A UN-Designated Insurgency and Its Leadership

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

Boko Haram is designated a terrorist organization by the United Nations Security Council and numerous national governments, and an active insurgency continues in northeastern Nigeria and the wider Lake Chad basin, a designation and a conflict that together outlived both of the group's own founding leaders. The group was founded by Mohammed Yusuf, who led it from 2002 until his death in a 2009 police custody killing, and was then led by his successor, Abubakar Shekau, from 2009 until Shekau's own death in 2021.

That two-name leadership succession, Yusuf then Shekau, spans the group's entire documented history from a Maiduguri preaching movement centered on one man's teaching to an insurgency now carrying formal international terrorist designation. Both leaders are dead, and no successor to either is named in the sourced record, which describes an organization that remains an active security concern in the region today, still designated by the Security Council years after the founder who gave it its name and its first following was killed in custody. The 2015 split that followed a pledge of allegiance to Islamic State occurred entirely within Shekau's own tenure as leader, years after Yusuf's death.