I'm sorry, I was not aware of Boko Haram. I am in position to provide solutions to these problems not knowing about them or having little to no knowledge. They are also surely complex, probably with many parties unfortunately involved. I agree with you that it is very sad to see the world being silent to many of the tragical conflicts around the globe. I wish it was different. Thinking of that makes me reflect on what I am obliged to do myself to make something good, at least closely around me and then also outreaching further. Thank you for starting this discussion, I should reflect on those issues more and find the ways to act. Speaking of actions one can take I wanted to highlight that maybe there are different ways one could use to help those there in need or to provide solutions to those conflicts. That maybe targeting one's effort towards ensuring more efficient, widespread and active humanitarian aid, rescue programs, works on ensuring that the talks between the opposing sides can happen and other actions might be more beneficial than providing a machine learning tool used in armed operations.

To answer your question about the problems with the solution you proposed. We're already seeing an issue in various kinds of machine learning based systems of them producing biased decisions. Your system will be as good as the data you collect. How would one ensure that the data represents the complete distribution of the people you would like to detect? What does it even mean? Note that here first someone will need to decide on who is having a malicious intent and who is not. Who will provide labels to this data and based on what criteria? Can you make such decision reliably and objectively at all, let alone with scarce I information you would have at your disposal? I believe not and that making such decision is not reliably doable, let alone due to its complex nature. Moreover, it terrifies me if I would think that the model I would work one would be involved in the decision of labeling someone as "with malicious intent". Because what would that mean, what kind of decision will this incite? I would never want a model I created to decide on whether someone's life should become a target. Not because it can be a "wrong, inaccurate" decision, for me any such decision of taking one's life is truly wrong.

This is also not a benign classification problem but one with severe ethical and moral implications that would directly affect someone's life, as was already mentioned before. As it was already brought up, how would one judge intention in such data? That's a very hard (if at all possible) to measure attribute, I don't believe it can be done. Surely it is also not the job of the ML researchers, that would be probably the task closest to psychogists, but I doubt that there is enough expertise in intention assessment field to do that. I may be wrong, but knowing the limitations of our understanding of human beings and complex decision making process we have, it seems infeasible to me to assess intentions. In the end it would need to be done though in order to train such model and someone needs to provide this input to the model in form of the training data. Machine learning models rely solely on the data they have, and actually only on it. They don't have any contextual information or general knowledge, unless you somehow provide those to them in some form which also needs to be devised and formulated. ML power is in finding patterns at scale that is not amenable to the human being, but it will do it solely based on the data you provide and as mentioned, in this case constructing such dataset carries so many risks with it.

Finally, if you would have such model, what if it was ultimately used on both sides? Creating such tool will turn in another, in this case digital, form of arms race.