CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
- Background of the Study
Terrorism, arguably, is the biggest threat to global peace and stability in the contemporary times. Since the dawn of this millennium, the incidence of the terrorism has been on a steady rise worldwide.
Hitherto, terrorism was more or less a national or regional affair. This trend, however, has since changed as been observed by Awake:
Just few years ago, terrorism seemed to be restricted to a few isolated places, such as Northern Ireland, the Basque Country in Northern Spain, and some areas of the Middle East. Now – especially since September 11, 2001, with the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York – worldwide phenomenon (June, 2006).
Indeed, the worldwide manifestation of terrorism has been evident in Africa, but also in Nigeria. With particular reference to Nigeria, the phenomenon has found expression in the emergence of Boko Haram insurgency. Since its advent, the sectarian insurgency has wrecked immense havoc in the country, especially by ―using explosives and firearms with gruesome, fatal‖ consequences (Awake June, 2008).
The Nigerian government has adopted different counterinsurgency strategies to curb the terrorist activities of the Boko Haram group. Counterinsurgency (frequently referred to by the acronym COIN) is just the opposite of insurgency. To put it differently, it involves a combination of measures undertaken by the legitimate government of a country to curb or suppress an insurgency taken up against it. So while insurgents for instance try to erase or overthrow the existing political authority in order to establish theirs, the counter-insurgent forces try to reinstate the existing political structures as well as reduce or annihilate the usurping authority of the insurgents.
For the past three years, developments and operations in Nigeria have forcibly rekindled the need to rethink the best possible ways to fight insurgencies, thus finding a strategy to address these emerging threats. At the onset, it is important to note that similar counterinsurgency strategies applied by the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan and Iraq have not yielded the desired and
predicted results. Put differently, there are even more cases of insurgencies and terrorism after the US (alongside the United Kingdom) 2001 declaration of ‗war on terror.‘ According to Lauren (2014), approximately 10 years after the 9/11 attacks, the United States faces a more diverse, yet no less formidable, terrorist threat than that of 2001. In this increasingly complex and dynamic threat environment, not only does Pakistan-based al Qaeda possess the ability to project itself across the globe to stage attacks against the West but so do groups based in Yemen, Somalia, and Iraq.