Using casualty assessment and weighted hit rates to calibrate spatial patterns of Boko Haram insurgency for emergency response preparedness

Abstract

Since the beginning of the current millennium, Boko Haram has terrorised the residents of Northern Nigeria with devastating and high profile campaigns resuming in 2010. First responders struggle to cope with planning for and responding to the aftermath of these attacks. This paper describes analysis that can help emergency services pre-empt the geography and magnitude of susceptibility to attacks and the potential of the terrorists to generate severe attacks. The data used for the study were five years of terrorist activities. Results suggest that the efficiency of Boko Haram is not necessarily random and that attacks are generally well calculated to hit communities with disproportionate concentrations of vulnerable residents. The analysis is the first attempt to examine how a spatial segmentation framework might offer insight and intelligence towards understanding the configuration of terrorism for operational response.