspects with AK-47s. All were turned over to the military and detained. More recently, in April, he and his boys apprehended nearly 40 people suspected of being Boko Haram members in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, 500 miles away. With each mission, Kalli and his unit have become more efficient at rooting out sympathizers. This time, he boasted, the entire operation — from finding Umar to searching the houses to handing him over to Nigerian security forces — took less than 35 minutes.
Kalli grew up in Maiduguri, among 18 brothers and sisters. His father was a cow trader and farmer, and his mother, the last of his father’s four wives, was a housewife. Kalli’s grandfather helped raise him and pushed him to excel at school. As a teenager, Kalli decided he wanted to be a military officer and joined his secondary school’s cadet program, a feeder for the best military academy. But his mother worried that he was choosing a risky career, and he ended up studying accounting at a technical college in Maiduguri. He became an auditor, rising through the ranks of the Borno State government, married and soon was prosperous enough to take two more wives and have 20 children.
Then Boko Haram began its onslaught against his hometown. Once an ancient center of Islamic teaching and trade, Maiduguri is now a city of sandbagged bunkers and security checkpoints. The attacks were sporadic but chilling. In June 2011, Boko Haram bombed a beer garden; last December, it orchestrated bombings near the airport and on a military air base. Boko Haram attacked civilians seemingly at random. Kalli’s brother was assassinated in his own home in 2011. “It really hurt me,” he recalled. “But we were handicapped, we couldn’t do anything. We were even afraid to report it to the military or authorities, because if you report it, a few days later Boko Haram will just come and kill you.” This was not the Nigeria he knew.
Men of Kalli’s generation were among the last to benefit from the country’s post-independence, oil-driven economic expansion. In the 1960s and ’70s, a high-school graduate could easily find a good job. The Nigerian naira was on par with the British pound. Nigeria was so wealthy, in fact, that it almost didn’t matter that billions of dollars were lost to graft. But deep social and economic rifts existed just below the surface. Pieced together in 1914 and controlled by the British until its independence in 1960, Nigeria was loosely divided along religious lines, with a mostly Muslim, ethnically diverse north and an equally diverse, predominantly Christian south. Under British rule, the north was governed via local emirs, which did not interfere with the region’s Muslim identity, while the south was more directly controlled by the British. The south eventually developed an economy centered on oil; the north remained largely agrarian. Because Christian missionaries were concentrated in the south, southerners also had access to Western education. Today, these regional differences persist: Literacy rates are significantly higher in the south than in the north, while poverty is more entrenched in the north than in the south.
After independence, a succession of military governments held the two regions together, suppressing ethnic and religious differences and quelling dissent. Civilian rule returned in 1999, renewing hopes of a more equitable society. Instead, says Max Siollun, a Nigerian writer and historian, “1999 came and went, soldiers left and were replaced by civilians, but nothing changed. The government was still corrupt, poverty was still rife and economic opportunities and jobs were still scarce.” Radical Islamic groups, Siollun says, filled this moral vacuum, as they often had in Nigeria.
Boko Haram got its start in Maiduguri. In 2001, a young Muslim cleric named Mohammed Yusuf began preaching about the government’s failures, blaming Western education for corrupting Nigerian leaders and advocating an Islamic society based on Shariah law. Yusuf’s message resonated with many in the north, especially its disaffected young men. Over the next two years, the group, then known as the Yusufiyya movement, tried to create independent settlements in Borno and in neighboring Yobe State. Most of the efforts began peacefully, though some cells were accused of killing clerics and police officers. Local news media began to use a term for the group, Boko Haram, which translates to “Western education is forbidden” in the regional language, Hausa. The insurgents’ official Arabic name, however, is jama’atu ahlis sunna lidda’awati wal-jihad, which means People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.
In 2009, after the police opened fire on several Boko Haram members at a funeral procession in Maiduguri, shooting 17, the group bombed and set fire to government buildings. The police and the military battled the insurgents for days; more than 800 people were killed, most in extrajudicial killings by the military, and thousands of people were forced to abandon their homes. Yusuf was arrested and died in police custody. In response, Boko Haram staged an uprising. Under a newly appointed leader, Abubakar Shekau, the group burned down schools and police stations; blew up cellphone towers, markets, churches and mosques; and killed scores of students and teachers throughout central and northern Nigeria. Boko Haram has since massacred thousands of Nigerians and abducted hundreds more. In February, the group savagely murdered almost 60 schoolboys; some were burned alive. This year, Boko Haram set off three explosions in the country’s capital, underscoring that not even the federal government was safe from attack. In April, the group took the schoolgirls from Chibok. It still holds at least 200 of them captive.
The Nigerian government’s response to Boko Haram has been fraught from the beginning. President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian southerner, has behaved as if the insurgency is a creation of northern Muslim leaders and thus their problem to solve. It took him more than three weeks to speak publicly about the abduction of the schoolgirls. His wife, Patience, provoked public outrage when she questioned whether the kidnapping had occurred, claiming it was all a ploy by her husband’s opponents to embarrass him. (She later expressed concern over the missing schoolgirls.) Government critics charge that the military has been slow to respond to the threat posed by Boko Haram because officials are benefiting from the war in the north, siphoning money from the country’s $6 billion security budget.
Residents in the northeast have complained frequently of the army’s indifference. But their grievances coalesced around the response to the kidnapping of the girls. Local officials in Chibok say the army was alerted to the possibility of an attack up to four hours before the girls were abducted, but military reinforcements never arrived. Since then, the military has been criticized for not doing enough to look for the girls. It claimed that it had broken up a Boko Haram cell that participated in the kidnapping and that it was on the verge of rescuing the girls, but they never materialized. The United States and other foreign powers have offered assistance, but finding the girls remains a formidable task. “It’s a big, big challenge,” says Stephen Schwartz, the director of Nigeria policy and operations at the State Department. “If it were up to the United States, we would have difficulty trying to rescue that number of girls over that big an area. It’s a really high-stakes kind of effort. I give the Nigerians a lot of credit for having the forbearance to not try anything premature or reckless.” (The military declined repeated requests for comment.)
Meanwhile, Boko Haram continues to fund and arm itself through bank robberies, extortion, ransom demands, sieges on Nigerian armed forces and, some analysts say, help from affiliates of Al Qaeda. In part, Boko Haram can operate with impunity because much of the northeast remains inaccessible, with bad roads and poor phone reception. Large areas along Nigeria’s borders with Cameroon, Chad and Niger are vulnerable to Boko Haram. “The northern land mass is just huge, and some parts of it are not very hospitable, so the government hasn’t always penetrated into every nook and cranny,” Siollun says. “Those border areas have always been bandit country; it facilitated the emergence of groups like Boko Haram.”
Despite Boko Haram’s increasing strength, the Nigerian government, says Campbell, the former ambassador, has not pursued a comprehensive anti-insurgency strategy. “The government has done very little to address the pervasive sense of alienation among people in the north,” Campbell says. “If you’re going to address the drivers of the insurgency, that takes time. My sense is implementation is very, very slow.” Fatima Akilu, a director in Nigeria’s Office of the National Security Adviser, told me that a deradicalization program is being created to promote sports, literature and the arts to secular and Islamic schools, and that the government is working on an economic-­development plan for the northeast. Akilu says officials also hope to devise “safe passage” for militants who wish to leave the group. She assured me that the Civilian J.T.F. was not a reaction to the military’s failures but rather a natural response on the part of northeasterners to a common threat — a kind of citizens’ brigade. “It was a spontaneous movement that began without any involvement from the state at all,” she says. “These were youths who said, ‘We no longer want you in our communities,’ and they pushed them out. It is an initiative we support.”
From the time Kalli wakes up, around 4:30 in the morning, until he goes to bed, sometimes as late as 2:30 a.m., he receives calls alerting him to Boko Haram sightings, impending or developing attacks and recent abductions and killings. When he hears of a village under siege, he rounds up as many of his boys as he can and heads out to the fight — without protective gear and at times without proper weapons. “Sometimes your gun won’t even work,” he lamented. It was a miracle that only 15 of his men had been killed so far. “God is with us,” he said. When he began this work, his children, whom he calls “my soldiers,” and his wives urged him to reconsider. “I don’t have enough time to get rest or sleep,” he said. “I am always engaged.” Kalli, a Muslim, says he is ready to die for his religion and his country. “These insurgents came to destroy the image of Islam,” he told me. “They are cult members. Islam doesn’t allow anybody to kill anybody, either Muslim or Christian. I want to protect the integrity of this country.” He is still employed by the auditors’ office, but was given an extended leave for this new public service.
When I first met Kalli at the hotel in Maiduguri, he was with three men who had been seized by Boko Haram. The group has turned to forcible recruitment as its violent tactics erode support among northerners. “They began to recruit by force, because they have moved so far from their core ideology,” Akilu says. “When Shekau descended into this indiscriminate slaughter, murdering people for no reason, a lot of people didn’t understand what was going on and did not subscribe to the philosophy of the current leadership.” Sometimes Boko Haram compels the boys and young men it captures to spy or fight for the group; sometimes it kills those it captures, a warning to anyone who would collaborate with government forces. The men with Kalli managed to escape. (This is not unheard of; Boko Haram does not always guard its captives carefully. Right after their abduction, some 50 of the Chibok schoolgirls also managed to get away. One of them, a 14-year-old named Rejoice Yaga, told me that the militants seemed confused and kept asking one another if they should take the girls or leave them.)