Nigeria has struggled against violent jihadist groups for decades, with the largest threat being JAS, a terror group founded in 2002, commonly known as Boko Haram (that name, meaning “Western education is forbidden,” is a pejorative created by the group’s opponents). Boko Haram became internationally known in 2014 when it kidnapped 276 schoolgirls in Borno state (dozens of whom are still missing). But the next year, Boko Haram split, with a rival faction forming the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP).
“ISWAP is actually the bigger, more powerful faction now,” James Barnett, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute and an expert in West African terrorism, told TMD. Last month, suspected ISWAP fighters laid siege to two army bases in Borno state, killing 14 soldiers and a local imam, forcing the government troops to retreat from one site, and kidnapping an unknown number of women.
Boko Haram and ISWAP mostly operate in Nigeria’s northeast, but the northwest is in similar shape. Ansaru, an older group that may have links to al-Qaeda, has been resurgent in recent years. Two other groups come from outside Nigeria: the Islamic State Sahel Province, and Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), another al-Qaeda affiliate. Both groups crossed into Nigeria through its frontier with the Sahel, an arid region that stretches across much of northern Africa.
Islamists aren’t the only security problem Nigeria faces. Hundreds of armed gangs, which often alternate between fighting each other and cooperating with other criminal groups and jihadists, have proliferated in the northwest.
“The bandits are by and large very much not motivated by religious ideology,” Barnett argued. “They’re motivated more by ethnic grievance, profit, and power—many of them kind of operate more like warlords.”
Cattle raiding, kidnapping for ransom, and ad hoc road tolls are becoming increasingly common, and perpetrators are often organized along ethnic or communal lines, like the Fulani or groups of cross-border herdsmen referred to as the Lakurawa.
In the past, military solutions have worked in combating Nigerian terrorism. During the mid-2010s, Boko Haram rampaged through much of the country, killing hundreds in suicide bombings and attacks on mosques, and even spreading into northern Cameroon.
“2014 was the worst it’s been; we had bombs going on in every city, including Abuja [the capital],” Miriam Adah, an assistant research manager for Africa at the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), told TMD. But regional governments cooperated to contain the threat, creating the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF), a military alliance composed of troops from Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Cameroon, and Benin. An MNJTF offensive “brought some level of sanity to the border regions, and it made it much more difficult for militants and insurgents alike to cross over the borders,” Adah said.
That cooperation is no longer happening. Last year, Niger, directly north of Nigeria, withdrew from the MNJTF following a military coup and diplomatic friction with its southern neighbor. Chad has also said that it plans to scale back its involvement with the alliance. But the breakdown in trust between Niger and Nigeria poses the most immediate problem, because the two countries share a porous, almost 1,000-mile border.
Armed groups have taken advantage. “The people who live across the border are also unified by the same language, with the same religion, who have centuries of interaction before colonialism,” Oluwole Ojewale, the regional coordinator for Central Africa at the Institute for Security Studies, told TMD. “Within that innocent social relation, illicit activities are taking place that [are] enabling and allowing the free flow of arms and weapons of criminals.”
American assistance is unlikely to fill any gaps left by the MNJTF’s decline. “One-off Tomahawk strikes in rural Sokoto don’t change the underlying, enabling dynamics,” Brandon Kendhammer, a political scientist at Ohio University and an expert on Boko Haram, told TMD. The deeper problem is that the Nigerian state had effectively abandoned the rural north long before the bandits and jihadists arrived.
On paper, Nigeria has a third tier of government—774 elected local councils—meant to administer schools, clinics, and local services in the rural areas where federal and state governments rarely reach. But Isa Sanusi, the director of Amnesty International Nigeria, told TMD that state governors have gutted those councils. For years, they have routed federal funds allocated for local councils into “joint accounts” they control—then pocketed the funds or diverted them to bankroll state projects and political machines. In July 2024, Nigeria’s Supreme Court ruled the practice unconstitutional and ordered allocations to be paid directly to local councils, but many governors are still defying the ruling, retaining more than 4.5 trillion naira (U.S. $3 billion) in council funds.
The result, in much of the rural north, is a vacuum. “These places are ungoverned spaces. Completely ungoverned,” Sanusi said. “[The government] cannot provide them with water, it cannot provide them with education, it cannot provide them with anything.”
In the absence of the state, men with guns are stepping in. “All armed groups in Nigeria in the north, and even bandits in other parts of the north, are collecting levies and taxes, and executing people through their own brutal justice system,” Sanusi told TMD. In island communities on northern Nigeria’s Lake Chad, ISWAP provides protection from bandits, potable water, boats for transport, and medical facilities—in return for paying taxes and not cooperating with the Nigerian state. “If that happens, then ISWAP is incredibly brutal to them,” Barnett said. “It’s the carrot and stick.” ISWAP now earns an estimated $191 million a year from such levies, or roughly 10 times what the Borno state government collects.
The government has responded to the surge in violence with military strikes. Airstrikes that result in mass civilian casualties have occurred roughly twice a year for the last several years, with rare accountability.
“In many parts of the north, civilians have come to trust armed groups more than the government,” Sanusi said. “The only thing they give them is this airstrike.”
The only long-term solution to the violence of armed groups lies in alleviating the social and economic grievances of northern Nigerian communities, Ojewale told TMD. “The truth of the matter is that crimes that are ideologically driven have never been resolved, and can never be resolved, by bombing alone,” he said. Even successful military offensives only set back armed groups temporarily, Kendhammer argued, as groups like Boko Haram and JNIM can easily reform and rebuild.
Kendhammer said that programs aimed at providing alternatives to terrorism and banditry had shown some promise. “You needed to do things that were going to address the drivers—you needed to deal with finding ways to get people to leave violence and extremism,” he told TMD. Operation Safe Corridor, which seeks to provide people trying to leave extremist groups with religious reeducation and vocational training, has faced opposition from politicians who accuse it of favoring the perpetrators of violence over victims.
Unrest across the Sahel also amplifies the problem. In the last five years, military coups and civil wars have gripped Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea, Chad, and Sudan. Some of the new military juntas expelled French and U.S. forces that had been providing anti-terror support, either attempting to secure their countries on their own or outsourcing suppression to Russia’s brutal Wagner mercenaries. Terror groups have profited from the chaos. “The Sahara is fast becoming the global headquarters of major terrorist groups,” Ojewale said. According to the Global Terrorism Index, five of the 10 countries most affected by terrorism in 2025 were in the Sahel.
The outlook for northern Nigeria is grim. Regional cooperation has collapsed, Western powers have shown little interest in the region, and the Tinubu government has shown little appetite for anything beyond more airstrikes. “There is no immediate solution on the horizon,” Sanusi said.
Last week, the U.S. Embassy in Abuja authorized all nonemergency personnel to leave the country and urged travelers not to visit Nigeria. On Wednesday, Nigerian military forces were on high alert due to reports of a planned attack on Abuja’s international airport and a prison facility.
“The scale of intervention internationally that would be necessary to address this problem is not—by any kind of evidence that I’ve seen—forthcoming,” Kendhammer said.