Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan is a Nigerian politician who served as the president of Nigeria from 2010 to 2015. He lost the 2015 presidential election to former military head of state General Muhammadu Buhari and was the first incumbent president in Nigerian history to concede defeat in an election, thus allowing for a peaceful transition of power.
Operation Juniper Shield, formerly known as Operation Enduring Freedom – Trans Sahara (OEF-TS), is the military operation conducted by the United States and partner nations in the Saharan and Sahel regions of Africa, consisting of counterterrorism efforts and policing of arms and drug trafficking across central Africa. It is part of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). The other OEF mission in Africa is Operation Enduring Freedom – Horn of Africa (OEF-HOA).
The Nigerian Army (NA) is the land force of the Nigerian Armed Forces. It is the largest component of the Nigerian Armed Forces. The President of Nigeria is the Commander-in-Chief of the Nigerian Army, and its professional head is the Chief of Army Staff, who is the highest ranking military officer of the Nigerian Army. It is governed by the Nigerian Army Council (NAC). The Nigerian Army is operationally and geographically divided into ten divisions, the basic field formation. The army has been involved in operations throughout the country, most especially during the Nigerian Civil War, and has undertaken major operations abroad. Nigerian Army officers have served as chiefs of defence in other countries, with Brigadier General Maxwell Khobe serving as Sierra Leone chief of staff in 1998–1999, and Nigerian officers acting as Command Officer-in-Charge of the Armed Forces of Liberia from at least 2007. The Nigerian Army is globally renowned for its professionalism and experience in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency; in 2022, the Nigerian Army won the award for the "Best Land Force in National Defence in Africa" in Banjul, Gambia.
Boko Haram, officially known as Jamā'at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-Da'wah wa'l-Jihād, is an Islamist jihadist organization based in northeastern Nigeria, which is also active in Chad, Niger, northern Cameroon, and Mali. In 2016, the group split, resulting in the emergence of a hostile faction known as the Islamic State's West Africa Province.
The Boko Haram insurgency began in July 2009, when the militant Islamist and jihadist rebel group Boko Haram started an armed rebellion against the government of Nigeria. The conflict is taking place within the context of long-standing issues of religious violence between Nigeria's Muslim and Christian communities, and the insurgents' ultimate aim is to establish an Islamic state in the region.
Abubakar Mohammed Shekau was a Nigerian militant who was the leader of Boko Haram, an Islamist extremist organization based in northeastern Nigeria, from 2009 to 2021. He served as deputy leader to the group's founder, Mohammed Yusuf, until Yusuf's execution in 2009.
The Vanguard for the Protection of Muslims in Black Africa, better known as Ansaru and less commonly called al-Qaeda in the Lands Beyond the Sahel, is an Islamic fundamentalist Jihadist militant organisation originally based in the northeast of Nigeria. Originally a faction of Boko Haram, the group announced in 2012 that it had pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda and was independent. Despite this, Ansaru and other Boko Haram factions continued to work closely together until the former increasingly declined and stopped its insurgent activities in 2013. The group was revived in 2020, and has been involved in the Nigerian bandit conflict.
Timeline of the Boko Haram insurgency is the chronology of the Boko Haram insurgency, an ongoing armed conflict between Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram and the Nigerian government. Boko Haram have carried out many attacks against the military, police and civilians since 2009, mostly in Nigeria. The low-intensity conflict is centred on Borno State. It peaked in the mid-2010s, when Boko Haram extended their insurgency into Cameroon, Chad and Niger.
On the night of 14–15 April 2014, 276 mostly Christian female students and also Muslim students aged from 16 to 18 were kidnapped by the Islamic terrorist group called Boko Haram from the Government Girls Secondary School at the town of Chibok in Borno State, Nigeria. Prior to the raid, the school had been closed for four weeks due to deteriorating security conditions, but the girls were in attendance in order to take final exams in physics.
Religious violence in Nigeria refers to Christian-Muslim strife in modern Nigeria, which can be traced back to 1953. Today, religious violence in Nigeria is dominated by the Boko Haram insurgency, which aims to establish an Islamic state in Nigeria. Since the turn of the 21st century, 62,000 Nigerian Christians have been killed by the terrorist group Boko Haram, Fulani herdsmen and other groups. The killings have been referred to as a silent genocide.
The Islamic State's West Africa Province (ISWAP), officially Wilāyat Garb Ifrīqīyā, meaning "West African Province", is a militant group and administrative division of the Islamic State (IS), a Salafi jihadist militant group and unrecognised quasi-state. ISWAP is primarily active in the Chad Basin, and fights an extensive insurgency against the states of Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Turkey. It is an offshoot of Boko Haram with which it has a violent rivalry; Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau killed himself in battle with ISWAP in 2021. Until March 2022, ISWAP acted as an umbrella organization for all IS factions in West Africa including the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (IS-GS), although the actual ties between ISWAP and IS-GS were limited.
Starting in late January 2015, a coalition of West African troops launched an offensive against the Boko Haram insurgents in Nigeria.
Chikaodinaka Sandra Oduah is a Nigerian-American journalist, poet and cultural entrepreneur who has worked as a television news producer, correspondent, writer and photographer. She is the founder of Zikora Media & Arts, which operates as a media production company and a cultural institution. Oduah was formerly a correspondent for VICE News. Known for her unique human-focused ethnographic reporting style with an anthropological approach, she was awarded a CNN Multichoice African Journalist Award in 2016. Upon the abduction of 276 schoolgirls by the terrorist group Boko Haram in Chibok, northeastern Nigeria, she was the first international journalist to visit and spend extensive time in the remote community of Chibok. Her thorough and exclusive coverage of the mass kidnapping won her the Trust Women "Journalist of The Year Award" from the Thomson Reuters Foundation in 2014. Oduah's reporting explores culture, history, conflict, human rights, and development to capture the complexities, hopes and everyday realities of Africans and people of African descent.
The Al-Qaeda–Islamic State conflict is an ongoing conflict between Al-Qaeda and its allied groups, and the Islamic State.
