Abstract:
The scope of this project was to analyze data on Nigeria to better understand the nature of the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram. By analyzing both terrorism and counterterrorism events compiled from WITS and Jane’s databases we were able to identify casualty hotspots. Additionally we analyzed administrative, geo-political, and cultural boundaries to better clarify the complexity of the problem. Finally we analyzed development indicators and attack data resulting in some interesting trends.
Background:
Boko Haram is an Islamist terrorist group in Northern Nigeria that poses an exigent threat to the people and government of Nigeria, as well as the interests of the United States. Their ideology purports to be opposed to Western Education in the hopes of establishing a state governed by Sharia law. In practice their attacks have focused on creating chaos in Northern Nigeria with a particular focus on religious and government targets. This organization has increasing ties with Al Qaeda at large. As AQ looks to expand affiliations across the African continent disrupting these networks before they reach critical mass is of vital importance.
Generating Data:
Collecting the attack data was relatively simple. We set the parameters from January 2010 to the present. The reason for this is that a previous version of Boko Haram was almost entirely wiped out in November of 2009. Strikingly more violent Islamists adopted the banner of Boko Haram to conduct their operations. We also pulled data from the Nigerian government’s 2011 census reports. Once the reports had been extracted into a spreadsheet and properly coded, they were loaded into ArcGIS either as point shapefiles or joined to admin layers in order to create a spatial references based on various socioeconomic factors and indicators within counterterrorism and Boko Haram operations.
The heat map is a portrayal of both Boko Haram members who have been killed or captured by security forces and the number of casualties Boko Haram has inflicted by month. The search radius was uniformly set to 40,000km with output cell sizes at 4,000km.
Lastly, the the location of Boko Haram attacks was correlated against socioeconomic data at the state and legally governed area (LGA) levels. This revealed a correlation between areas suffering from a high number of attacks, areas with with low literacy rates, and areas with high unemployment. Interestingly, a correlation was also found between attacks and LGAs with high male literacy rates.
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| Correlation Chart |
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