"The Making And Unmaking Of Abubakar Shekau" By Ahmad Salkida

 Ahmad Salkida is a journalist who knew the founder of Boko Haram, Mohammed Yusuf and other members of the the terrorist group.

The Making and Unmaking of Abubakar Shekau

By Ahmad Salkida

November 26, 2025

Abubakar Shekau’s fanaticism thrived like wildfire in the Sambisa Forest Reserve. His dramatic reign ended abruptly, but the scars of his terror still linger. This is how he lived.

The night air over the Sambisa forest reserve in North East Nigeria throbbed with the growl of engines. Then came the voices — distant at first, before swelling, amplified through loudspeakers mounted on the backs of trucks. “We seek only Shekau,” the fighters declared. “Surrender, and you will live.”

It was late May 2021, and two columns of fighters of the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) rolled into the dense forest in perfect coordination. Their target was not the Nigerian army, their usual adversary — it was Abubakar Shekau, the leader of rival terror group Boko Haram, who once ruled Sambisa as a self-anointed caliph while his followers wreaked havoc and terrorised northern Nigeria for more than a decade. 

But this forest that once echoed gunfire and war chants now seemed overcast in ghastly silence; the fighters who had not abandoned Shekau — as many had taken ISWAP up on the chance to surrender — called it “the silence of waiting”. 

In his wooded hideout, Shekau’s health deteriorated. Long afflicted with seizures, in the last days as ISWAP closed in, he reportedly suffered more frequent episodes, floating between rage and lethargy. 

Within hours of ISWAP’s advance, the group’s stronghold was surrounded. Witnesses recall the confusion — frantic radio calls, bursts of gunfire, and the echo of men shouting in Kanuri and Arabic as the walls of Shekau’s empire closed in.

Then, the blast rolled through the trees. 

According to an internal message released by ISWAP, Abubakar Shekau died in the hours between the 18th and 19th of May 2021. Rather than surrender, he reportedly triggered his suicide vest, killing himself and several others present. The man who had used death as a symbol of his sermons chose suicide as his final supplication.

It wasn’t the first time Shekau had died — his death had been rumoured and reported half a dozen times in the preceding years, by the military or competing insurgency groups — but it was the final, definitive time, with confirmation coming just a few days after the blast. His death ended his reign of terror, but his legacy endures across the Lake Chad region, and more broadly in the geopolitical alarm his insurgency helped ignite. It is the legacy of Shekau’s long war of mass abductions, executions, and persecution of Christians that has reverberated so far as to cause figures like Donald Trump to designate Nigeria as a land of Christian genocide requiring urgent U.S. military intervention. 

Boko Haram has deliberately targeted Christians because of their faith. At the same time, the group also targets the vast majority of Muslims in the region as murtadd or murtaddūn—“apostates”—a label it applies to any Muslim who rejects its ideology, joins state institutions, or refuses to submit to its rule.

This dual campaign of violence is central to understanding the group’s impact. Many observers objected to Nigeria’s designation as a Country of Particular Concern for religious freedom violations precisely because the data show that, for every two Christians killed or enslaved, as many as eight Muslims have suffered the same fate. This underscores that Boko Haram’s violence is not only sectarian but also profoundly political and ideological, targeting all communities that fall outside its extremist worldview.

This profile retraces Shekau’s path, from an obscure perfume seller in Maiduguri to the architect of one of Africa’s deadliest insurgencies with a $7 million bounty on his head. Shekau’s caustic ideology and cruelty reshaped a region and left behind a generation born into war.

To understand why Shekau died the way he did, we must first know how he lived.

He was born in a remote village in Yobe State, northeastern Nigeria, where his early life unfolded in a modest, devout Muslim household. His father served as a local district imam and ensured that religion, discipline, and community values formed the foundation of his son’s upbringing.

Shekau was a familiar face on the village’s dusty football fields. “He was an above-average player,” one of his childhood friends recalled. “You couldn’t ignore him in a game.” Back then, everyone called him by his nickname, Babson — a name that echoed across the playgrounds from Yobe to Maiduguri in the 90s. 

Shekau was a fluid midfielder, sometimes stepping into defence when the match demanded grit. “He read the game well,” said his friend. “When he played, his presence was always felt.” 

Off the pitch, however, his world was more modest and solitary. For years, his livelihood revolved around a rickety Spilley bicycle and a box of small perfume bottles tied to the back. He was known as Mai Turare, the perfume seller. In one Maiduguri neighbourhood, two residents recalled his sales ritual: he’d uncap a bottle, dab a drop on the back of your wrist, and wait silently as the scent settled on your skin. Only then would he ask if you wanted to buy.

According to his mother, Falmata Abubakar, who spoke with journalist Chika Oduah for Voice of America in 2018, Shekau’s childhood was fairly uneventful. As a young boy, he left home for Maiduguri to continue his Islamic education — a common path for children known as almajirai. In this traditional system, students live under Quranic teachers, locally known as Mallamai, memorising scripture from wooden slates while often fending for themselves by begging for food. 

Falmata described her son’s early years as humble and devoted to learning, but she also identified this period as the turning point in his life. 

His first Islamic teacher, Malam Mande, rewarded Shekau with a bride after he memorised the Qur’an. The couple were in their late adolescence. But the joy was short-lived as his young wife died in childbirth. The circumstances surrounding the tragedy drove a wedge between Shekau and his teacher. In the midst of this great wave of personal grief, sometime in 2004, fate brought him together with Mohammed Yusuf, the radical cleric who would later found Boko Haram. 

“Since Shekau met with Mohammed Yusuf, I didn’t see him again,” Falmata, Shekau’s mother, said. Her words carried both love and sorrow. “Yes, he’s my son and every mother loves her son, but we have different characters. He brought a lot of problems to many people,” she told VOA. “He just took his own character and went away. This is not the character I gave him. It’s only God who knows.” 

The birth of Boko Haram

Nigeria’s transition from military rule to democracy in 1999 was rocky. For decades, the country had been governed by a fraught, violent series of military dictators who grappled for power, overthrew each other in coups, and crushed opposition with force. Corruption was rife, as was neglect of communities on the peripheries.

In Maiduguri, out on Nigeria’s northeastern fringe, the teachings of a medieval Sunni Muslim scholar and jurist, Ibn Taymiyyah, began to take hold. Ibn Taymiyyah’s ideas profoundly influenced contemporary Islamic reform movements, including Salafism and Wahhabism, by holding that the corruption of rulers justified followers’ rebellion. And in Maiduguri, Ibn Taymiyya’s writings found an audience among young people shaped by years of military rule and corruption, disconnected from a government that had long discarded them. 

Among them was Mohammed Yusuf, a fiery young preacher who set up a study centre and named it ‘Ibn Taymiyyah Masjid’ in Maiduguri and hatched a group of like-minded thinkers, spurned by the government and eager for action. Boko Haram was born. 

Shekau, who had been studying at the mosque, was among them and shared his compatriots’ profound rage. On occasions when he gave sermons, his voice trembled with suppressed fury as he condemned state impunity and corruption. 

Muhammad Yusuf and Abubakar Shekau’s words spoke to the wounds of hundreds of youths that the state refused to see. Their promise of purity and justice, however twisted, felt like a balm. Many young men were drawn to this cult that offered dignity through resistance. 

In late July 2009, clashes between the sect and Nigerian security forces erupted across four northern states. The violence, sparked by a disputed incident in Maiduguri and an initial attack in Bauchi, left hundreds dead. Rights groups later documented extrajudicial killings during the crackdown. Security forces stormed the group’s base and captured Mohammed Yusuf, who was later executed extrajudicially while in police custody. His body was riddled with bullets, behind a wall that serves as a barrier between the police headquarters and the police staff quarters. Detained in a cell at the time, I heard a senior Mobile Police officer yell, “Don’t shoot the head!” — so his body could be identified amid the heaps of corpses that were then piling up in Maiduguri. The gunfire that followed ended Yusuf’s life outside the law. 

Shekau, who was wounded during a night assault on the Police Headquarters on July 27, 2009 (a bullet tore through his thigh), went underground. From the dust-choked streets of Maiduguri, he was ferried to Kano and admitted to the National Orthopaedic Hospital, Dala. Months passed as he nursed his wounds later in a rented house in the Rijiyan Zaki area within the Kano metropolis. This was when he adopted a pseudonym — Alhaji Garba — hiding his true identity from neighbours and strangers.

Shekau’s personal life was as regimented as his theology. He remarried after his first wife’s death, and later took an additional wife, Hajara, who was the younger sister of one of Mohammed Yusuf’s wives. By the time Boko Haram’s violent uprising erupted in July 2009, Shekau was married to Yana and Hajara. After Yusuf’s death, Shekau claimed one of his widows, Hajja Gana, as his third. By 2011, when he was still living in Rijiyan Zaki in Kano, he added a fourth wife, Fatima, from Potiskum in Yobe State. 

“Alhaji Garba” defied the script, as bombs were being detonated at the Police headquarters, UN house, media houses and several mosques and churches in Abuja and across northern Nigeria. He cruised highways, dropped into towns, and traded pleasantries at checkpoints from the owner’s corner of his SUV and sometimes in the ’90s model of a Golf sedan. 

Then came the nationwide search. Cornered in Kano, he bolted through Maiduguri to Bama, the ghost town he controlled and vanished into the Sambisa wilderness. He took with him his four wives and dozens of children

When he re-emerged, it was not merely as a man healed, but as a prophet of vengeance. Yusuf’s death and those of hundreds of sect members that were summarily executed, with their houses demolished and businesses confiscated by the Nigerian government, did not end the threat. Instead, the episode set the stage for a far deadlier insurgency under Shekau’s leadership. 

Suspected members of Boko Haram were detained in sweeps across the country. Fear of arrest and persecution led many young men to shave their beards, and many women to stop wearing long hijabs. The stigma attached to families with any real or perceived link to the sect forced many to relocate; some parents did not survive the strain.

From that point, an already incensed and offended sect read their plight as state persecution. Facing the path of radicalisation, the sect found justification in fueling retribution. Their assassinations of police officers, suspected informants, and traditional rulers spread across northern Nigeria. Bank robberies, car snatching, and other crimes also became rampant in parts of the North East. 

In September 2009, Boko Haram orchestrated a prison break in Bauchi, freeing more than 700 inmates, many of them adherents of the sect. The sect arrived in Bauchi with leaflets bearing their chosen name, Jamaatu Ahlissunnah liddaawati wal-Jihad (JAS), which they scattered across the city like confetti. It was the first time the sect rejected the poster name Boko Haram and proclaimed its preferred name. A sign that the group was probably preparing for a prolonged offensive showed in its manifesto dated September 7, 2009, in which it honoured its fallen members, held the state responsible for the demolition of mosques, denounced those who snitched on it and vowed to wage jihad against Nigeria. It then drew a line on the sand, threatening that “those who collaborate with unbelievers … will perish with them.” This was the seed of Shekau’s doctrine of insurgency — a war without mercy, legitimised through his bigoted interpretation of the scripture.

It would later become evident that these criminal activities were sources of funding for turning the sect into a fiery army. By 2011, Shekau’s Boko Haram moved to suicide car bombs, IEDs and coordinated raids. In Abuja, a bomber drove into the Nigerian Police Headquarters on June 16, killing several people. On Aug. 26, a suicide car bomb struck the UN compound, killing 21 and injuring dozens. In Damaturu on Nov. 4, waves of car bombs and gun battles hit police stations, churches, and banks, leaving about 100 to 150 people dead. Christmas Day attacks later that year hit churches in Madalla (near Abuja) and Damaturu, killing over 41 people.  In the years that followed, suicide bombings and shootings were recorded in major mosques in Kano, Adamawa, Kaduna, Abuja, and others.

Boko Haram roughly translates to “Western education is forbidden,” reflecting the group’s rejection of Western-style schooling and governance, which they see as bearing a corrupting influence on Islamic values. Nevertheless, the group does not use the name Boko Haram. Members call themselves Jamā’at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-Da’wah wa’l-Jihād, “the People of the Sunnah for Preaching and Jihad.” This name emphasises their religious identity and mission as they see it — spreading their version of Islam through Da’wah (preaching or invitation) and Jihad (engaging in struggle) against what they consider un-Islamic authorities and communities. 

The movement, and its later offshoots such as the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), have devastated the Lake Chad Basin since 2009, directly causing tens of thousands of deaths and displacing millions across Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon — destroying livelihoods, fracturing communities, and turning once-thriving settlements into ghost towns. HumAngle has extensively documented this destruction.

Continued below

Photo 1) Abubakar Shekau

Photo 2) Ahmad Salkida

Photo 3) As Shekau directs bombardments across northern Nigeria and Abuja, he lived in Rijiyan Zaki, within the Kano metropolis from 2009 to 2012, before moving to Bama in Borno State early in 2013, and later relocated to the Sambisa Forest Reserve.

Photo 4) Illustration by Akila Jibrin/HumAngle