About six years ago, locals in the Tangaza and Gudu areas of Sokoto raised an alarm over the suspicious activities of a group of herders operating in the Marake and Tsauni Forests. A police investigation at the time concluded that the armed group, known locally as Lakurawa, were merely herders and not violent. 

Although the police suspected the group was heavily armed, they described them as seasonal visitors from the neighbouring Niger Republic. The official narrative by the then police commissioner, Murtala Mani — after engaging with traditional and religious leaders in the affected area – was that the herders had left with their families, cattle, camels, and donkeys.

Earlier this week, however, the Nigerian Defence Headquarters declared the so-called herders are “a new terror group” affiliated with jihadists in the Sahel, a region that accounts for sizable chunks of global terrorism deaths. 

“The terrorists took advantage of the gaps in cooperation between both countries and exploited the difficult terrains to make incursions in remote areas in some Northwestern states to spread their ideology,” said Edward Buba, the Director of Defence Media Operations.

The military, therefore, declared nine members of the group wanted. They are Abu Khadijah, Abdurrahman, Dadi Gumba a.k.a Abu Muhammed, Usman Shehu, Abu Yusuf, Musa Wa’a, Ibrahim Suyeka, Ba Sulhu and Idris Taklakse. Now, the police have claimed that the terrorist group operates in areas like Tangaza, Gudu, Ilela, Binji, and Silame, and is believed to have entered the border communities from countries like Niger, Chad, and Mali. 

The terrorists preach in local Hausa and Fulfulde, imposing rules and levies on local communities, residents said. Sometimes, they “help” locals fight other terrorist groups operating in their territory to gain absolute control and wider influence. 

Following their incursion about six years ago, the roving Lakurawa criminal organisation established camps  — which it called Darul Islam — around the Gwangwano, Mulawa, Wassaniya, and Tunigara areas along Nigeria-Niger border areas. The sect has grown  from less than 50 members to over 200, with young men aged 18-35. It embraces unorthodox practices and esoteric interpretations of the Qur’an. 

A study by Murtala Ahmed Rufai, a professor at the Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto, noted that followers of the sect have a similar pattern of religious separatism with any other radical Islamic movements. The group claims ideological purity and avoids contact with the rest of the society. The Lakurawas use arms to intimidate and harass locals under the pretext of enforcing sharia in the affected areas.

Who Are the Lakurawas?

The Lakurawas were herders who suddenly turned militant in the wake of the Malian crisis. Their presence in the communities along the Nigeria-Niger border in Gudu and Tangaza areas of Sokoto goes beyond the search for food and water for their cattle which they had been doing for years. Around October 2018, about 200 jihadis arrived in the Gudu and Tangaza area of Sokoto from across the border in Niger. Locals say they’re “herders, light-skinned, speaking Arabic and Fulfulde languages” from Mali. 

For nearly a decade now, the northwestern region has been a haven for rural terrorists. They’ve emptied villages and driven farmers from their farms, controlled a thriving kidnap-for-ransom enterprise that has disrupted the livelihood of the largely farming communities and impoverished families across the region. 

The people of Wassaniya, Tabaringa, Mulawa, and Jina-Jini were not exempted. In the rural communities of the region where these terrorists hold sway, as there is little to no government presence. And most of the time, they’re left at the mercy of the marauding terrorists. Therefore, some traditional authorities in these areas invited the Lakurawas to provide “security to our communities.”

“The District Head of Balle in Gudu Local Government together with the District Head of Gongono in Tangaza Local Government met with Alhaji Bello Wamakko, the then Chairman of Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN) and discussed how to tackle Zamfarawa (Bandits). They finally reached the conclusion to hire Lakurawa from Mali in order to deal with Zamfarawa bandits. This was the first effort. I myself told Bello Wamakko that this was not a good effort,” the study cited one local authority as saying. 

In an interview with Tribune Newspaper in 2018, a resident of Tangaza, Alhaji Aminu Dikko Tangaza, corroborated Rufai’s research here.  According to him, contrary to the police report, only a few members of the group were actually invited to protect the communities against banditry, but “they later mobilised other members of their group to terrorise and introduce strange laws in the communities.”

Through the traditional rulers in Balle, the Lakurawa requested funds to buy weapons for the newly recruited members and money was given to them. 

One resident who spoke to DailyTrust said some members of the group were invited to rescue a kidnap victim. “The locals were initially happy with their coming because of the way they sacked bandits in their communities but their refusal to consult their leaders and hand over recovered cattle as well as the way they were forcing people to give out animals as Zakkat which they used to take to their countries made us suspicious and decided to report the matter to constituted authorities,” the local added.

Interviewed for Rufai’s study, Magajin Balle, a village chief, said: “I didn’t invite nor attend the meeting [with the Lakurawa]. But the District Head was in attendance, because the invitation was done on his insistence. They solicited for support in cash, cows, logistics and weapons for both their invited Lakurawa guests and their newly recruited youth in the communities, to fight the ravaging Zamfarawa bandits. My advice to them then was not to allow their children to participate in this dirty job. That is why few youths were recruited from Balle town.”

The relationships soured when the group accused Muktar, son of the district head and chief treasurer of the group, who had died in a fire incident, of misappropriating about N63 million belonging to them. 

According to sources, the first major attack by the Lakurawas was recorded on Aug. 10, when they attacked a military base in Sokoto, killing three soldiers and setting a Hilux vehicle on fire. The group’s present mode of attack is on the government security forces, armed vigilantes and the armed terrorists. They mostly spare civilians, conscripting them to obey radical Islamist beliefs – what they define as God’s laws.  

Upon invitation, they seemed to have protected ungovernable communities desperate to get security. The armed gang would later get to Gande, and Getta-rana in Silami local government. Many Lakurawa fighters are seen in communities like Raka, Gudu, Silami, Labsani, Mada, preaching to the civilian population of the areas to pay and give alms (zakat) and obey the laws based on the ideological principles. 

Locals in some of the above-mentioned communities who saw the deadly fire power the group possessed described them as “extremely dangerous”. Shehu Makeri, one of the deposed monarchs in Tangaza told HumAngle that “the first time we suspected Lakurawas’ fearful movements and infiltration of the group from Mali, and Libya into our  area, we told the government and the security authorities about the situation. They [Lakurawas] imposed laws on our communities and lured us with protection against bandits attacks.” 

The ideological armed gang settles in Tsauni forest with their logistic facilities.

The Chairman of the Tangaza Local Government, Isah Salihu Kalenjeni, who spoke to HumAngle, said: “We suspect that these groups are about 300 splitting across Illela, Tangaza, Gudu, Silami and Binji forest areas. They frequently visit our villages meeting rural people dressed in Muslim attire sometimes with turban visiting mosques. Our fear is that they are planning to take over our redundant youths, luring them into their criminal activities.” 

A Growing Threat?

The presence of the group underscores a huge gap in Nigeria’s security governance, especially in rural areas, and by extension border communities where movement across the country’s national border is as easy as falling off a log. It also exposes the erosion of trust among locals in the government’s ability to secure their lives and properties.

The Lakurawa’s activities have since spiralled out of local control. The group preached in public places, imposed levies on herders under the guise of Zakat and flogged villagers for playing music or dancing and chastising them for un-Islamic activities. 

In his paper,  titled “Jihadization of Banditry”, James Barnett, a conflict and humanitarian crisis researcher, noted that members of the group conducted several attacks on local security forces, including an attack on a military base — a situation that prompted a joint military operation between the Nigerian military and their Nigerien counterparts to carry out an offensive against them. Although they desisted from conducting any more attacks, locals say they still saw members of the groups in the area after the military operations.

The re-emergence of the group, analysts say, is linked to the coup in the neighbouring Niger Republic, which disrupted joint military patrol along the border between Nigeria and Niger.

“Before they left after the offensive, they’d already indoctrinated some residents. In fact, the authorities did not even know that they had indoctrinated some of the locals who were left behind while some stayed in the forest around Tangaza and laid low. The absence of a joint-border patrol since the military took over in Niger actually gave them free access. The group has been in that area since 2018. Most people in that area are aware of the group’s existence for a long time now,” a source familiar with the situation in the axis told HumAngle. He asked not to be named due to perceived security risks.

Stirring The Pot

The northwestern region has been a hotbed of criminal gangs for years in Nigeria. Jihadist groups like Ansaru have also been able to stamp their foot. The region shares a long, porous border with the Republic of Niger, where the Al-Qaeda-linked JNIM and the Islamic State in Greater Sahara (ISGS) operate. The border with the Benin Republic, in Kebbi state, also offers a corridor for Sahelian terrorists, mostly as a logistics route or base. Its vast forests provide buffers for terrorists and are very likely vulnerable to house jihadists fleeing military offensives in neighbouring jihadi-infested countries. 

With large swathes of ungoverned spaces and limited government presence across the areas, analysts are quick to point out that the region is fast becoming a ticking time bomb, especially with the influx of jihadists from the Sahel — a situation that’s likely to exacerbate the country’s already fragile security situation, particularly in the northern region.

Samuel Malik, a senior researcher at Good Governance Africa, a pan-African think-tank, told HumAngle that the multitude of violent actors in the already volatile region pose a graver threat to counterinsurgency operations.

“While many people paint the security challenges in the region with a convenient tag of banditry, emerging leads, including the re-emergence of Lakurawa, point to the fact that ‘banditry’ does not properly capture the realities on the ground,” Samuel noted, adding that ascribing every attack in the region to bandits provides the perfect cover for Islamist terror groups like the Lakurawa to infiltrate the region undetected, making it strategically difficulty to deploy the right responses. 

The security analyst believes that the groups’ operations will further put a strain on the livelihood of local communities who have already been at the receiving end of terrorists’ attacks on their homes for more than a decade now. 

“All these groups operating in the region need resources for their operations and the first target, as seen in the northeast, are always civilians. Illegal taxation, extortion, kidnapping, raids, etc, are all tactics these groups deploy to shore up their resources, tightening the noose around their necks,” he said.

Additional reporting by Abdullahi Abubakar.