Is the west the next target for Nigeria's Taliban?

This episode had striking parallels with an earlier event on the other side of the Sahara. In 2006, Algerian Islamists, having lost the country’s civil war, allied with Osama bin Laden to become “al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb” (AQIM), warning that they would strike against Western interests wherever they were found. They made their new purpose abundantly clear by launching a suicide attack on the UN headquarters in Algiers in December 2007.

Key figures in Boko Haram are understood to have met AQIM, which has a presence in neighbouring Niger. The danger, therefore, is that it has become the latest – if unannounced – member of the al-Qaeda franchise, focusing on Western targets not only in Africa, but further afield. If so, Britain would almost certainly feature on its hit list. At least 150,000 Nigerians are thought to live here, raising the possibility that cells loyal to Boko Haram could be infiltrated into the country. A group that began operating in the remote city of Maiduguri, near the border between Nigeria and Chad, could evolve into a threat to British security, too.

There is nothing inevitable about this. While al-Qaeda did manage to extend its reach from the north-west frontier of Pakistan to the streets of London, it had key advantages that Boko Haram lacks. First, the British population of Pakistani origin is perhaps 10 times greater. Second, the determination of the Pakistani state to combat al-Qaeda’s brand of pitiless nihilism was always open to question – to put it mildly.