Multiple reports have confirmed that the Boko Haram chief Abubakar Shekau is dead. Shekau’s demise came after Boko Haram last week clashed with Isis in Sambisa forest in northeast Nigeria. Some reports suggested that the Boko Haram leader detonated a suicide vest rather than be captured by the Isis militants.
Isis’s West African Province (ISWAP) is often characterised as being under the Boko Haram umbrella, but the two factions have become deadly rivals in the region. And with terror engulfing the continent, along with the rise of an African Islamic State, it is Isis that is now the beneficiary of Shekau’s death.
In 2009, Shekau took over the group founded by his teacher, the radical Islamist preacher Mohammad Yusuf, whose teachings centred around the slogan ‘Boko Haram’, which means ‘western education is forbidden in Islam’. The group slowly grew from an insurgent militia to a jihadist outfit which aspired for an expansionist caliphate in northeast Nigeria.
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