!!!!!Marques E. Guntz

marques.guntz@gmail.com

!Writing Sample

! The attached writing sample is an excerpt from A White Paper on Boko Haram. During my graduate coursework for the Fall 2015 session at American Military University, I authored the original research paper during a course I was enrolled in entitled “The Non-State Soldier.”

For purposes of this assignment, I was tasked with hypothesizing, researching, and composing a white-paper on a terrorist organization that posed a risk to the national security and defense of the United States and its global interest. (A “white-paper” is a legislative document explaining and supporting a particular political solution.) Due to the length of the original work, the sample includes only the Introduction and Background and History sections.

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INTRODUCTION

On the night of April 14th, 2014, the Boko Haram terrorist organization went into the town

of Chibok located in Borno State, Nigeria, and kidnapped 276 female students from the

Government Secondary School. Though some of the female students have escaped captivity since

this debacle, more than 200 students are still missing from their families and friends. The Nigerian

government has received harsh criticism world-wide for its inability to place itself directly in the

middle of this incident, and has done very little to recover the missing girls and return them back

home before Boko Haram acts on their intentions to sell the female students in the human

trafficking market. On August 26, 2011, a suicide bomber drove a vehicle-borne improvised

explosive device (VBIED) into the United Nations headquarters in Abuja, Nigeria, killing 23

people and injuring more than 80 others. Boko Haram claimed responsibility for this attack as

well. With three years between the two aforementioned attacks by the Boko Haram terrorist

organization, there have been many other attacks that have occurred at the hands of the Islamist

religious sect in the north Nigerian lands. This “white paper” will offer an assessment of the Boko

Haram terrorist organization and determine their potential threat to the national security and

defense of the United States of America.

BACKGROUND AND HISTORY

Since Nigeria’s inception in 1914 by colonial British governor Frederick Lugard, the

country has experienced serious strife between the Northern and Southern states. Nigeria was

conceived as a country due to mere colonial commercial and economic considerations without due

regard for the indigenous people of the land at that time. The colonialists at the time were far too

concerned about profit to worry about other notions of evil that included genocides, murder of

infants and children, political corruption, poverty, bad governance, and insecurity. “Nigeria

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became a monster that was birthed and nurtured to feed off the flesh and gorge itself on the blood

of its own children. The general consensus about the country is that it is not just a dream that

failed to fulfill but also a nightmare that should never have been dreamt.” (Ebiem 61).

The Southeastern part of Nigeria is home to the Igbo ethnic group, where the Igbo

population is about 65 million people. The Southwestern part of Nigeria is home to the Yoruba

ethnic group, where their population is about 50 million people. The Northern region of Nigeria is

comprised of the ethnic Hausa/Fulani people, and there are approximately 55 million people that

belong to this ethnicity. In Nigeria, for the most part, the Southern states are predominantly

Christian states due to the practices and preachings of the colonials, while the Northern states are

predominantly Muslim. The Northern state of Borno has always been a center of Islam in that it

was a popular route of the Trans-Saharan trade a long time ago. The Arab traders of the Trans-

Saharan trade era reportedly brought Islam into Borno as early as the 9th century AD, so it goes to

stand that the religion of Islam has been at the forefront of the indigenous people of Nigeria for

quite a long time.

Jama’atul Ahlus-sunnah Lidda’Awati Wal Jihad, or Boko Haram, first began as a group of

harmless young Muslims with radical inclinations that wanted to fight the large-scale corruption

that has always been present in the Nigerian government. The original leader of the group,

Muhammad Ali, first set out to create an organization that would carry out a revival of Islam

amongst the Northern states of Nigeria, mainly Borno state, where life would be run according to

strict Islamic Sharia. (Sharia, or Islamic law, is the moral code and religious law of a prophetic

religion, developed after the death of the Prophet Mohammad.) In the 19th and 20th centuries,

Sharia was the law of the land in northern Nigeria, but as Nigeria aimed to gain its independence

in 1960, Sharia law became nearly extinct by this time. This was due to the Settlement of 1960.

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“Under the Settlement of 1960, Nigerian Muslims traded away the right to impose Sharia law

across the board in exchange for concessions in other areas as independent Nigeria began drafting

its first constitution. Sharia now only applied in matters of personal or family relations in the

north. Most Muslim leaders were supportive of the settlement, believing that discarding Sharia

was essential to progress towards modernity” (Ford 1). But in 1999, growing opposition to the

Settlement of 1960 started to show itself by an active effort in the northern states of Nigeria to

impose Sharia law on its people. A compromise to these efforts came in the form of the

Constitution of 1999 which granted significant power to Nigeria’s states and created a system of

appellate courts to hear appeals from Sharia trial courts. This opened the door for northern states

to impose Sharia law over their territory, thus paving the way for the terrorist organization known

as Boko Haram to enforce their own views of Sharia law in their northern Nigerian territories.

As previously mentioned, the original name of Boko Haram is the Jama’atul Ahlus-

Sunnah Lidda’Awati Wal Jihad, which translates to mean “people committed to the propagation of

the teachings of the prophet and Jihad.” The fact that the term “jihad” is in the name and

translation of Boko Haram says a lot about their organization and their beliefs, being that a

“jihad” is an effort to practice religion in the face of oppression and persecution. (A person

engaged in jihad is called a mujahid, the plural form being mujahideen.) In Hausa language,

which is derived from north Nigeria, “boko” is another word for “book”. “Boko” has come to

represent Western education. “Haram” is an Arabic term meaning sinful. In Islamic jurisprudence,

haram is used to refer to any act that is forbidden by Allah. That being said, “Boko Haram”

translates to “Western education is sin”.

Little is known about the first leader of the Jama’atul Ahlus-sunnah Lidda Awati Wal

Jihad, Muhammad Ali. Ali did not first set out to overthrow the Nigerian government in a violent

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uprising. Ali was disgraced at the betrayal by his government of its people, and wanted to separate

himself and start his own political Sharia, with Islam being the way of life for he and his

followers. Ali’s followers mainly consisted of poor peasants who were also not happy with how

the government was taking care of its people. Ali and his people then withdrew from Maiduguri

(the Borno state capital) to Kanama in nearby Yobe state. In December 2003, Ali and his people

had a run-in with the law enforcement entity of the Nigerian government in which Ali and his

group were seen as “trouble-makers” in their town of Kanama, and were not allowed to fish in the

local pond. Police were called to the scene to take control of the situation, and in doing so,

members of the Jama’atul Ahlus-sunnah Lidda Awati Wal Jihad confronted and attacked the

police officers. The confrontation involving the Jihad against the State police lasted from late

December to early January. During the fight, nearly 200 members of Ali’s jihad were killed,

including Ali himself.

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References

1. Ebiem, Osita. Nigeria, Biafra, and Boko Haram: Ending The Genocides Through Multistate

Solution, New York, NY, 2014.

2. Ford, John. “The Origins of Boko Haram,” The National Interest, June 6, 2014, accessed

October 1, 2015, http://www.nationalinterest.org/feature/the-origins-boko-haram-10609.

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