Some notes about #ISWAP, #JASDJ #BokoHaram. Mamman Nur & Habib Yusuf broke away from Abubakar Shekau in 2016 with a strong reform agenda. I think it can be summed up as a rationalisation / bureaucratisation of jihad. Just one example of this: penal reform. A thread...
Shekau was famous for the spectacular violence he visited upon people he deemed criminals (adulterers, thieves, drugs dealers and users). Executions, chopping hands and feet, brutal flogging… He and his men made shows of this, for the education of the masses.
There, we are squarely in the realm of the spectacle of extreme violence: brutal, but intermittent. The ruthless affirmation of sovereignty and quest for purity.
Though of course every once in a while they'd be embarrassed when a buddy of Shekau had been doing some plundering of his own. It was never clear why some were punished and others were not.
This created a lot of tensions within the organisation, feeding the 2016 divide.
Nur and Yusuf came with a very different take, proposing a change that is eerily close to Michel Foucault’s distinction between punishment and discipline… Nur and Yusuf came with a thorough reform of the prison system.
They created new prisons, they renovated others, replaced the cramped mud-houses by large metal cages with zinc roofing (I think I saw pics of one in media accounts of the Nigerian Army’s 2022 offensive).
They banned corporal punishment. They developed a standardised feeding system. I suspect they were the ones who introduced prison registries to keep track of detainees and terms.
Jail terms replaced a lot of the brutal punishments Shekau favoured. The no public executions dropped, though some still took place, with or without Nur's and Yusuf's knowledge & authorisation. Some people have also told me of discrete assassinations of major internal critics.
But for usual crime, Nur and Yusuf insisted that people be given a second and third chance. And jail terms became part of that more subtle, more forgiving, economy of punishment which they promoted.
Of course, the situation in ISWAP’s reformed jails did not become great – former detainees are clear this tough. But the intention was clear enough. The intent was to govern more precisely, more sparingly.
They realised that Shekau's quick kills, often hastily decided, created a lot of rancor. There was a famous episode in Bama when young fighters had been executed for marrying without authorisation their sweethearts who had captured by the group.
That episode created a huge controversy within the group, and the chief qadi of JASDJ eventually apologised for it. It was one of those defining moments when some militants began thinking Shekau was bad.
And so ISWAP has learnt from that, probably with the help of the IS, which may well have done its own soul-searching on this since the downfall of the Caliphate.
Amazingly, I even heard recently that the IS was calling into question the 2018 execution of Mamman Nur - Nur was accused of being in touch with the government and having received money, no less. But his death was still seen as having created too many problems.
The politics of mercy...
Sorry for the typos and stuff. Bear with me.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
