September 11, 2014 | Quote

Boko Haram’s Predatory State Within a Predatory State

Establishing Sharia in all of Nigeria has always been seen as Boko Haram’s ultimate goal. On Aug. 24, the group’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, reinforced this notion by releasing a video in which he claimed the town of Gwoza, near Maiduguri, as “a state among the Islamic states.” Media reports widely interpreted Shekau’s comments as a declaration of a caliphate, a translation later refuted by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a terrorism expert at the  Foundation for Defense of Democracies, based in Washington, D.C. In fact, as Gartenstein-Ross notes, Shekau did not even use the term “caliphate” in his 52-minute speech.

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