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EDUCATION UNDER ATTACK 2014‘School teachers?We will kill them!’In Nigeria, from January to September 2013, some 30 teachers werereportedly shot dead, sometimes during class. The Associated Pressreported that in a video statement made in July 2013, Abubakar Shekau,leader of the militant Islamist group Boko Haram, threatened teachers,saying: ‘School teachers who are teaching Western education? We willkill them! We will kill them!’; he also endorsed recent school attacks andclaimed that non-Islamic schools should be burned down. Boko Haram,whose commonly used name means ‘Western education is a sin’ inHausa, has sought to impose a strict form of Sharia, or Islamic law, innorthern Nigeria and partially destroyed or burned down 50 schools inthe first seven months of 2013, according to Amnesty International.A teacher peers into a deserted student hostel at theGovernment Secondary School of Mamudo in Yobe state,Nigeria, where gunmen killed at least 22 students and ateacher in the middle of the night on 6 July 2013.© 2013 Aminu Abubakar/AFP/Getty Images9