Boko Haram was a Salafi jihadist terrorist group which was founded in Nigeria in 2002 by the Salafist ideologue Mohammed Yusuf, who preached that Western education was forbidden (that saying, in Hausa, lending itself to his movement's name). In 2009, Boko Haram morphed from a Salafist commune into a violent insurrectionist organization which launched an insurgency against the Nigerian government, and, after Yusuf's death in 2009, Abubakar Shekau took over the leadership of Boko Haram and embarked on a campaign of suicide bombings and mass kidnappings in northern Nigeria. By 2015, Boko Haram was the deadliest terrorist group in the world, having killed 20,000 people and displaced 2,300,000 people, and, in March 2015, Boko Haram cut its ties with al-Qaeda and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, becoming part of its West Africa Wilayah ("province"). In August 2016, however, Shekau and a faction of the new ISIL province split from the main group after Abu Musab al-Barnawi was appointed to replace him due to his comparative extremism (he declared all mainstream Muslims to be heretics and ordered notoriously indiscriminate suicide bombings in Muslim-majority areas), resulting in factional infighting between the pro-IS ISWAP faction and the pro-Shekau Jama'atu Ahlus-Sunnah Lidda'Awati wal Jihad faction. At the same time, Boko Haram expanded its operations to Chad, Niger, and northern Cameroon, resulting in a multinational West African coalition being assembled to fight back against the terrorists. In May 2021, Shekau killed himself in a suicide bombing after ISWAP captured his stronghold of Sambisa Forest, and, on 26 May 2021, al-Barnawi declared Boko Haram dissolved and Shekau dead, leaving ISWAP as Boko Haram's spiritual successor.
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