Gwoza sits in the Mandara Mountains along the Nigerian-Cameroonian border, a town of roughly 200,000 people that had already endured years of escalating violence. By 2014, the city's local government area had become a hub of Boko Haram activity. In May, the Emir of Gwoza, Idrissa Timta, was killed in an ambush. Two weeks later, on June 2, militants massacred over 500 civilians in villages surrounding the city. Roads in and out were subject to constant ambush, and since May, Boko Haram had effectively imposed a siege on the entire district. The kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls were rumored to be held somewhere nearby. Gwoza was not simply attacked on August 6 - it had been slowly strangled for months before the final blow landed.

The attack itself was swift and devastating. Boko Haram fighters, disguised in army uniforms to sow confusion, poured into the city and set fire to government buildings, the police station, churches, and the Emir's palace. Civilian homes burned alongside public structures. A witness told Amnesty International that militants began shooting in every direction upon entering the city. Thousands fled toward the Sambisa Forest and into the mountains, though many who attempted to escape through the surrounding villages were caught and killed. In the aftermath, at least 600 civilians died. The new Emir, Mustapha Idrissa Timta, son of the murdered predecessor, was nowhere to be found.

What distinguished Gwoza from the dozens of other towns Boko Haram had attacked was what happened next. With Gwoza under their control, Shekau declared the city the capital of Boko Haram's caliphate - the first time the group had claimed formal sovereignty over territory. In a 25-minute propaganda video, militants broadcast footage of executions alongside Shekau's declaration, mirroring the media tactics of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Nigerian officials disputed the claim and announced an offensive to retake the city, but the declaration signaled a new phase in the insurgency. The seizures of Buni Yadi, Madagali, and other cities across Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa States followed.

Nigerian soldiers did not retake Gwoza until March 2015, seven months after its fall. By then, the city was devastated. Boko Haram was subsequently recognized by the central Islamic State as the Islamic State - West Africa Province, though by that point its territorial gains were already shrinking. The designation did not bring peace. Throughout 2016, Gwoza was attacked repeatedly, both by ISWAP and by Shekau's breakaway faction, Jama'at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-Da'wah wa'l-Jihad. The violence continued to ripple outward long after the caliphate's flag was pulled down.

By 2017, only a third of Gwoza's original 350,000 residents had returned. The city they came back to was not the one they left. Government buildings were shells. Churches were ruins. The palace of the Emir was gone. Families who had scattered into refugee camps in Maiduguri and across the Cameroonian border faced the question of whether there was anything to return to, and whether it was safe to try. NPR reported on the slow, uncertain process of coming home after fleeing Boko Haram - the destroyed houses, the missing neighbors, the lingering fear that what happened once could happen again. Gwoza's fall lasted seven months. Its consequences have lasted far longer.