THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

When one thinks of jihadist organisations such as the Islamic State, Al Qaeda or Boko Haram, the first things that come to mind are not the daily interactions of members, their dress codes, grooming habits, or their love for poetry and Islamic hymns known as nasheeds. Instead, people think of attempts to carve out territories in which strict Shari'a law can be applied, attacks against western targets, or even the sexual slavery of women. These are, of course, all important aspects of contemporary jihadist movements, but they do not allow for a full picture as to why ordinary foot soldiers may join jihadist movements, nor more importantly, why they stay in these movements and carry out acts of violence on behalf of the movement.

Mustapha (Reference Mustapha2014) identifies five key pillars of analysing Boko Haram, and while they are not specific to understanding the motivations of foot soldiers, they are nevertheless a useful paradigm for understanding the context surrounding Boko Haram and its actions. Mustapha (Reference Mustapha2014: 166) lists his pillars as: ‘1) religious doctrines, 2) poverty and inequality – vertical and horizontal, 3) the political context of post-1999 electoral competition, 4) the personal agency of the youth directly involved in Boko Haram, and 5) the geographical and international context of the insurgency.’ In terms of considering the motivations of foot soldiers we stress the importance of religious doctrines and personal agency, but we also highlight the importance of other factors such as accessing new forms of masculinity (e.g. Boko Haram affords young men access to guns, uniforms, vehicles, and in some cases also brides), and most importantly creating bonds of solidarity through shared experiences and ties.

Ratelle & Souleimanov (Reference Ratelle and Souleimanov2017: 574) argue with regards to militant groups in the Caucasus that ‘macro-level explanations concentrating on ideological influences have stopped short of addressing the individual choices and dilemmas of insurgents’. The same sentiment is expressed by Lee Ann Fujii (Reference Fujii2008), who argues that ‘motives and interests are often rooted in local relations and power structures’ and that social networks and interpersonal relationships are also important. Drawing on Granovetter's concept of ‘social embeddedness’ the argument is that social networks make ‘certain people more available for recruitment than others; these same ties also shaped the form of participation … in a given movement’ (Fujii Reference Fujii2008: 579). It is also clear from the literature that those who join terrorist movements are often influenced by a sense of solidarity with family and/or friends, and that joining and remaining active in the activities of the movement for some foot soldiers may be more about commitment to a community rather than to ideology (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw, Slater and Stohl1988; Della Porta Reference Della Porta1995; Borum Reference Borum2004).

Through employing a micro-level understanding of the ongoing violence in the region, we argue that understanding the way that individuals in the region interpret the history of the Lake Chad region (including a deep sense of a decline in regional prestige), the direct experience of the high level of corruption and abuses prevalent in the Nigerian state (Deckard & Pieri Reference Deckard and Pieri2017), a crisis in masculinity (Zenn & Pearson Reference Zenn and Pearson2014), the sense of brotherhood and solidarity that these movements offer, as well as financial incentives also enable us to understand the inflow of new recruits. This does not exclude the importance of ideological motivation for many recruits and especially for the leadership of the group, but rather argues that this is not the sole factor, especially for foot soldiers. This study illustrates that particular root causes of violent engagement are often intertwined, forming an overarching motivational underpinning that is highly complex and multi-layered.

Islam does play an important role in the process of violent engagement. This is especially true for those who have positions of leadership in jihadist movements, as well as for those who joined Boko Haram before its first major violent phase in 2009. While forms of jihadist ideology and narratives have been present in Northern Nigeria since the time of Usman Dan Fodio who established the Sokoto Caliphate in 1804 (Adeleye Reference Adeleye1971: 19), this was not particularly strong in the north-eastern part of the country where most of Boko Haram's violence occurs today. In reality, Salafi-Jihadism has been a relatively recent ideological development in north-eastern Nigeria, dating back to the late 1990s, and correlated with a greater influence stemming from Saudi funding (Brigaglia Reference Brigaglia2012a, Reference Brigaglia2012b). Instead a range of factors have to be taken into account when trying to understand what draws individual recruits to jihadist movements in Northern Nigeria, the ways in which participants who believe they are fighting a jihad understand and interpret their own positionality within the given movements, and the decisions recruits take to act on behalf of a given movement. As noted by Kalyvas & Kocher (Reference Kalyvas and Kocher2007), theories on violent mobilisation should focus on the general participants in the insurgency and not only on the ‘first comers’ with strong ideological motivations, such as Mohammed Yusuf or Abubakar Shekau. Furthermore, our understanding of violent engagement in an insurgency should not be limited to a dichotomy between participation and non-participation. In other words, one should also refrain from pinpointing a single motivation for insurgent activity.

THE DATA

The video footage on which we base our current analysis of everyday life within Boko Haram comes from a series of recordings taken from the hard drive of Boko Haram videographers’ laptop computers, and which contains over 400 video files and about 18 hours of footage. The hard drive was delivered to Voice of America (VOA). VOA determined that the videos came from laptops that had been captured in a Nigerian military raid. The source for the videos was not affiliated with the Nigerian military or government, or with Boko Haram. According to VOA, the prime importance of these videos is that the recordings are by the group's own videographer, who appears to also have been responsible for centrally collecting videos from other videographers of the group in addition to filming videos himself (he appears in the footage when he gives his video camera to other foot soldiers to film). In much of the footage ‘militants are seen candidly chatting, boasting and going about their daily business – and flagrantly committing heartbreaking atrocities’ (VOA 2017). This is significant because it demonstrates that the footage was for the videographer and foot soldiers with him to capture and catalogue their everyday life within the sphere of Boko Haram's control. As VOA (2017) states, however, the footage is not all playful: among other things, ‘the clips reveal Boko Haram executing and flogging civilians, chopping off people's hands, attacking a military outpost and assassinating locals in a hunt for money and food. Militants are shown interrogating villagers, flying a drone and sanctimoniously condemning ‘unbelievers’ accused of violating their distorted version of Islam.’

VOA authenticated the videos through analysing time stamps on the videos, checking references made by fighters in the footage, and through correlating events described in news broadcasts heard in the background. According to VOA (2017) the recordings were made in late 2014 and 2015. This was a period of mass expansion by Boko Haram in north-eastern Nigeria which culminated in the physical takeover of territory which Abubakar Shekau, the group's then leader declared on 14 August 2014, as an ‘Islamic State’.

VOA hired a professional Kanuri translator, who can also translate Hausa, to translate the contents of the video footage into English and then matched locations to satellite images. One of the initial interesting findings was that foot soldiers speaking on camera do so almost exclusively in the Kanuri language, the group's common tongue, and which is different from much of the available Boko Haram propaganda published online, which is predominantly in Hausa or sometimes Arabic. This buttresses the argument by Barkindo (Reference Barkindo2016) that while the conflict in the Lake Chad region is not a Kanuri uprising; ‘most of Boko Haram's recruits are Kanuri and the Kanuri heartland provides the space and the local networks, fishing unions, market groups and farming communities for recruitment and mobilisation’. Barkindo (Reference Barkindo2016) further argues that the Kanuri language ‘facilitates the movement of arms, training of new recruits and establishment of camps’ and that in 2013, ‘letters were sent to known Kanuri soldiers, threatening them with death if they refused to stop fighting for the Nigerian government’.

It can be presumed that Boko Haram reserves Hausa or Arabic language videos for the general public in northern Nigeria or an international audience, since Kanuri people in northern Nigeria generally understand Hausa but people from a Hausa background are less likely to understand Kanuri. As such Hausa language videos can be understood by a larger audience in Nigeria. Scott MacEachern (Reference MacEachern2018: 160) claims that even Boko Haram's Hausa language broadcasts sometimes have ‘a Kanuri-inflected Hausa that can be hard for Hausa speaking people themselves to understand’. It is nonetheless still curious that not even one of Boko Haram's over 100 public videos and statements since the start of the insurgency in 2009 has been primarily in Kanuri, who seem to comprise most of the group's members. Shekau, for example, never said any more than a few sentences in Kanuri in any video and when he does use Kanuri it is for the purpose of summarising in a few sentences his previous Hausa or Arabic content (Barkindo Reference Barkindo and Zenn2018).

The video footage provides intimate details of the everyday lives of both those who take part in Boko Haram, and those who lived under Boko Haram control and administration. The footage, for example, tends to show an arid desert landscape where men travel around mostly by motorcycle and in which oxen pull carts, and camels are sold in markets. Women who appear in the footage (often in the background) are dressed in colourful chadours but appear free to walk around the town without a male guardian (mahram), and many of the men, including fighters, have adopted a mixture of Islamic and casual western dress. Boko Haram flags, which are modelled on the Islamic State's flag, and logos appear frequently throughout the footage, and prominently during Shari'a-based punishments, such as public executions or amputations, for which there are large crowds spectating with men and women segregated as they observe. Only men are invited from the audience to participate in the punishments. A number of Boko Haram members are shown holding a miswak, a twig with toothbrush-like bristles, and whose historical use in the Muslim world has been well documented (Al Sadhan Reference Al Sadhan1999). The miswak is important because it has strong connotations to the prophet Muhammed, and so through being shown with one, Boko Haram members may feel it adds to their credibility as self-proclaimed Salafis.

At least one clip was used in a later Boko Haram propaganda video that was released by the Islamic State. The clip featured Man Chari (Shekau's deputy) ordering the hand-cutting of two alleged thieves and the shooting and killing of a boy (in early teens) and a goat, who were both accused of homosexuality and bestiality. Notably, however, when this video was released online by the Islamic State with its official branding on behalf of Boko Haram (or, more specifically, Islamic State in West Africa Province) the part with the boy and the goat as well as an instance where Man Chari's gun was clogged and failed to shoot were edited out. This video, like others for public consumption, was in Hausa and the fighters in the videos were dressed in fresh black uniforms that they do not ordinarily wear, presumably designed for the film knowing that it was a propaganda video.

Jacob Zenn has been integral to the analysis of the VOA footage, working as a consultant to the VOA team, and so has had exclusive access to the entirety of the footage. In order to make our analysis more transparent, we are basing it only on the VOA footage for which there are publicly available clips, but the analysis is also coloured by access to the rest of the footage which has yet to be publicly released.Footnote ⁶ Zenn was able to identify a number of known Boko Haram militants and viewed the videos with an individual who considers himself to be a former ‘associate’ of the group, and who also has contacts to some elements of the leadership of the insurgency and has participated in the successful negotiations with the group.

In Table I, we estimate the breakdown of the 18 hours of footage by theme.

Table I.

Breakdown of VOA Boko Haram video footage

We identify with Hegghammer's sentiment that processing and presenting the data on non-military activities of those who participate in jihadist movements can be ‘tricky because the object of study – non-military social practices – is so vaguely defined’ (Hegghammer Reference Hegghammer2017: 177). Our approach was to review each video several times and to note the instances of non-military activities that were most prominent. There is of course some level of subjectivity in this, and our approach has been coloured by the non-military activities that Hegghammer (Reference Hegghammer2017) also highlight, such as poetry, nasheeds and group relaxation.

Examining jihadi poetry and nasheeds has to date been limited in the academic literature, though not absent (Said Reference Said2012; Hegghammer 2014, Reference Hegghammer2017; Creswell & Haykell Reference Creswell and Haykell2015; Kendall Reference Kendall, Kendall and Stein2015; Paraszczuk Reference Paraszczuk2015; Gratrud Reference Gratrud2016; Pieslak & Lahoud Reference Pieslak and Lahoud2018). Through delving into the everyday lived experiences of people who fight for Boko Haram, and specifically through their use of nasheeds, this article will shed light on why people join and stay in terrorist groups, particularly jihadist ones. We can start to understand the ties that poetry and literature can create through evoking emotions and creating bonds of solidarity. As Hegghammer (2014) puts it, poetry and music must do something more, or something different, than simply convey doctrine, or people wouldn't bother creating them. Out of all of this, Hegghammer (Reference Hegghammer2017: 177) stresses the importance of three main practices: ‘devotional, recreational, and identity-marking’. To that we add the practice of administration, and this is particularly important when a group has control over territories, and thus has to concern itself with aspects of governance.

CASE STUDIES

Communicating external affairs of the ‘caliphate’

One of the ways Boko Haram leadership communicated with villagers and foot soldiers in its ‘caliphate’ was by sending out messengers from Abubakar Shekau to different villages to convey messages to the population. These messages were relayed at Shari'a tribunals which took the form of a public spectacle bringing a whole village together, including men and boys and women and girls in segregated sections. Shari'a tribunals served a greater function than simply the punishments inflicted on transgressors, which ranged from floggings and stonings (of both men and women) to amputation of hands and shootings (apparently only of men). In addition to their role in punishment, the tribunals were a way for Boko Haram to convene several hundred people together and explain to them what they needed to know about the ‘caliphate’.

The tribunals would begin with an announcement over loudspeakers in the town from the mosques. The people would then filter into the public space – usually a grassy area just outside of the commercial area of the town – while Boko Haram hisba members blocked traffic and directed pedestrians to the area. Hisba is the classical Islamic concept to ‘command good and to forbid evil’ (Cook Reference Cook2003), and has often resulted in the formation of specialised ‘police’ forces to implement Islamic morality standards (Pieri et al. Reference Pieri, Woodward, Yahya, Hassan and Rohmaniyah2014). The villagers would enter the grassy area, which was surrounded by Boko Haram foot soldiers whose role was to organise the crowd, while commanders stood at the front overseeing the event.

Much of the commanders’ speech conformed to what appears to be a standard ‘template’ for tribunals, and included starting out through the offering of praises to Allah before moving on to wishing the success of the mujahidin not only in Nigeria but also neighbouring countries, specifically naming Chad and Cameroon. This captures Boko Haram's desire at the time to seen as representing jihad in a broader section of West Africa, which the Islamic State was keen to promote in its early propaganda promoting the Islamic State in West Africa Province attacks in Niger, Chad and Cameroon (Zenn Reference Zenn2018). At the same time there were also instances where part of the speech would be customised messaging, depending on the contextual circumstances of Boko Haram in any given location.

One example of this in the footage was in the months just before Shekau pledged loyalty, or baya’, to the Islamic State's self-proclaimed Caliph Abubakar al-Baghdadi in March 2015, when a Boko Haram member who described himself specifically as a messenger of Shekau spoke in front of a group of villagers and foot soldiers in Kumshe, Borno State. A commander, who was the only militant to wear all black and appeared notably more robust (and perhaps well-fed) than the foot soldiers, first conveyed his praises to Allah and then handed the microphone to the messenger. The messenger, speaking in Kanuri and wearing a blue outfit and sometimes interrupted by the screeching coming from the microphone, explained that he was sent to the town by Shekau and that two other imams speaking on behalf of the group should be ignored. He then explained that the group was now loyal to Abubakar al-Baghdadi, implying that those two imams had rejected the impending pledge by Shekau to al-Baghdadi. The messenger also offered guidance from Shekau, which was more mundane than the typical speeches and images of Shekau where he is described as ‘crazy’ and threatening (Barkindo Reference Barkindo and Zenn2018). The messenger said:

From this it is clear that Shekau wanted to impress a uniformed version of Islam on areas that came under the control of Boko Haram's ‘caliphate’. There was no room for diversity of Islam under the ‘caliphate’, and to make sure of this, a hisba morality police was empowered with the responsibility of guarding to make sure everyone is abiding by the rules. That such a hisba existed is also evidenced on propaganda videos the group released of the hisba carrying out inspections of markets in Sambisa Forest.Footnote ⁹ The messenger continued with:

Although these were simple instructions the fact that it is Shekau who needs to tell them these rules through the messenger shows his cult of personality and that his leadership authority extended throughout the ‘caliphate’; his rule was recognised on a grassroots level and not just propaganda videos tailored to a mass Nigerian or international audience. The mention of Muhammed Yusuf also showed that the group sees Shekau in the line of leadership from Yusuf, who led the group before his death at the hands of the security forces in July 2009, after which Shekau became his successor.

Following this messenger's speech, various Boko Haram fighters emerged from the surroundings to implement punishments on the ‘suspects’ and explained why the suspects’ behaviour, such as drug smuggling, deserved flogging or, in the case of adultery, deserved the death penalty. This message was still several months before Shekau pledged loyalty to al-Baghdadi. It also shows that the pledge was not a ‘spontaneous reaction’ but there was a build-up and internal preparation for it. Indeed, documents released by the Islamic State in March 2015 also show that the dialogue about the pledge to al-Baghdadi from Shekau began at least early as November 2014 and continued until Boko Haram convened a shura (council) on the matter in February 2015 in which they agreed Shekau would make the pledge.Footnote ¹⁰ It also shows that beyond propaganda videos there were other ways Boko Haram communicated with its foot soldiers and civilians under its territorial control.