Abstract
For several months, armed groups in Boko Haram seem engaged in a scorched earth policy in Borno State (in the north-eastern Nigeria), the heart of their settlement area. They attack villages, engage in destruction, looting, burning crops and killing, seemingly at random. The use of violence by Boko Haram first answers to tactical needs.
Since the movement was driven from Maiduguri, the state capital, by a combined action of the security forces and local militias, Boko Haram erected to protect themselves, a curtain of terror in the countryside.
The level of violence in the group is the result of the atrocities that its members, too, have endured: in the camps of the security forces, suspects have been poisoned, tortured to death, particularly by pushing their nails in the head with a hammer.
