Boko Haram’s insurgency now one of the deadliest conflicts on earth

The insurgency in Northern Nigeria is now one of the deadliest conflicts on earth, with more than 6,000 people killed in 2014 and nearly 10,500 dead since the beginning of 2011. Boko Haram’s recent rampage through the town of Baga and 16 smaller communities near the Nigerian side of Lake Chad has likely killed several hundred people - although it now appears that the early high estimate of 2,000 killed is excessive and has little factual grounding. Neverthteless, the attack may end up having the largest death toll of any single Boko Haram atrocity. According to the Social Violence in Nigeria database maintained by Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, the middle six months of 2014 accounted for over one quarter of the conflict’s overall deaths.

The deliberate targeting of civilians is clearly prohibited by international law and we are very concerned at reports that there were children and elderly people among the victims.

UNHCR spokesman Ravina Shamdasani

The Boko Haram insurgency is alarming for reasons beyond its death count. The group has demonstrated as least some ability to strike beyond its base in Nigeria’s northeast, taking credit for bombings in the central city of Jos in mid-2014 and attacking frequently in Kano, one of the major cities in northern Nigeria and a center of the region’s centuries of Islamic culture and history. But it’s also managed to actually hold territory in the northeast, claiming as much as 70 per cent of Borno State and carving out a domain where the Nigerian government can’t or won’t operate — and where the jihadist group has murdered with impunity. It’s an area that also hugs the borders of neighboring Chad, Niger, and Cameroon. For now, the Boko Haram crisis has received far less media attention than wars of comparable severity, despite the group’s possible connections to Al Qaeda and self-professed kinship with other jihadist radicals the world over.

Africa boko haram