Measuring the Toll of the Boko Haram Insurgency

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Two independently maintained conflict-event datasets, the Council on Foreign Relations' Nigeria Security Tracker and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, tracked the insurgency across the same June 2011 to June 2018 window and recorded thirty seven thousand five hundred thirty and thirty four thousand two hundred sixty one deaths respectively, both far higher than the twenty thousand figure often cited in earlier reporting; both trackers note their own counts likely understate the true toll given limited access to affected areas. A separate and much larger figure, a United Nations Development Programme assessment's estimate of nearly three hundred fifty thousand deaths in Nigeria's northeast through the end of 2020, measures a different quantity: it adds indirect deaths from the malnutrition and lack of medical care that followed mass displacement to the roughly thirty five thousand direct conflict deaths it separately counts, and this atlas names it rather than folding it into the direct-conflict bounds above.

Boko Haram lost most of the fixed territory it held at its 2014 to 2015 peak to a Nigerian and multinational military counteroffensive drawing on Chad, Cameroon and Niger, but the group and its Islamic State West Africa Province offshoot have continued a sustained campaign of attacks, kidnappings and displacement across the Lake Chad basin region since. No international genocide or crimes against humanity determination covers the insurgency as a whole, though the United Nations and numerous individual governments have designated both factions as terrorist organizations, and human rights bodies have documented mass atrocities against civilians throughout the conflict's now more than fifteen years.