North-East

It was midnight on April 12 when Modu Baluye woke to the sound of gunfire.

He was asleep with his family inside a classroom at Government Girls’ Secondary School (GGSS), in Monguno, Borno’s north, in northeastern Nigeria, which now serves as a temporary displacement camp, when the first shots rang out. Then came another burst, and another, cutting through the night in rapid succession.

“These people are attacking again,” he remembered saying.

He whispered a prayer and stayed awake. Around him, other displaced families were stirring as well. In the darkness, people listened without speaking, measuring the distance of the violence by the sound of the guns. The attack went on for hours.

By Modu’s account, the gunshots lasted about four hours. He later learned it was a gun battle between terrorists and military officers at the nearby Sector 3 base. As the troops pursued the terrorists along the exit route between Gana Ali, another displacement shelter, and the GGSS, they drove over buried explosives, which detonated and killed the commanding officer and six other soldiers.

By morning, fear had settled over the communities.

The military, residents said, became suspicious of the settlements around the base. The attackers had entered on foot under the cover of darkness, and the communities were not far from the military formation.

“They suspected we were hiding some of them,” Modu said. In the days that followed, soldiers raided Gana Ali and the GGSS camp. Residents told HumAngle that five suspected informants in the communities were arrested, and weapons were recovered. Then came an order for the communities to leave.

“They told us: leave or we will kill you all and burn down your houses,” Modu recounted. Within two days, families began dismantling their makeshift shelters. They packed what they could carry and left. Some were moved to a government settlement on the outskirts of Monguno, along the Monguno-Gajiram road, which is about a 30-minute walk from town.

“It is two weeks today,” Modu said when he spoke to HumAngle on May 10. “The place was torched after we left. I am not sure who torched the buildings.”

For Modu, displacement is not new. He fled Ala, his village in the Marte Local Government Area (LGA) of the state, in 2016 as insurgent violence spread across northern Borno. At the time, he was unmarried and found refuge with his parents at the ‘Water Board’ displacement camp in Monguno, where they lived for about six months. He later moved to the GGSS settlement after securing his own shelter and spent nearly a decade there. In 2024, he got married. By the time soldiers ordered residents to leave the community in April, he had begun building a mud house on a piece of land he purchased the previous year. It was there, in the unfinished house, that he and his family began rebuilding their lives after years of displacement.

A war returning to the bases

The Monguno attack came during a renewed wave of terror assaults on military formations and rural settlements across Borno.

In recent months, terrorists from Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad (JAS), commonly known as Boko Haram, and the Islamic State West Africa (ISWAP) have repeatedly targeted troops, bases, weapons, and supply routes. The attacks have killed soldiers, including senior military officers, and Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) members. 

In Nov. 2025, terrorists ambushed a military convoy along the Damboa-Biu road. Two soldiers and two CJTF members were killed. Brigadier-General M. Uba, commander of the 25 Task Force Brigade, was abducted and later killed.

On Jan. 26, terrorists attacked a military base in Damasak, killing seven soldiers and capturing 13 others, including the commanding officer. Eleven later escaped. Five days later, on Jan. 31, another terror attack on an army base in Sabon Gari killed nine soldiers and two CJTF members; about 16 injured security personnel were evacuated for treatment.

On March 10, a military base in Kukawa came under attack; the commanding officer, Lt. Col. Umar Farouq, and several of his soldiers were killed. 

On April 9, three days before the Monguno attack, terrorists launched a joint assault on the headquarters of the 29 Task Force Brigade in Benisheikh, killing its brigade commander, Brigadier-General Oseni Braimah.

The attacks have already weakened the military formations in rural areas. In some places, troops have withdrawn or consolidated around larger garrison towns, leaving smaller settlements more exposed. But when soldiers are killed, residents say the anger does not end on the battlefield. It returns with the troops.

The trails of suspicion

In rural Borno, civilians are often trapped between two armed powers. Terrorists demand information about troop movements, military positions, and security operations. Soldiers, in turn, demand information about insurgent hideouts, movements, and informants. Refusing either side can be deadly.

Those suspected of helping the military may be abducted or killed by the terrorists. Those suspected of helping terrorists may be arrested, detained, displaced, or punished by security forces. As a result, civilians often face impossible choices, with serious consequences regardless of whom they cooperate with.

Despite these risks, communities have at times provided intelligence to the military. In March, for example, residents of Doro, a rural community in Kukawa LGA on the shores of Lake Chad, reportedly alerted troops after observing suspicious insurgent movements, helping security forces prepare for an attack.

The consequences of such actions can be severe. In March 2022, ISWAP executed four civilians in communities within the same local government area after accusing them of spying for government troops. Residents said the killings were intended to deter others from sharing information with security forces. For many civilians, the message was clear: speaking to the military could carry a death sentence. 

The Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Gen. Olufemi Oluyede, recently argued that residents in Borno and Yobe knew some of those behind the attacks during an operational visit to Maiduguri in March, reflecting a long-held security assumption that residents in affected communities often know more than they admit. The CDS said communities must take ownership of the crisis, citing Kukawa, where he claimed two of the attackers were from within the village.

But for many civilians, knowing does not mean consenting. They say  in places where terrorists move freely, buy food, collect supplies, and threaten residents, silence is often a currency for survival.

Professor Abubakar Mu’azu, former director of the Centre for Peace, Development, and Diplomatic Studies at the University of Maiduguri, said this suspicion has existed since the early years of the insurgency.

“Right from the start, there was suspicion by the security agencies that the people who are living in areas where these terrorist activities were happening are also supporting the terrorists,” he said. “They never considered the fact that there is a majority of people who disagree with these terrorists’ activities.”

Mu’azu said the reactionary nature of security operations has prevented the military from building a reliable system of trust with local communities.

“They assume that the locals are giving information to the terrorists willingly,” he said. “But they keep saying they want the people to give them information about the terrorists.”

For him, this contradiction is at the heart of the crisis.

The military needs civilian intelligence to fight terrorism, but if civilians fear that any contact with terrorists, even under duress, will be treated as collaboration, they may stop speaking altogether.

Life under duress

In Monguno, residents say terrorists still move in and out of town despite the presence of security forces.

Koso Abubakar, a displaced farmer, said the terrorists often enter on motorcycles, buy food items, and leave.

“They come and leave at will,” he said. “Sometimes, they come to kidnap people. They don’t attack the military, and the military does not confront them. But on other days, they attack the military. That is when the military retaliates.”

According to Koso, most residents live with the knowledge that they can be accused by either side at any time.

“People are living in fear because everyone is a potential target,” he said.

In many rural communities, even work has become dangerous. A farmer going to his field, a fisher heading towards the water, or a trader moving goods through bush paths may first have to pay those who control the routes. The payments are called taxes, levies, or sometimes simply “settlement”, but residents understand what they are: money paid under fear. To refuse is to risk punishment, in lighter cases, or killing and abduction, in extreme cases, from terrorists. To pay is to risk being seen by soldiers as someone sustaining the insurgency. In this way, even the small acts people perform to feed their families can become evidence against them.

Professor Mu’azu said this fear terrorists use violence to discipline communities.

“They are very good at setting a very deadly example by killing or eliminating people, with or without evidence,” he said. “If they are attacked by security agencies and they did not hear anything from people living in these settlements, they would assume the people gave information about their positions.”

This was what many residents believe happened in Ngoshe in March, when terrorists attacked the community, killed many residents, and abducted others, including women and children. The attack was suspected to be retaliation for a previous military operation in the Mandara Mountains that killed some terrorist commanders. The terrorists reportedly believed residents had given up their location.

For civilians, the lesson is brutal: giving information can kill you. Not giving information can also kill you.

When protection becomes punishment

The military has long accused some civilians of aiding terrorists.  In the early years of the war, many young men were arbitrarily detained. Some disappeared. Some were killed. In April 2014, soldiers arrested 42 adult men from Gallari, a village in the Konduga LGA of Borno, on suspicion of links to the insurgency. They were taken to the Giwa Barracks detention facility in Maiduguri. Twelve years later, only three have regained their freedom after years in detention and alleged torture. Through months of on-the-ground investigation and analysis of satellite imagery, HumAngle has also previously reported on disappearances and mass graves linked to military operations, while the wives of detained and disappeared men later formed the Knifar Women movement to demand justice.

For communities already carrying the memory of those years, new raids and forced evacuations reopen old wounds.

Mu’azu said security forces should approach communities with more care, especially when allegations of collaboration arise.

“One would assume that when security forces are dealing with situations like this, they would not come with the mindset that the people are sympathetic to the terrorists, or that all the people are giving information to the terrorists,” he said.

He added that soldiers have a difficult job and deserve sympathy for the burden they carry. But he argued that this does not justify indiscriminate punishment.

“They are the ones who are supposed to protect the civilians,” he said. “If there are people they suspect, they should arrest them and hand them over to the police for proper investigation, without compromising the little support they have in the community.”

When communities are burned or displaced after attacks, the consequences go beyond the immediate loss of shelter. Food stocks disappear. Children are pulled out of school. Families scatter. People who had already fled violence once are forced to flee again.

In resettled or displaced communities, where people have spent years coping, another displacement can mean the collapse of everything they had slowly rebuilt.

A dangerous silence

After the Monguno raid, Koso said some residents became so afraid of the military that they fled into the bush.

“Many people, about 30, also left for the bush,” he said. “Most of them fear the military. The military does not trust them.”

Mu’azu warned that this kind of fear can damage counterterrorism efforts.

“They will lose trust, respect, and block chances of receiving information,” he said. “This could also push them to be recruited by the terrorists.”

For Mu’azu, the solution is not to abandon intelligence work, but to make it safer and more systematic. He said the military should cultivate trusted informants within communities, create secure channels of communication, and protect residents when terrorists retaliate.

“This is the gap,” he said. “Oftentimes, communities are attacked after successful military operations. The patterns should be studied. They should do a statistical analysis. They should be mindful of the time and be prepared against such actions.”

He also called for stronger collaboration among the military, DSS, police, civil defence, and intelligence agencies in neighbouring countries such as Cameroon, Chad, and Niger, because terrorists move across borders.

But for Modu and others displaced from Gana Ali and the GGSS, these policy questions remain distant. What they know is simpler: they fled one danger and met another. They were told to leave the place they had made into a home. Then they watched, or heard, that what remained had been burned.

In Borno’s war, civilians are often asked to prove their loyalty to the state while surviving under the shadow of terrorists, and in that narrow space between fear and suspicion, many are losing everything.

Nigerian troops say they have rescued 360 people abducted during a deadly terrorist attack on Ngoshe, a resettled community in Gwoza Local Government Area of Borno State, northeastern Nigeria, more than three months after terrorists overran the town, killing residents and forcing thousands to flee.

Solomon Ali Talake, a primary school teacher and survivor of the March 3 attack, said community members had received information about the rescue.

“I was told they have been rescued,” Solomon told HumAngle on Sunday. “Families have been informed, but they have not allowed us to see them yet. They said they are assessing them and will release them to their families afterwards.”

The March 3 attack on Ngoshe was one of the deadliest assaults on a resettled community in southern Borno in recent months. Residents said the attackers first struck a military formation in the town before moving into the community. Homes were set ablaze, civilians were killed, and hundreds of residents were reportedly abducted.

Solomon survived by hiding in a tree throughout the night while the attack unfolded beneath him. From his hiding place, he watched as gunmen moved through the community, burning houses and pursuing fleeing residents.

The attack displaced thousands of people, many of whom fled to Pulka, a neighbouring community about 12 kilometres away. Others sought refuge in Maiduguri, Cameroon, and other locations. The exact number of people killed or abducted remains disputed. While some media reports estimated that about 100 people were killed and more than 300 abducted, residents told HumAngle that the scale of the attack made precise figures difficult to establish. Victims were later buried in a mass grave, according to survivors.

Among those abducted were two of Solomon’s nephews, aged 14 and 11. On Sunday, he said he had not yet been able to confirm whether they were among those rescued.

Asabe Ali Talake, Solomon’s sister and the children’s mother, also said she had received reports of the rescue but remained uncertain about the fate of her children.

Asabe said she was still waiting for confirmation from authorities. Relatives of the freed victims say communication with them remains restricted while security agencies conduct assessments.

Military authorities typically screen and profile people freed from insurgent-controlled territories before reuniting them with their families. The process is intended to establish identities, assess physical and psychological conditions, and determine whether further investigation or rehabilitation may be required.

This comes amid a broader wave of insecurity affecting communities across Borno State. In recent months, terrorists have launched repeated attacks on military formations, reconstruction projects, and resettled communities, raising concerns about the sustainability of government resettlement efforts in conflict-affected areas.

Part of a broader rescue effort

A politician from Gwoza, who spoke to HumAngle on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to discuss the matter publicly and who was involved in advocacy efforts for the victims’ release, claimed a ransom was demanded for the release of the victims. HumAngle could not independently verify the claim, and the military has not publicly indicated that any negotiations took place. 

This development is the latest in a series of operations by troops of Operation Hadin Kai targeting terrorist enclaves in the Mandara Mountains and surrounding areas.

Three days earlier, troops rescued a woman and her infant child after killing several terrorists. On May 1, troops rescued six abductees during an operation around the Mandara Mountains. Six more victims were rescued on May 14. In April, 12 victims, including men, women, and children, escaped during a military operation targeting a terrorist camp.

The latest operation, however, represents the largest reported release linked to the March 3 attack on Ngoshe, offering renewed hope to families who have spent months waiting for news of their relatives.

While military authorities described the operation as a rescue, questions remain about how the victims regained their freedom.

In the previous episode of Vestiges of Violence, we told the story of Bintu Suleiman, whose daughters and grandchildren were abducted during the attack on Ngoshe, northeastern Nigeria, on March 3, 2026. She was still waiting for news, still hoping for their return.

Now, we have some updates.

In this episode, her 16-year-old daughter, Aisha Muhammad Shuaibu, has escaped captivity after spending a period of two months and two weeks with the terrorists. She returned home carrying her four-year-old nephew on her back.

She shared with HumAngle what happened to her in captivity and how she escaped.

Reported by Sabiqah Bello

Voice acting by Rukayya Saeed and Khadijat Isah Baka

Multimedia editor is Anthony Asemota

Executive producer is Ahmad Salkida

Across northeastern Nigeria, former Boko Haram insurgents now move with Nigerian troops into forests they once controlled. They identify footpaths that insurgents use after attacks, point out where improvised explosive devices are most likely buried beneath soft sand roads, and decode habits, voices, and movement patterns invisible to the average soldier. They explain how camps are structured during the rainy season and identify commanders at a distance. Some of these ex-insurgents die in combat fighting the same insurgency they once served.

One of the first such defectors was Abubakar Umar from Bama in Borno State. Soldiers called him Small and say he was presumably in his mid-20s when he died in 2023. Before then, he had fought on the frontlines of multiple operations across Sambisa, Timbuktu, and the Lake Chad basin.

Before surrendering, Small spent years in the insurgency as a Naqeeb, a low-ranking fighter, enabling him to know the terrain intimately. By the time he defected to the Nigerian Army, he already knew which routes disappeared under floodwater during the rains, where insurgents buried weapons before abandoning camps, and how insurgents escaped after raids. He understood the logic behind ambushes because he had once planned and carried out attacks against the same army he would later fight beside.

Others followed a similar path. Among them was Zakariyya from Pulka in Gwoza, another ex-insurgent who later supported military operations across Borno and Yobe. He died in late 2025.

At first, many soldiers distrusted them, especially as some of them had lost close friends and colleagues to Boko Haram attacks. For them, accepting a former insurgent carrying a rifle beside them was never easy. Operation after operation changed the relationship, however. According to military sources familiar with the missions, Small and Zakariyya repeatedly identified patterns that helped troops avoid deadly traps and ambushes. With time, commanders began listening whenever they spoke.

Then came a particular operation deep inside Sambisa in 2023. Small moved ahead of the troops in a way one soldier later described to HumAngle as “fearless, almost reckless,” as though death no longer frightened him, having already crossed too many moral boundaries to fear its arrival. He never returned.

The soldiers who survived that operation spoke about him afterwards with the kind of tone usually reserved for men buried in decorated military uniforms. 

There are many stories like this now scattered across the northeastern region–former insurgents fighting alongside the state. 

From the islands and marshes of Lake Chad to the forests of Zamfara, Sokoto, Kaduna, Niger, Kebbi, and the roads stretching toward Kwara, Nigeria is confronting a conflict system that has changed shape. In response, security forces are increasingly turning toward defectors.

The unseen war

For years, the Nigerian state has made progress against the Boko Haram war. When villages like Bama and Gwoza fell to the terror group, the military reclaimed them very quickly. They have also killed commanders over time, while still exploring non-kinetic approaches that made it possible for insurgents to surrender. Through this approach, defections occurred at an unprecedented rate. 

Boko Haram fractured internally as ISWAP consolidated its presence in parts of the Lake Chad Basin. Many did not want to remain in the Lake Chad theatre, but they also did not trust a formal surrender to Nigerian authorities, so some of them moved to other parts of Nigeria.

HumAngle has tracked the movement of former Boko Haram elements to the North West region and parts of central Nigeria as far back as 2020. Some joined criminal armed groups, others became trainers, bomb makers, couriers, informants, guards, or logistics brokers. Others disappeared into cities following the death of Abubakar Shekau and clashes between factions within the group.

In Kano and several urban areas, defectors and affiliates blended into urban life. Some became labourers, mechanics, phone repairers, commercial drivers, or petty traders. Some drifted into robbery and informal criminal economies, while others married and completely concealed their past.

This creates a difficult security dilemma for many reasons. How does a state track men who have left the insurgency but not entered any formal process? How does it distinguish between a deserter seeking anonymity and one rebuilding operational networks elsewhere? How does it protect communities without criminalising everyone who once lived under insurgent rule?

Nigeria has not answered those questions through a coherent national framework. Instead, it improvises.

The intelligence war nobody sees

When HumAngle spoke with soldiers and intelligence officers who served in the North East, their language was different. They do not romanticise former Boko Haram insurgents nor do they describe them as heroes, but they call them assets.

Before defectors became operationally useful, troops often entered unfamiliar terrain with insufficient intelligence from local hunters, the civilian joint task force, and satellite imagery. Equipment like drones and maps was useful but had limitations, as it could not predict movement patterns or likely landmines. Former insurgents helped dismantle part of that advantage. According to several defectors interviewed for this report, many military successes now depend partly on information provided by them.

“Whenever soldiers go for operations,” one explained, “some of us move ahead because we know the roads, the bushes, and where bombs are planted. We tell them which road not to use.”

Another former insurgent described how they identified hidden weapon caches and camp positions.

“Some of us know where weapons were kept. So when operations happen, we guide soldiers directly to those places.”

They also described helping troops understand insurgent movement patterns after attacks.

“When fighters escape,” one said, “we know the routes they use because we ourselves used those routes before.” The source added, “We advised soldiers to evacuate the women and children left behind by fighters to Maiduguri, which encouraged a lot of the fighters to defect from the group easily at a later date.”

The moral fracture

For victims, however, these battlefield contributions rarely erase memory. A widow whose husband was executed does not easily accept that the man who once terrorised her community now works alongside soldiers. A farmer whose village was burned does not find emotional comfort in hearing that a former insurgent helped identify buried bombs. A displaced family living with hunger in an abandoned resettled community does not easily understand why former insurgents appear to receive rehabilitation support while survivors struggle alone.

That anger has become one of the deepest unresolved tensions inside Nigeria’s reintegration strategy. Many affected communities perceive former insurgents as receiving privileges unavailable to victims. Some surrendered members received food support, accommodation, vocational training, phones, stipends, or reintegration assistance. Meanwhile, many survivors still live with displacement, trauma, hunger, unemployment, grief, and insecurity.

One former insurgent described how resentment intensified after communities observed rehabilitated insurgents riding motorcycles, carrying weapons alongside soldiers, wearing jeans and clean clothes, and moving relatively freely.

“What happened was mostly hatred and resentment,” he said. “People saw the boys looking comfortable and became angry.”

Kabiru Adamu, the Managing Director of Beacon Consulting, comments on this imbalance. “When we look at this from a transitional justice perspective,” he said, “the current imbalance is a significant vulnerability.”

According to him, communities may interpret reintegration programmes as rewarding violence while neglecting victims.

“If the state appears to reward insurgency while neglecting victims, it breeds a deep sense of injustice. Unaddressed grievances are the primary fuel for cyclical violence.”

Former insurgents speak

The former insurgents interviewed by HumAngle described themselves not as forgiven men, but as useful men. “There are those who go to war,” one former fighter said, “And there are informants.” He explained that some maintain communication with active insurgents and relay intelligence to security agencies.

“If attacks are being planned, information is passed quickly to intelligence officers so security can be strengthened.”

Others described identifying civilians secretly supplying insurgents with food, fuel, or information. “There are people in town transporting petrol, food, and information,” one explained. “Those who surrendered know many of them because they worked together before.”

According to the former insurgents, these intelligence networks disrupted insurgent logistics and prevented attacks. Some defectors also described participating directly in combat operations.

“They gave some of us motorcycles and guns,” one said. “Sometimes, operations happen without soldiers even accompanying us.”

Another described units led by surrendered insurgents moving independently through forests to intercept attacks or recover weapons.

“Some commanders are given twenty or thirty motorcycles and sent to carry out patrols,” he said. “They stop attacks and return with captured weapons… Nearly 40 per cent of ground troops’ successes achieved in the past three years in this war come from the contribution of surrendered fighters.”

HumAngle cannot independently verify this claim. Still, several military and intelligence sources who spoke to HumAngle on the condition of anonymity admit that defectors remain useful in operations. What is less clear is whether relying on them will be safe or sustainable in the long run.

Security expert Kabiru Adamu described former insurgents as “force multipliers” rather than the decisive force behind military gains. According to him, conventional military operations, air power, and the Civilian Joint Task Force remain central to weakening insurgent networks.

“Ex-fighters provide precision,” he explained. However, he warned that the strategic dangers remain severe. “The risks include infiltration, double agents, human rights concerns, institutional degradation, and loss of civilian trust.”

The risk of dependence also concerns some analysts and security officials. If military units become too reliant on defectors for intelligence, what happens when defectors lie, or when personal grudges shape accusations, or when former insurgents return to active criminal networks or, as in some cases, return to Boko Haram carrying sensitive operational knowledge? What happens when military institutions fail to build independent intelligence systems because surrendered insurgents appear easier to use?

The northwestern region is quite different from the North East. Boko Haram and ISWAP emerged through ideological insurgency structures combining theology, coercion, governance, taxation, and violence. In contrast, the armed groups in the northwestern region emerged differently, engaging in criminal activities such as cattle rustling, communal conflict, illegal mining, vigilante reprisals, extortion, kidnapping, and governance collapse.

Yet over time, the distinction blurred. Armed groups across Zamfara, Sokoto, Katsina, Kaduna, Niger, and Kebbi increasingly adopted tactics associated with insurgent warfare: IEDs, ambushes, and rural territories being subject to armed taxation systems.

Abubakar Abdullahi, a journalist who has reported extensively from Zamfara, said Boko Haram-linked elements have become increasingly visible inside parts of the northwestern region.

“In areas such as Dutsin Maiqardaji mountain,” he said, “Boko Haram members have a heavy presence. Both Lakurawa and Boko Haram terrorists preach to residents they keep under siege in ungoverned spaces. Ongoing armed operations in the North East pave the way for fighters to find Zamfara as a haven,” he explained.

Therefore, the state’s decision to use surrendered insurgents in counterinsurgency operations across parts of the northwest follows a grim internal logic.

Trauma beneath the surface

The psychological burden of the insurgency now stretches across an entire generation. In Maiduguri, Monguno, Bama, Dikwa, Gwoza, Damboa, Pulka, Banki, and dozens of smaller communities scattered across Borno and the wider Lake Chad region, trauma shows up in ordinary routines. Some people report waking suddenly at night whenever motorcycles pass too quickly outside their compounds. Parents instinctively gather children indoors whenever rumours of attacks on nearby roads spread. Men who once farmed freely now calculate distance from military formations before deciding whether land is safe enough to cultivate.

For many survivors, peace itself feels temporary.

Kauna Malgwi, a clinical psychologist directly affected by the insurgency during its early years, described northeastern Nigeria as a society living in a prolonged psychological survival mode.

“Prolonged violence keeps societies in chronic hypervigilance,” she explained. “People shift from acute stress into collective survival mode. Nervous systems remain activated for years. Unresolved trauma normalises fear, weakens communities, and erodes cohesion. Ongoing violence keeps trauma active and prevents healing.”

The effects appear everywhere: overcrowded displacement settlements, classrooms where children struggle to concentrate because conflict has interrupted the normal architecture of childhood, families where fathers withdraw emotionally after years of violence, and young men who have grown up around guns, funerals, military convoys, and uncertainty.

“Children in chronic conflict develop emotional, learning, and behavioural problems that, if unaddressed, persist into adulthood and become the generational norm,” Malgwi warned

She listed the consequences as cycles of violence, emotional detachment, chronic anxiety, educational disruption, social mistrust, difficulty forming secure relationships, and increased vulnerability to recruitment by armed groups.

“If trauma among children is ignored,” she warned, “national stability itself is at risk. Peacebuilding that ignores collective healing produces fragile and temporary peace. When victims feel forgotten as ex-fighters are supported, trauma deepens and trust in institutions erodes. Forgiveness must not be forced. Communities require safety and acknowledgement before reconciliation.”

According to her, communities need public acknowledgement of suffering before reintegration can become emotionally sustainable.

“Victim-centred support systems are essential. Communities need visible justice, visible care, and transparent communication before trust can begin to recover.”

She also warned about the development of emotional desensitisation among conflict-affected populations.

“Without support, grief becomes anger or despair,” she explained. “Violence itself can become normalised.”

Many young people in northeastern Nigeria have never experienced sustained normalcy. They grew up hearing stories about massacres the way previous generations heard folktales. They learned directions through checkpoints and geography through displacement.

Kauna Malgwi believes recovery in such environments cannot depend solely on psychiatrists or formal hospitals because the scale of trauma is too large.

“Community healing includes training community health workers in psychosocial support, group therapy, trauma-informed schools, faith-based healing spaces, and safe storytelling forums,” she explained, stressing the importance of collectively restoring dignity. “The goal is not only treatment. The goal is restoring function, trust, and resilience across society.”

For many survivors, however, the war never became a discussion about tactical adaptation. It remained personal. A missing daughter. A burned house. A father was executed beside a road. A child was buried after an explosion and nights of screaming.

A life divided permanently into before and after.

The state’s impossible calculation

For Kabiru Adamu, the question is not whether the state should use former insurgents operationally. The deeper issue is whether Nigeria can do so without weakening its own legitimacy. He described the current approach as a fragile balancing act between military necessity, transitional justice, and social stability.

“The Nigerian military faces a highly asymmetric threat,” he said. “Using former fighters offers distinct immediate operational advantages because these individuals possess granular, real-time intelligence. They know Sambisa Forest, the Mandara Mountains, the Lake Chad islands, and the internal communication structures of factions like JAS and ISWAP.”

Still, he repeatedly returned to the dangers. “The strategic risks are severe and multifaceted.” The operational usefulness of former insurgents can serve as an excuse to abandon accountability. “There must be transparent triage,” he argued. “Low-level associates and coerced participants cannot be treated the same way as high-level perpetrators. Most residents of Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe reject blanket amnesty for commanders associated with mass atrocities.”

For Adamu, reintegration without visible justice creates long-term instability.

“If communities feel abandoned by the state in favour of their attackers, it erodes the social contract. It opens the possibility of vigilantism or future militant mobilisation driven by resentment. Demobilisation is not simply a military process,” he said. “Reintegration is generational and should remain civilian-led.”

He pointed to global examples from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Colombia as warnings.

“When stipends dry up without sustainable livelihoods, ex-combatants often return to criminal economies.”

According to him, Nigeria risks repeating similar mistakes unless rehabilitation becomes economically viable. “Cash support alone is not enough. Long-term reintegration requires market-driven livelihoods and ongoing monitoring.”

He also warned against grouping defectors into separate armed formations.

“Never create isolated paramilitary monopolies from ex-combatants,” he said. “If they are used operationally, strict oversight and accountability systems are essential.”

Perhaps most importantly, he insisted that reintegration cannot survive politically unless victims see equal investment in their own recovery.

“For every dollar spent on DDR,” he argued, “an equal or greater amount should be visibly invested in victims and receiving communities.”

Without that balance, he believes the state risks winning short-term tactical gains while deepening long-term social fractures.

The soldiers and the boys

One of the strangest transformations inside this war is the relationship between soldiers and former insurgents. Many soldiers lost friends to insurgent attacks, some carry visible scars, and others carry memories they rarely discuss. Meanwhile, former insurgents themselves live in a state of permanent ambiguity. They are neither fully accepted civilians nor recognised soldiers. They exist inside a grey zone.

According to the former insurgents HumAngle spoke to, several surrendered members deployed to Zamfara and other northwestern states were killed during operations against armed groups.

“In this war,” one said, “many of those helping the government have lost their lives. Some died fighting people they once called brothers.”

A Nigerian soldier told HumAngle he never imagined he would one day fight alongside former Boko Haram members.

“I thought the only relationship I would ever have with these bastards was to kill them or be killed,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he’s not permitted to speak to journalists on this matter

Now deployed with some of the defectors against their former comrades, the soldier said the experience has reshaped parts of his perception over time. Some of the former insurgents have proven useful in combat operations, particularly because of their familiarity with insurgent tactics and terrain.

“They have been very helpful since we started working with them. They are constantly watched and supervised, but the contributions of some of them have been priceless,” said the staff sergeant.

What a serious framework would require

Nigeria does not need to pretend former insurgents are useless. Evidence from the field suggests they have helped disrupt attacks, expose explosives, identify camps, trace logistics, and support military operations. At the same time, experts say the state cannot continue to manage reintegration through improvisation and silence. A credible framework would require clear categories that separate coerced associates from high-level perpetrators. It would require transparent accountability systems. Victims would receive compensation, trauma support, livelihood recovery, education, and public acknowledgement.

The northwest would be treated as its own conflict system requiring tailored responses rather than simple transplantation of northeastern models.

Repentant volunteers

The former insurgents interviewed for this report did not seem to want public sympathy. Most acknowledged that many Nigerians would always see them as part of the violence they once took part in. Yet, beneath their answers was a recurring theme. They insisted they no longer recognised the movement they had joined years earlier.

Abu Muhsin, now 38, said he entered Boko Haram as a teenager after preachers repeatedly visited his village.

“I joined them when I was around 16 years old,” he said. “They used to come and preach in our village, near Damasak. I got convinced, and I joined them.”

Over time, he rose within the movement and eventually became a Naqeeb, a field commander operating around the Lake Chad region. But years inside the insurgency changed his view of the organisation.

“We saw that the group was not following the rules of Islam,” he said. “They kill people and loot their properties. We started communicating with those who surrendered before us. They directed us and later escaped from the bush with some of our families.”

After surrendering, Abu Muhsin said he volunteered to support military operations because former insurgents understood terrain and insurgent movement patterns better than most troops.

“No one forced us to volunteer,” he said. “We just felt we should assist the military since we know the bush better than they do.”

For that assistance, he said, volunteers receive irregular payments. “They give us some allowance. They pay us ₦100,000, sometimes ₦50,000 or ₦30,000.”

Another former insurgent, Ibn Mus’ab, traced his recruitment to family influence. “My cousins were already members and used to visit us,” said the 35-year-old former fighter from Wulgo in Gamboru Ngala. “They used to preach their doctrines to us. Later, they convinced me, and I followed them to the bush.” That was in 2014. 

Inside the insurgency, Ibn Mus’ab became Amirul’Uddah, responsible for weapons management. Like several defectors interviewed for this report, he framed his disillusionment in religious terms.

“I left them because some of their activities are becoming un-Islamic,” he said. “They kill people unnecessarily. They kill someone for taking drugs, which is not so in Sharia.”

His departure from Boko Haram was shaped partly by internal persecution. He said he was accused of an offence and that members of the group declared him wanted. “I escaped to Giedam, not even knowing that the military was accepting people who surrendered,” he recalled. “I was later told I could submit myself, and I surrendered to them.”

He escaped alone, and his family joined him later. Asked why he now assists the military against former comrades, he answered without hesitation.

“I decided to assist because those people are no longer following the Sharia accordingly. There are many of us who are ready to assist, and a lot are doing well.”

Like others, he described financial incentives as modest and inconsistent.

“The usual pay is ₦100,000, sometimes ₦50,000,” he said. “If they can pay more than this, many more would be willing to volunteer.”

Abu Faruq’s story begins differently. Unlike some defectors who joined as adults through ideological persuasion, he said he was absorbed into the movement as a child during Boko Haram’s expansion across Gwoza.

“They took me when I was a kid,” the 35-year-old said. “It was in Gwoza when they were preaching. I grew up in their place and got married.”

He said he became part of the Rijaal, the fighting cadre within the insurgency structure.

Years later, he concluded that the movement no longer reflected the religious principles it claimed to defend. “I left them because they were not practising what the Qur’an and Hadith say about Sharia,” he explained. “They kill innocent people, they loot and destroy people’s properties.”

According to him, communication with earlier defectors again played a critical role in encouraging surrender. “Some of our friends have earlier surrendered, and they told us how they were received warmly,” he said. “They directed us on the phone on how we could come out and meet the military.”

After leaving the bush, Abu Faruq eventually joined operations supporting Nigerian troops, including deployments far beyond the northeast. “Yes, I did,” he said when asked whether he travelled with soldiers to the northwest. “They selected some of us to assist them in Zamfara and Sokoto.”

According to him, defectors participated in operations across multiple villages affected by armed groups. “They first took us to Sokoto, and from there we went to many villages in both Sokoto and Zamfara for operations.”

He said he remained there for about two months. For that deployment, he received what he described as ranger allowances. ‘They pay us ₦100,000 per month as rangers.”

These stories show men trying to find a new place for themselves in a war that has already taken over much of their lives. But none of their reasons answers the deeper moral question about Nigeria’s use of former insurgents.

Muhammed Kaumi had just stepped out of the mosque when his phone rang on the evening of Friday, May 29. He had recently returned from Dikwa, a town in Borno State, northeastern Nigeria, and assumed the call was from a relative checking on his journey home. Instead, the voice on the other end delivered news that left him numb.

“Bulama has been killed,” the caller said. “They have killed Bulama.” Muhammed felt his chest tighten. “I instantly felt a sharp pain in my heart,” he recalled.

Bulama Ali was his cousin, a farmer, a father of five, and one of thousands, like him, who have been displaced by the Boko Haram insurgency that has scarred the region for more than a decade.

Within minutes, Muhammed was on his way to the Custom House Internally Displaced Persons’ Camp in Muna, on the outskirts of Maiduguri, where Bulama had lived with his family for nearly a decade.

As he rushed there, questions flooded his mind: “What had happened? Who had killed him? Why?”

When he arrived, residents told him that Bulama had allegedly been beaten by men they identified as “repentant Boko Haram fighters”, locally known as “Hybrids”.

For many residents of Maiduguri, the allegation struck a painful nerve.

For years, former insurgents who surrendered to authorities have passed through government rehabilitation and reintegration programmes such as Operation Safe Corridor and the Borno Model, before returning to civilian communities. However, some have bypassed both interventions completely. 

The Nigerian authorities have involved some of these deserters in security operations, where they help troops with intelligence gathering, their knowledge of terrorist-held terrain, and even operational activities. The arrangement has remained controversial among many survivors of the conflict and among security analysts. 

Now, residents in these communities say their fears have been justified. 

They brought him back dead

Bulama’s final hours began shortly before the Friday Muslim congregational prayers.

Muhammed was told by relatives and eyewitnesses that “[Bulama] was on his way to the mosque on his bicycle when he received a phone call. He stopped by the roadside [close to Muna, on the Maiduguri-Gamboru highway] to answer it.” Behind him was a vehicle carrying armed men dressed in black uniforms. “They honked at him to move,” Muhammed said. “But he was speaking on the phone and did not hear them.”

Abbas Shettima, who witnessed the incident, said the confrontation, which occurred between 1:15 p.m. and 1:30 p.m., quickly escalated. 

“We were all heading to the mosque when we saw them beating him,” Abbas recounted. According to him, the group consisted of about ten men carrying guns and sticks. “They said he was blocking their way,” he said.

Bulama tried to explain. He apologised repeatedly, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. 

“He kept begging them to spare him,” Abbas said. “He crouched down and covered his head with his hands while they beat him.” When bystanders attempted to intervene, the armed men threatened them. Residents watched helplessly. Eventually, the men forced Bulama into their vehicle and drove away.

No one knew where he had been taken.

At the time, witnesses said they believed the group were members of the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) because of their uniforms.

Hours later, shortly after 3 p.m., the vehicle returned. “They brought him back severely wounded,” Abbas recounted. “He could barely move.”

Residents rushed toward him to help, but within ten minutes, he died.

The incident was immediately reported to the soldiers stationed at the camp’s entrance. According to Muhammed, the soldiers said they had seen the vehicle dropping Bulama but did not know what had transpired. “They were the ones who told us the men were Hybrids and that they had come from the Maiwa axis,” he said.

Residents later learned that Bulama had allegedly been taken to Maiwa Kura, a remote village in Mafa Local Government Area, Borno State, where the group was reportedly stationed. 

Although “Hybrids” are often perceived as operating independently, they are typically attached to military formations and work alongside security forces, according to a member of a local volunteer security outfit involved in counterterrorism operations who spoke to HumAngle.

“The commanding officer of the military base gives instructions to the ‘Hybrid’ commander attached to that formation, who then relays orders to his men,” the source explained. “During broader operations involving multiple locations, they also have a state commander from whom they receive directives.”

However, this does not necessarily imply military involvement in the attack that claimed Bulama’s life, as Hybrid patrols sometimes operate independently.

Bulama’s family subsequently reported the matter to the police. 

Muhammed said that soldiers, police officers, and members of the CJTF later travelled to Maiwa, where they arrested three suspects, including a commander. “They told us the others had travelled to Mafa for an operation,” he said.

The suspects were taken into custody and transferred to the Borno State Criminal Investigation Department for further investigation.

According to family members, the suspects claimed Bulama died after jumping from the back of a moving Hilux vehicle. But the relatives remain unconvinced. “The doctors told us he had been severely beaten,” Muhammed said. “His hands were tied, and he had internal bleeding.”

The family retrieved the body on Saturday morning and buried him later that afternoon. When the body was prepared for burial, he said, blood continued to seep from his eyes, ears, and nose. “It stained the white shroud.”

When HumAngle contacted the Borno State Police Public Relations Officer, Nahum Kenneth Daso, he said he was not aware of the case and would make inquiries. As of publication, no official update had been provided.

The men known as ‘Hybrids’

In many communities across Borno State, the word “Hybrid” carries different meanings depending on who defines it. 

To security officials, they are a practical asset in a war that has stretched for more than 15 years. For many residents, they are former terrorists trying to rebuild their lives. To others, especially those who lost relatives, homes, farms, and livelihoods during the conflict, they are a constant reminder of wounds that have never fully healed.

The term is commonly used to describe some former Boko Haram members who surrendered and passed through official rehabilitation and deradicalisation programmes, and later became attached to security operations in various capacities.

Since they possess intimate knowledge of terrorist operations and hierarchy, security agencies have increasingly relied on some of them to help in identifying former colleagues, navigating difficult terrain, and providing information that security forces may otherwise struggle to obtain.

For authorities, the arrangement is often viewed as a necessary component of the counterterrorism campaign. However, many civilians find it deeply unsettling.

That is why, for some residents, the sight of former terrorists carrying weapons or working alongside security forces can be difficult to accept.

Bulama’s death has reopened those anxieties. Yet, the resentment many residents express today did not begin with his killing. It has been building for years.

In August 2021, as thousands of terrorist deserters began surrendering from the Sambisa Forest and the Lake Chad region, the Borno State Government convened a high-level stakeholders’ meeting at the Government House in Maiduguri. Government officials, security agencies, traditional rulers, religious leaders, civil society organisations, journalists, and community representatives gathered to discuss the reintegration of former insurgents into society.

At the end of the meeting, participants agreed in principle to forgive and accept these deserters back into their communities. Their acceptance, however, was not unconditional. The stakeholders insisted that surrendered terrorists must be thoroughly screened before reintegration. They also warned against the release of hardened extremists into the communities. They further called for meaningful reconciliation between victims and former terrorists.

The gathering was widely presented as a collective endorsement of reconciliation.

But beyond the conference hall, acceptance has proved far more complicated.

Many residents who had survived the violence felt they had not been part of that conversation. Some had lost parents, spouses, siblings, and/or children. Others had spent years moving between displacement camps, uncertain whether they would ever return home. For them, forgiveness was not a policy decision that could be reached through consensus among stakeholders. It was an intensely personal choice shaped by trauma, memory, and loss.

“The people making these decisions are not always the people who suffered directly,” Abba Gana told HumAngle.

Over the years, some residents have complained of harassment and intimidation by former terrorists and their families. Others say they simply feel the reintegration process has moved faster than community healing.

The debate became even more sensitive as some former terrorists began assisting security operations. To many survivors, the transformation can be difficult to reconcile: people who once arrived as attackers returning as neighbours and protectors, and in some cases, as men carrying authority.

Some government officials have repeatedly defended the reintegration policy. Recently, General Olufemi Oluyede, the Chief of Defence Staff and chairperson of the Operation Safe Corridor National Steering Committee, likened terrorist deserters to the biblical Prodigal Son, arguing that they deserve rehabilitation because they remain Nigerian citizens. 

Those concerns were further amplified by reports that not all former terrorists were passing through official rehabilitation channels. In 2025, a HumAngle investigation documented allegations that some defectors were quietly leaving the forest and reintegrating into communities without participating in formal deradicalisation programmes, raising questions about screening, accountability, and oversight.

Over the years, several incidents involving terrorist deserters have also contributed to public unease. In April, a former Boko Haram member allegedly shot and killed a CJTF member during an argument in the Mafa LGA. According to reports, the victim was rushed to the hospital but was confirmed dead on arrival, while the suspect was later arrested and handed over to the police.

Two years earlier, some deserters reportedly stormed a police station in Maiduguri in an attempt to secure the release of their colleagues arrested over alleged drug-related offences. In another case that generated public outrage in 2023, a deserter was accused of killing his wife at the outskirts of Maiduguri.

Concerns about the reintegration programme are not new. As far back as 2020, Ali Ndume, the senator representing Borno South Senatorial District, publicly criticised aspects of the government’s amnesty efforts, recounting the case of a deserter whom he alleged killed his father and later absconded with his property. The senator argued that the victims and survivors’ concerns were not receiving the same level of attention as the rehabilitation of the deserters.

Taken individually, the circumstances surrounding these incidents differ significantly from Bulama’s case. Collectively, however, they have helped shape public perceptions of the reintegration programmes and deepened anxieties among some residents about the monitoring, supervision, and accountability of deserters, particularly those involved in security-related activities.

For many survivors of the conflict, such incidents reinforce a lingering fear that rehabilitation alone may not be enough. Bulama’s death has now brought those long-simmering concerns into sharper focus. 

“The community is deciding on an action,” Abbas said.

Residents gathered after Bulama’s burial to discuss possible legal steps. Some suggested pooling money to hire a lawyer. Others proposed approaching human rights organisations.

“We are thinking of contributing money and hiring a lawyer,” Abbas said.

Justice and unfinished wounds

For Muhammed, grief and anger now coexist. His cousin survived displacement and years of uncertainty. He, however, did not survive a short journey to the mosque.

When asked what justice would look like for his family and the displaced community, Muhammed replied, “The law does not play by sentiments; it follows laid-down rules. I hope they will do what is right. If it is by my sentiments, I would not want them to be free. I would want them imprisoned for life.”

He paused.

“I don’t care about compensation. I don’t care about apologies. Justice for me is their imprisonment.”

A family left devastated 

Bulama was only 30 years old. He left behind two wives and five children.

He earned a living as a farmer. And before displacement forced the family from Boboshe in 2016, his father was killed. His elderly mother remains alive and still lives with them at the displacement camp.

The survival of his family, which was Bulama’s responsibility as the breadwinner, hangs uncertainly over relatives, who are also struggling to survive. “We are not rich people,” Muhammed said. “Caring for five children in addition to our own children will be difficult.”

Around the camp where he lived for over a decade, residents gather beneath makeshift shelters to rest, but the conversations about Bulama’s death remain on their lips. 

What remains immediate is his nuclear family, and the space left by a man who left home for Friday prayers and never returned.

The death of Abakar Minuki, one of the most influential leaders of the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), in a joint United States and Nigerian military operation, marks one of the most consequential blows to the insurgent group in recent years. Yet, analysts and insiders familiar with the terror group warn that history offers little reason to assume the killing will significantly diminish the long-term threat posed by the group.

Multiple sources familiar with ISWAP’s internal structure told HumAngle that Minuki’s most likely successor was Baba Shuwa, commonly known as Ba Shuwa. However, indications emerging from the aftermath of the operation suggest he may also have been killed. If confirmed, the simultaneous removal of both men would trigger the most significant leadership transition in the organisation since its emergence from Boko Haram’s internal schism nearly a decade ago.

For the first time, leadership could pass not to the insurgency’s founding generation, but to a second generation of fighters raised entirely within the movement’s war ecosystem. Two names have emerged as the strongest contenders: Abu Salem and Bana Chingori.

“This would represent a generational shift unlike anything the movement has experienced before,” a source familiar with ISWAP’s internal dynamics told HumAngle.

From village barber to insurgent leader

Known variously as Abu Bakr ibn Muhammad ibn Ali al Mainoki, Abor Mainoki, Abubakar Mainoki, and Abakar Minuki, the slain commander was himself a product of the insurgency’s evolution.

Born in 1982 in the village of Mainok, a settlement along the Maiduguri-Benisheikh corridor in Borno State, he adopted his nom de guerre from his hometown. Long before becoming one of the most feared figures in the Lake Chad Basin insurgency, Minuki was known as a young barber operating a modest salon in the village.

Those who encountered him during the rise of Mohammed Yusuf’s movement recall a quiet young man who blended into daily life. That anonymity would eventually disappear. By the time Boko Haram transformed from a fringe religious movement into a powerful insurgent force, Minuki had become part of its military structure.

Abu Mus’ab, Abu Fatima, and other Boko Haram leaders had to secure Minuki’s approval before finalising their escape from Abubakar Shekau in the Sambisa forest to the islands of the Lake Chad Basin, shortly before ISWAP split from Boko Haram. Minuki not only provided refuge for members of the newly formed ISWAP fleeing Shekau’s crackdown, but also protected them and facilitated their settlement in his territory, where he ruled as one of Shekau’s most formidable Amirul Fiya.

He belonged to the first generation of fighters who entered the organisation before the 2009 uprising that transformed the movement forever.

The last men of Yusuf’s generation

To understand what Minuki represented, one must return to Boko Haram’s earliest years. According to sources familiar with the group’s formative history, Mohammed Yusuf’s original armed contingent consisted of fewer than 100 members. These men were responsible not only for security but also for recruitment.

As the organisation expanded, Yusuf reorganised fighters into military formations named after prominent figures from Islamic history. Among them were the Zubair Ibn Awwam Battalion, Umar Farouk Battalion, Salmanu Farisu Battalion, Khalid Ibn Walid Battalion, and Salaudeen Ayubi Battalion.

Several battalions survived years of expansion, state crackdowns, factional disputes, and battlefield losses. Over time, however, only two retained their original lineage and remain operational: the Timbuktu formation, associated with Faruk, and the Buhairiya structure, which absorbed the remnants of several earlier battalions.

Minuki was already a Naqeeb, a junior commander, during the pre-2009 period. Ba Shuwa, by contrast, was merely a foot soldier. While Abu Salem, who is now touted as the likely successor of ISWAP, was still a child. That generational distinction highlights that few survivors remain from the movement’s founding era.

The rise of the second generation

If Minuki and Ba Shuwa are both dead, the succession process could elevate men who never knew the insurgency before it became a regional war. Among them, Abu Salem stands out. Sources describe him as both a military commander and a religious authority within the insurgency. He currently serves as Amirul Fiya, based in Krinua, a battlefield commander with influence extending beyond purely military affairs.

His biography mirrors the insurgency’s own evolution. The son of a respected first-generation Boko Haram member, Abu Salem benefited from mentorship by senior leaders from an early age. His pedigree gave him access to influential networks that many younger fighters lacked.

He also carries the scars of combat. During one battle with members of Nigeria’s armed forces, he sustained serious gunshot wounds to the lower abdomen. The injuries required long-term medical management involving a Foley catheter. According to sources familiar with his condition, he continued participating in military operations despite the injury for years.

Within ISWAP, Abu Salem has cultivated a reputation for bravery, clerical authority, and charisma. Several sources compared his influence to that once exercised by Abu Musab al-Barnawi and Minuki himself.

Another contender is Bana Chingori, regarded as Ba Shuwa’s closest deputy. Unlike Abu Salem, however, Bana faces a structural challenge: He does not originate from the Faruk battalion network, which sources estimate supplies approximately 70 per cent of ISWAP’s current fighters and leadership, including Minuki.

In an organisation where battlefield alliances and battalion loyalties remain deeply influential, that may prove decisive.

The ethnic question behind ISWAP leadership

Leadership succession inside ISWAP is not determined solely by military competence. HumAngle understands that ethnicity, lineage, dialect, and social hierarchy continue to shape power within the organisation.

Public portrayals often reduce Boko Haram and ISWAP to ideological movements driven exclusively by extremist interpretations of Islam. The reality is considerably more complex. The overwhelming majority of ISWAP’s estimated fighting force originates from the Kanuri ethnic nationality, which has historically been dominant across the Lake Chad Basin. Yet, the Kanuris are far from homogeneous.

They are divided into numerous dialect communities, clan networks, and social categories that carry significant political weight, all of which the insurgents take very seriously. These divisions influence recruitment, promotions, alliances, and leadership legitimacy.

Mohammed Yusuf, for example, belonged to the Manga dialect group, one of the most prestigious Kanuri communities. His lineage strengthened his standing within the movement’s formative years. Abubakar Shekau came from the Kaama-speaking Ngala’a community, often viewed as socially marginal within traditional Kanuri hierarchies.

Several researchers and former members argue that Shekau’s relationship with the broader movement was shaped partly by this outsider status. Minuki himself emerged from Borno Central, where multiple Kanuri dialect groups intersect. Ba Shuwa’s ancestry has also been the subject of internal scrutiny.

Sources say rivals occasionally questioned the purity of his Kanuri lineage, reflecting how deeply social stratification continues to influence perceptions of authority within insurgency networks in the Lake Chad basin.

For this reason, sources told HumAngle, the emergence of a non-Kanuri leader remains highly unlikely. Even if such a figure were elevated, sustaining authority would be extraordinarily difficult. “The movement talks about Islam and the caliphate,” one source familiar with internal deliberations said, “But when leadership questions arise, ethnicity still matters.”

The foreign fighters effect

The leadership transition unfolding inside ISWAP is taking place within an organisation that has undergone profound internal transformation in recent years. Sources familiar with the group’s operations told HumAngle that the growing presence of foreign fighters from across the Sahel and beyond has reshaped not only the movement’s military tactics but also its internal security culture.

As foreign fighters increasingly settled in the Lake Chad region, ISWAP imposed some of its strictest operational security measures to date. Members were ordered to delete existing photographs and cease documenting activities through images. The use of smartphones was largely prohibited, reflecting mounting concerns about surveillance, geolocation tracking, and intelligence penetration. 

The restrictions marked a sharp departure from earlier years when both Boko Haram and ISWAP routinely photographed preaching sessions, training exercises, weapon displays, and daily life in territories under their control. Such imagery formed a central component of the group’s propaganda and recruitment machinery.

According to sources, the new rules were enforced ruthlessly. Several fighters accused of taking photographs or retaining images on their devices were reportedly executed. The killings served as both punishment and deterrence, reinforcing a culture of secrecy that now permeates much of the organisation. 

“The message was simple,” one source familiar with the group’s internal directives said. “Any digital trace that could expose fighters, commanders, or locations became a security threat.” The arrival of experienced foreign fighters appears to have accelerated this shift. Many brought with them lessons learned from conflicts across the Sahel, where drone surveillance, signals intelligence, and electronic tracking have increasingly shaped the battlefield.

The influence of foreign fighters introduced a greater emphasis on counter-intelligence, operational discipline, compartmentalisation, and the elimination of digital footprints that could expose personnel, camps, supply routes, or command structures. The result is an insurgent organisation that has become considerably more cautious than its predecessors. While leadership losses continue to disrupt, ISWAP’s evolving security architecture suggests a movement increasingly focused on institutional survival rather than on dependence on individual commanders.

Fractured, not defeated

The killing of Minuki undoubtedly represents a serious disruption, and the elimination of Ba Shuwa, if confirmed, would considerably deepen that disruption. Yet, military and intelligence officials caution against interpreting the development as a strategic defeat for ISWAP.

“The organisation has experienced similar moments before with the deaths of Mohammed Yusuf, Mamman Nur, Abu Musab al Barnawi, Ba Idrissa, and several other senior commanders, each of which generated predictions of organisational collapse,” said Kyari Mustafa, a conflict researcher in Maiduguri.

Those predictions never materialised. Instead, the group adapted. The pattern has become familiar across the Lake Chad Basin.

HumAngle has documented a pattern where successful military campaigns weaken the insurgency. Communities experience a period of relative calm. The group regroups, reassesses, and eventually resumes attacks. This cycle has repeated itself for more than 15 years. What makes the current moment significant is the possibility that an entire generation of commanders may be disappearing simultaneously. If Minuki and Ba Shuwa are indeed gone, the future of ISWAP may soon be shaped by men who were toddlers when Mohammed Yusuf built the movement.

Whether that transition produces fragmentation, renewal, or further violence remains uncertain. What is clear is that the Lake Chad Basin has witnessed enough leadership decapitations to know that the death of a commander, however important, does not automatically mean the end of the war.

There are moments when nations move dangerously close to collapse before the public fully realises it. It begins with carefully framed messages that conceal or even deny a storm, then the country is described as dangerous, lawless, and extremist-tolerant. By the time formal consequences arrive, the political judgment has often already been made. By late 2025, Nigeria was approaching that threshold in Washington DC, the United States’ capital. 

Donald Trump was accusing the Nigerian state of failing Christians, and Republican lawmakers were describing the country as one of the world’s deadliest countries for Christians. Evangelical organisations in the United States were also mobilising around massacre narratives from Benue, Plateau, Southern Kaduna, and parts of the North Central region. These led to congressional pressure, visa restrictions, and discussions of sanctions. Later, Trump threatened military action and warned that the United States could move into Nigeria “guns-a-blazing” if the killings continued.

Inside sections of conservative American politics, Nigeria was no longer merely a troubled African country but was becoming a pariah state, a symbol of global Christian persecution, failed governance, Islamist expansion, and state weakness.

Then, the trajectory shifted. Within months, the same Trump administration that had threatened consequences against Nigeria began working with Abuja on counterterrorism cooperation. American intelligence support deepened, and US military involvement expanded, leading to widely criticised (for their lack of any real impact) airstrikes targeting Islamic State-linked and Lakurawa positions in northwestern Nigeria in December 2025. However, in May 2026, Trump publicly celebrated a successful joint Nigerian and American operation that killed Abu Bilal al-Minuki, described in both countries’ security circles as one of the most important Islamic State figures operating across Africa.

Nigeria had moved from an accused state to an operational partner, even though many have wondered what the cost might have been or continues to be. Behind that dramatic transition was one of the most consequential diplomatic-security campaigns mounted by Abuja in recent years. It involved diplomats, intelligence officials, military officers, embassy staff, policy advisers, lobbyists, diaspora actors, civil society networks, and security partners.

At the centre of this coordination stood National Security Adviser (NSA) Nuhu Ribadu, the coordinating figure who pulled the necessary elements together: the presidency’s political authority, the security establishment’s operational credibility, the embassy’s diplomatic access, the military’s counterterror capacity, policy networks in Washington, and a message that American officials could not easily dismiss.

Working with figures including a senior Nigerian career diplomat in DC, an influential woman at the NSA’s secretariat, senior defence and intelligence officials, foreign affairs officials, and other intermediaries, Ribadu helped steer Nigeria away from a potentially disastrous confrontation with Washington, DC.

The crisis Abuja could not treat as routine

Nigeria has faced criticism from the United States before on corruption, election disputes, human rights abuses, military excesses, and oil theft — all governance failures. None of those carried the same immediate danger as the late-2025 escalation. This crisis was different because it had moved beyond policy disagreement into moral accusation. The phrase “Christian genocide” changed the stakes.

Inside conservative American evangelical circles, Nigeria had already become symbolic before Trump’s escalation. Reports from groups such as Open Doors, International Christian Concern, Aid to the Church in Need, and Nigerian Christian advocacy organisations had repeatedly described Nigeria as one of the world’s deadliest places for Christians. Killings in Adamawa, Benue, Plateau, Southern Kaduna, parts of Niger State, and other flashpoints circulated widely through American church networks. 

Nigeria’s First Lady, Pastor Remi Tinubu, also operated far beyond the ceremonial margins. Using her deep evangelical and clerical networks, she became a decisive force in breaking resistance, opening doors that formal diplomacy and security channels could not. Her interventions softened hardened positions, clearing the path for diplomatic and security engagement to gain some traction.

“Nigeria is facing a complex security crisis that has sustained for over two decades and has currently metastasised into several violent crimes, including active insurgencies, farmer-herder violence, armed groups, gang violence, ethnic militias, and vigilantism, among several others,” Managing Director of Beacon Intelligence Consulting, Dr Kabiru Adamu, told HumAngle.

“While the triggers of the violence sometimes include identity such as ethnicity and religion, other factors, including socio-economic, political and environmental causes, are behind the violence.”

Amara Nwankpa, Director General, Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Foundation, argued that acknowledging complexity should not become a shield against responsibility.

“Nigeria is facing a complex security collapse,” he agreed. “But saying the crisis is ‘complex’ should not become a way to avoid the harder question of why some communities consistently suffer more than others.”

“The Nigerian state is weak. In many places, it genuinely struggles to protect people because of overstretched security forces, corruption, political fragmentation, and poor state capacity. That matters. A state that cannot protect is different from a state that deliberately chooses not to. But that distinction does not remove responsibility,” he told HumAngle.

“The mistake of the ‘Christian genocide’ framing is that it treats all the violence as one coordinated religious project,” he said. “The mistake of the ‘it’s complicated’ response is that it sometimes uses complexity as an excuse for inaction.”

Johnstone Kpilaakaa, an award-winning journalist who has closely followed the Middle Belt crisis, submits that the violence cannot be separated from the collapse of state protection across rural Nigeria. “Overall, the crisis reflects the broader failure of the Nigerian state to provide protection for its citizens,” he said. “Rural communities in the Middle Belt, many of which already experience a near-total absence of state presence, even in basic social services, have become especially vulnerable to terror attacks and organised violence.”

According to Kpilaakaa, the genocide narrative gained traction in the Middle Belt partly because many of the most devastated communities were Christian. “Historical memory also plays a role. The legacy of the 19th-century Sokoto Jihad, which faced resistance in parts of the region, continues to shape perceptions and fears today.” Children, he added, are raised with those stories, and those inherited fears continue to shape how violence is interpreted.

James Barnett, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, framed the crisis more as systemic collapse than coordinated extermination. “Nigeria is experiencing something more like a nationwide security crisis than a specific campaign targeted at one group,” Barnett said. “This is a collapse of state capacity that is felt in all corners of the country to different degrees, and it’s allowed militant and criminal groups of various stripes to kill, loot, and take over communities with significant impunity.”

He acknowledged that some armed actors operate with religious motivations. But much of the violence, he argued, is driven by opportunism, local disputes, criminal economies, and governance breakdown. That complexity became Abuja’s central diplomatic argument later in Washington.

The conservative machinery turns against Nigeria

Several American political actors helped turn the issue into a Washington crisis. Senator Ted Cruz became one of the strongest congressional voices accusing Nigeria of systemic anti-Christian violence. He introduced the Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act of 2025 and repeatedly cited casualty figures involving Christians killed, churches destroyed, and communities displaced.

Congressman Riley Moore also became a central figure in the pressure campaign. He pushed the White House towards stronger action and publicly accused the Nigerian state of failing to protect persecuted Christians. But the deeper force came from evangelical networks. American evangelical activism is not simply moral advocacy but also an organised political ecosystem. It has media platforms, donor structures, church mobilisation capacity, congressional access, lobbying relationships, legal advocacy groups, and influence inside Republican politics.

Pastors, televangelists, diaspora activists, advocacy groups, conservative influencers, and social media personalities amplified reports from Nigeria, often portraying the country as the global epicentre of anti-Christian violence. Prayer campaigns followed. At the same time, misinformation and disinformation flooded digital spaces, blurring the line between verified atrocities and fabricated claims. Across Telegram channels, Facebook pages, WhatsApp broadcasts, podcasts, YouTube ministries, and conservative media networks, emotionally charged narratives circulated with little scrutiny, shaping international perceptions of Nigeria’s security crisis.

Yet even some analysts sympathetic to Christian suffering warned that the narrative was becoming distorted. “In attempting to draw global attention to the suffering of communities in the Middle Belt, some evangelical advocacy networks and social media actors have also oversimplified the crisis,” Kpilaakaa said.

“In certain cases, this has involved the circulation of half-truths, selective reporting, or sensationalised accounts that do not fully capture the complexity of the situation.” He stressed that multiple forms of violence were being collapsed into a single frame. “Beyond terrorist violence, the Middle Belt also faces attacks carried out by local militia groups and criminal networks, particularly in states such as Benue,” he said.

“Unfortunately, many of these distinct forms of violence are often merged into a single narrative of religious persecution, which can make the crisis more difficult to properly understand, analyse, and address.”

Nwankpa reached a similar conclusion, though he warned against dismissing the suffering that fuels those narratives.

“Some evangelical networks and social media platforms have distorted global understanding of the violence, but not by inventing suffering,” he said. “The suffering is real. Many Christian communities, especially in parts of the North and Middle Belt, have experienced terrible violence.”

According to him, the distortion emerges when an entire national security collapse is reduced to a single religious explanation.

“Incentives also drive that simplification. In the US, persecution narratives mobilise donors and audiences very effectively. Clear stories raise more money than messy realities.”

He added that diaspora activism had amplified simplified narratives globally, often detached from the wider context of Nigeria’s security breakdown.

Kabiru Adamu was direct. “Yes,” he said when asked whether evangelical networks and social media had distorted international understanding of Nigeria’s violence. “Their narrative of Christian genocide and the bandying of falsified figures contributed to the Trump administration’s earlier stance.”

Still, he warned against swinging to denial. “This is not to say Christians are not being killed. They are. But so too are Muslims.”

Christians had been killed, churches attacked, villages emptied, and priests abducted. But Muslims are also dying in larger numbers as Nigeria’s conflicts defy simple religious labels. Islamic State affiliates targeted Muslim communities, soldiers, traders, aid workers, schools, and transport routes. Armed groups kidnapped indiscriminately. Farmer-herder conflict, jihadist expansion, criminal economies, land pressure, governance failure, and communal grievances all overlapped. The genocide frame compressed those realities into one dangerous explanation. 

Trump turns pressure into a state crisis

In late 2025, Trump’s administration escalated pressure against Nigeria under international religious freedom frameworks, including the Country of Particular Concern designation. He accused Nigeria of allowing Christians to be killed by “Radical Islamists” and threatened possible military action. 

For Abuja, the implications were dire. They could bring about diplomatic isolation, damage to intelligence and security cooperation, and investor panic in an already fragile economy. This was where Ribadu’s office became central. The National Security Adviser understood that Nigeria could not defeat the pressure campaign through blunt denial.

So, Abuja adopted a more difficult strategy that involved acknowledging the insecurity while rejecting the genocide label and repositioning the crisis as part of a broader counterterror and state fragility problem.

Kpilaakaa argued that, “The absence of proactive state action, credible investigations, and timely justice creates space for speculation and mistrust, while trauma inevitably shapes the perceptions and judgment of survivors.” 

The Nigerian response, therefore, focused less on arguing morality and more on changing strategic calculations in Washington. The message became simple: weakening Nigeria would strengthen the so-called Islamic State.

Nwankpa believes Ribadu’s intervention succeeded not because it resolved the crisis, but because it changed how Washington interpreted it.

“Ribadu did not solve the crisis,” he said. “What he did was change the diplomatic framing, and he did it very effectively. He shifted the conversation from ‘Nigeria is allowing Christians to be killed’ to ‘Nigeria and the US are facing a shared terrorism problem.’ That helped cool tensions with Washington and turned pressure into cooperation.”

But he warned that the strategic success came with consequences.

“Once the relationship became centred on counterterrorism, the space for human rights and accountability pressure became smaller,” Nwankpa said. “The focus moved from protecting vulnerable communities to fighting shared threats. In that sense, the deeper issue of impunity remained unresolved. It was postponed.”

Ribadu’s reframing strategy

Ribadu’s role with coordination happened because many parts needed to move in specific directions. For example, the presidency had to provide political authority, the military had to provide operational credibility, diplomats had to reopen channels in Washington, intelligence officials had to frame the regional threat, lobbyists and intermediaries had to reach spaces formal diplomacy could not easily penetrate, and the central message itself had to remain consistent.

Nigeria was a battered state confronting overlapping extremist, criminal, communal, and regional threats, and if the state weakened further, Boko Haram and a confluence of other terror groups across the country would benefit.

Kabiru Adamu believes Ribadu deserves significant credit for the diplomatic de-escalation. “The NSA Nuhu Ribadu can be credited for de-escalating the earlier US stance when the Trump Administration, after designating Nigeria a country of particular concern due to perceived religious persecution and Trump’s threat to come ‘guns a blazing,’” he said. “Ribadu led a high-level delegation to the US and followed through with engagements that led to the creation of a joint working group between the two countries as well as deeper defence engagement.”

Barnett reached a similar conclusion. “The Nigerian government has responded pretty effectively on the diplomatic front so far,” he said. “After initially being caught unprepared for the Country of Particular Concern designation, it realised that it wouldn’t get very far by publicly protesting Trump’s narrative and instead sought to leverage Washington’s focus on Nigeria to secure new security cooperation.”

That recalibration reshaped the relationship because even though the United States still publicly raised concerns about religious freedom, Nigeria became increasingly valuable as a regional counterterror partner. Barnett noted that the new working relationship also elevated Ribadu internationally. “The US-Nigeria working group has boosted Ribadu’s profile internationally,” he said.

Kpilaakaa observed that Abuja’s strategy prevented a deeper rupture. “Despite recent joint military operations in Metele, Borno State, which reportedly led to the death of a senior ISWAP leader, some influential American politicians continue to frame US involvement as part of an effort to stop what they describe as a genocide against Christians in Nigeria only,” he said.

“That suggests the National Security Adviser has not fully succeeded in reshaping the narrative.” Even so, he argued that the cooperation itself remained strategically necessary. “Beyond the competing narratives, effective counterterrorism operations remain in Nigeria’s national interest,” he said. “If military cooperation is conducted professionally, ethically, and strategically, the outcome should contribute to greater security and stability for all Nigerians, regardless of religion or ethnicity.”

Why Trump changed course

Trump’s shift appeared dramatic from Abuja. One moment, he was threatening Nigeria. Months later, he was celebrating joint counterterror operations with Nigerian forces. But analysts say this logic was less ideological than transactional. “The change in stance by the Trump administration from declared hostility to now engagement is mainly because of the diplomatic engagements by Nigeria, including Ribadu’s engagements,” Adamu said.

“There is also the lobby group contracted by the Federal Government that may have played a role in supporting a de-escalation.” Barnett believes Nigeria itself was never central to Trump’s broader worldview. “Nigeria is not actually a foreign policy priority for Trump, despite how much it might feel to Nigerians like he is now a looming presence in their politics,” he said.

“The US government has dedicated much more time and resources to its Venezuela and Iran policies, for example, than it has to Africa. When Trump threatened to go into Nigeria ‘guns a blazing’ last year, he was essentially calling on the US national security bureaucracy to come up with ideas to ‘do something’ in Nigeria that would look impressive but not consume significant energy and resources or entail political risk.”

The solution Washington eventually settled on was a partnership rather than confrontation. “The US military, for its part, would always prefer to fight jihadists with the help of a capable local partner rather than opposition from the host government,” Barnett explained.

“So, when the Nigerian government signalled it was willing to work with the US military, that gave the Trump administration an opening to show its supporters that it was fighting terrorists, supposedly in defence of Christians overseas, without engaging in a messy humanitarian intervention or state-building exercise.”

Nwankpa argued that the political logic behind Trump’s shift reflected both American strategic interests and Nigerian sensitivity to external pressure.

“Trump changed position because the political framing changed,” he said. “Threatening Nigeria appealed to parts of his evangelical and religious freedom base. Working with Nigeria appealed to American security interests. Once Abuja accepted the counterterrorism framing, Trump no longer needed a public confrontation.”

But he also pointed to a deeper Nigerian calculation.

“Most Nigerians want stronger security responses, but very few want foreign powers taking over the process,” Nwankpa said. “There is a strong sovereignty instinct in Nigeria. External pressure that appears paternalistic often collapses domestic coalition support, even among people who agree with the underlying criticism… Ribadu’s approach worked partly because it allowed Nigeria to engage America as a partner, not as a country being lectured or managed from outside.”

Kpilaakaa argued that Trump never completely abandoned the persecution narrative. “I do not believe there has been a complete shift in position,” he said. “Even recently, Trump shared material on Truth Social that reinforced the same narrative that frames every attack as religious persecution targeting Christians alone.”

He added that religious framing remains deeply embedded in Trump-era politics. “The use of religion, in this case Christianity, as a framework for discussing political and security issues is synonymous with the Trump administration,” he said.

Yet, Abuja avoided turning the disagreement into a public confrontation.

“It is also significant that Nigerian authorities have largely avoided engaging in public confrontation with Trump or his allies,” Kpilaakaa said. “Instead, they have focused on maintaining cooperation around the shared objective of combating terrorism and protecting lives, irrespective of religion or ethnicity.”

The Sahel and Nigeria’s strategic value

Regional realities strengthened Abuja’s hand. The Sahel was deteriorating rapidly; Mali had drifted away from Western influence, Burkina Faso remained unstable, Niger’s political upheaval disrupted Western security architecture, and Russian-linked actors expanded across the region.

Washington needed a capable African partner, and Nigeria’s geography, population, intelligence infrastructure, military size, and position between multiple conflict systems made it indispensable. Ribadu’s team aggressively leveraged that reality.

Weakening Nigeria, they argued, would not save Christians. It would strengthen the very extremist groups killing Christians and Muslims alike. That logic resonated strongly inside American security circles because it aligned humanitarian concern with strategic necessity.

The limits of the recovery

None of this erased the suffering that produced the controversy. Benue, Plateau, and Southern Kaduna still bleed. Communities across Niger State, Borno, Sokoto, Zamfara, Katsina, Yobe, and Adamawa continue to experience displacement, extortion, killings, and fear.

The average Nigerian, irrespective of their faith and ethnicity, genuinely believes the Nigerian state has failed them and the state must do more, not only to save lives, but to regain their trust in governance. The deeper question now is whether security cooperation alone can sustain the diplomatic recovery if the violence continues unresolved.

Kpilaakaa warned that “military cooperation alone will not resolve the deeper structural issues driving instability in the Middle Belt.” “Addressing land disputes, prolonged displacement, impunity, and the absence of justice remains critical,” he said.

He pointed to one grievance. “One of the most persistent grievances among affected communities is that many victims have spent more than a decade in displacement, with little accountability for the violence they endured. Without credible justice, reconstruction, and long-term conflict resolution, security cooperation may contain the violence temporarily, but it will not produce lasting peace or stability.”

“No,” Adamu said when asked whether security cooperation could survive if killings and impunity continue. “Evangelical groups will continue to mount domestic pressure on the Trump administration should the killings continue.”

Barnett also cautioned that Abuja should not assume permanent stability in the relationship. “You can’t be too certain where things go from here as Trump is notoriously unpredictable,” he said.

“He might be satisfied with periodic strikes against the Islamic State that make for good Fox News content while the militaries engage in more routine behind-the-scenes coordination and training.”

But the pressure networks inside American politics remain active. “There is also a vocal American constituency on this issue,” Barnett warned. “Those folks can be highly critical of the Tinubu government, and they are likely to perceive any continued violence, particularly in the Middle Belt, as justification for sanctions or even more radical forms of intervention.”

His conclusion was stark. “Tinubu can’t be certain he’s out of the woods just yet.” That is the reality beneath Nigeria’s diplomatic recovery. Abuja escaped one dangerous moment in Washington, but it has not solved the crisis that created it.

Back in Abuja, Ribadu remains trapped in a far more complicated war. His growing influence has unsettled opposition figures, threatened entrenched interests within the ruling party, and fuelled quiet anxieties about his long-term political ambition, multiple sources within Abuja policy networks implied. “If Ribadu misreads that terrain, his ambition could become his greatest vulnerability.”

Before sunrise, Kellu Habila had risen from her mat in Mussa, northeastern Nigeria, and stepped into the kitchen, moving carefully in the dim light while the rest of the house slept. Outside, the dry-season dust had disappeared, replaced by the heavy stillness that precedes the rains in southern Borno. She prepared breakfast, then woke her four children one after the other: three boys and the youngest, a girl named Rifkatu.

It was early in the third term of the 2025/2026 academic session.

Unlike her brothers, who had resumed nearly a month earlier, Rifkatu was returning to school that morning for the first time because her old uniform was too worn to use. It was only the previous day that her parents had managed to buy another one.

“She was very happy,” Kellu recalled.

Four-year-old Rifkatu Habila and her friend, Alheri Olu, were both in Nursery One at Central Primary School, Mussa, a remote farming community in Lassa town, Askira Uba Local Government Area, Borno State. “The two girls were inseparable,” Kellu said. They played together, walked together, and often sat beside each other in class.

After the children left for school that Friday morning on May 15, Kellu headed to her farm on the outskirts of town. The farming season had begun, and like many residents of Mussa, she was trying to make use of the early morning before the sun hit hard.

Then the gunshots started.

“I hid inside a nearby stream when I heard them,” she told HumAngle. “It was a few minutes past 8 a.m.”

For a while, she remained there, crouched and listening. When the shooting eased, she ran back home.

By then, panic had already spread across Mussa. Parents were rushing toward the school. Some shouted their children’s names, while others disappeared into nearby bushes, searching for them. The gunshots, residents realised, had come from Central Primary School.

“We were told the children had been taken,” Kellu said. “So we started searching.”

She found her three sons hiding inside a nearby bush. But Rifkatu was nowhere to be found. Her voice broke when she spoke about what happened next.

“We kept searching. Later, her father and some men found children’s footwear outside town where the attackers had passed. He recognised hers.”

That was how they knew. Rifkatu and Alheri had been abducted together. That day, Friday, May 15, terrorists attacked Central Primary School, Mussa, abducting dozens of pupils. The exact number remains unclear. “Community leaders told us 43 children were taken,” Kellu recounted. But she believes the number may be higher. An official register recorded 40 confirmed names.

A pattern of attacks

Residents say the terrorists entered Mussa on motorcycles.

“Farmers running from the direction they came from said they also saw two Hilux vehicles parked outside town,” Emmanuel Hyarawa, Rifkatu’s uncle, said. “That was what they used to take the children away.”

No group has claimed responsibility, and no ransom demand had been made at the time this report was filed. But residents say the terrorists may be fighters from the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), a group that has repeatedly attacked communities along the southern Borno axis in recent years.

“They are the same people who attack soldiers here and abduct farmers,” Kellu said. “We recognised the way they dressed and moved.”

This was the fourth attack on Mussa within two months, according to residents. 

“Occasionally, they would attack the town, often focusing on the military. They would burn buildings, loot shops, and cart away military vehicles and equipment,” Emmanuel said. “They had come in early April and attacked the military. They killed four soldiers and a civilian.” A week before the Friday abduction, “They had attacked, looted shops, and carted away six cattle,” Kellu added.  In November 2025, Nigerian troops rescued 12 teenage girls abducted while working on farmlands in the area. 

But no school had been attacked before. “This is the first time,” Emmanuel said.

The gunshots from Friday’s attack were heard as far away as Lassa, a town nearly 20 kilometres from Mussa. “We heard them around 8:30 that morning,” Andrew Adamu, a resident of Lassa, said.

The two communities are separated only by a smaller village called Kelle. According to Kellu, the attackers arrived through the Damboa axis on nearly 40 motorcycles, each carrying at least two armed men.

There is a military presence in Mussa, but residents say the soldiers are few.

“They are not up to 30,” Emmanuel said. “And usually, they are outnumbered.” “When the terrorists entered, they used the pupils as shields. So, the military could not engage them,” he added.

Kellu said part of the school itself now serves as a military armoury. “The soldiers stay there during the day,” she said. “They have been using part of the school for years.”

Residents believe the timing of the attack was deliberate.

After the April assault that killed soldiers, reinforcements had arrived from Askira, the LGA headquarters, and remained in the community for more than two weeks. But on Friday morning, according to Emmanuel, the troops had only recently withdrawn.

“It was less than an hour after they left that the terrorists came,” he said.

When the shots were heard in Lassa, residents said security forces left the town immediately. “I didn’t see them leaving myself, but I saw their return in the evening,” Andrew said. “Often, when something like this occurs, reinforcement is sent from here, Lassa, or Dille, another village not far away, Askira, the local government headquarters, or Uba, another major town,” Andrew added.

However, as of the time this report was compiled, residents of Mussa said no reinforcements had returned to the community.

A police constable based in Askira, who asked not to be named because he was not authorised to speak, said, “Although Mussa is a Borno community, it is not under our coverage because of proximity. They are closer to Adamawa and, therefore, Adamawa forces are often the ones responding to situations there. We received a red alert about the abduction moments after it happened. However, on our end, no reinforcement was issued because it is not under our protection. Maybe the military went.”

Over 40 pupils and teachers abducted in Oyo

On the same day as the Mussa school abduction, terrorists, also on motorcycles, stormed three schools and kidnapped schoolchildren and staff in the Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State, South West Nigeria. It was a coordinated attack across the three schools in Ahoro-Esinle, a community in the LGA. 

In the early hours of May 15, motorcycle-riding attackers invaded Baptist Nursery and Primary School, Yawota, near Alawusa, as well as Community Grammar School and the L.A Primary School in Esiele, all in the Ogbomoso axis of the state.

No armed group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but the invaders operated in a coordinated manner that suggests they belong to a terrorist syndicate. There had been no such mass abduction in the area before now, as locals describe the remote area as peaceful until recently. Witnesses said the terrorists spoke Yoruba, Hausa, and Nigerian Pidgin as they invaded the schools, abducting over 40 pupils swiftly in a matter of minutes. 

The principal of the Community High School, Alamu Folawe, was also abducted alongside the pupils, while two teachers were killed during the early morning operation. Locals in Ogbomosho town told HumAngle that the area has recently been experiencing attacks, which have been largely unreported in the mainstream media.

The terrorists marched the abducted pupils and teachers towards the Old Oyo National Park, causing a hail of pandemonium and panic for residents. “The axis is actually underdeveloped and is quite far from town,” said Qosim Suleiman, a resident of Ogbomosho. “They have no electricity, and no paved  road networks.”

Alamu had only been redeployed to one of the schools recently, sources said. Most teachers are deployed to the community schools on a rotational basis from Ogbomosho town because “no one wants to stay permanently in the satellite villages with very poor government control.”

Following the attack, however, the Oyo State Universal Basic Education Board (OYOSUBEB) has ordered the shutdown of schools in Oriire LGA due to fears of a possible recurrence of such incidents. In a statement obtained by HumAngle, OYOSUBEB also directed all primary schools in neighbouring communities, including Surulere, Oyo East, and Olorunsogo LGAs, to vacate their premises until further notice.

“This is a dark and painful moment for our education family in Oyo State, and our hearts are with the affected parents, teachers and the entire community,” said Nureni Adenira, the OYOSUBEB chairperson.

“We understand the fear and anxiety this situation has caused, and we want to assure our parents and stakeholders that the safety of our children remains our utmost priority.”

The Oyo Global Forum, a group of professionals in the state, condemned the attack, charging the government to rescue the abducted pupils and teachers from the hands of the armed assailants. The group said in a statement sent to HumAngle that “every hour of slow response emboldens these armed criminal groups and increases the risk of further attacks across vulnerable communities and adjoining forest corridors linked to Kwara and Niger states.”

“This must not be treated as an isolated incident. It is a clear national security threat requiring sustained military, intelligence, and community-based security operations,” said Taiwo-Hassan Adebayo, the chairperson of the group. 

“Beyond the immediate rescue efforts, the government must urgently establish a preventive security framework across the affected axis, including strengthened rural policing, coordinated forest surveillance, and a functional early warning and rapid response system developed in partnership with local communities.”

The Oyo State Commissioner for Information and Civic Orientation, Dotun Oyelade, announced in a statement on May 16 that the government has taken security measures to prevent the attackers from moving beyond the national park before they are accosted. He said security operatives have commenced a rescue operation in the axis, stressing that suspects’ movements have been restricted.

“Patrol operations also commenced this morning after intelligence indicated the suspects remained within the National Park in Oyo State,” Dotun said. “Three separate patrol teams, comprising Amotekun operatives and hunters drawn from seven local government areas in Oke-Ogun, were deployed through Igbeti towards Oloka and adjoining communities,” he added.

Amid the ongoing search for the missing pupils and teachers, footage of some of the abductees has surfaced. In one of the clips, Racheal Alamu, the Community High School principal, is seen speaking from captivity, pleading with Nigerians and the government to rescue them.

“I’m doing this video to ask for help from everyone, starting from the Federal Republic of Nigeria, the Oyo State government, the Christian Association of Nigeria and all well-meaning Nigerians, that they should come to our aid and settle this thing peacefully so that our lives will not be lost,” she said.

Another abductee, a woman with a baby strapped to her back, weeps heavily while asking for the government’s intervention. “We need your help so that these people will release us. Please help us,” she wailed.

HumAngle has also exclusively obtained the names of the abductees, including seven teachers and 39 pupils.

Names of Schoolchildren and Teachers Abducted During the May 15 School Attacks in Oriire LGA, Oyo State, South West, Nigeria

From Borno to Oyo: Resurgence of School Abductions Sparks New Terror Wave in Nigeria by IT HumAngle

The lingering memories of school abductions

For many families in southern Borno and, now, in some parts of Oyo State, schooling has become entangled with fear. Any attack involving schoolchildren in Borno, particularly, inevitably revives memories of the Chibok schoolgirls’ kidnapping, where 276 girls were abducted by Boko Haram from their dormitories in April 2014.

More than a decade later, some of the girls are still missing.

The abduction drew global attention to attacks on education in Nigeria, but it also marked the beginning of a broader wave of school-targeted kidnappings across the country.  

Even the Nigerian government’s multimillion-dollar Safe School Initiative, launched after the Chibok abduction to strengthen school security, has struggled to achieve its objectives and has been dogged by allegations of corruption, poor implementation, and inadequate protection for vulnerable communities.

In 2018, 110 girls were abducted in Dapchi, Yobe State. Two years later, hundreds of students were kidnapped in Kankara, Katsina State. Then came Jangebe in Zamfara, and later Kuriga in Kaduna State, where more than 200 pupils were abducted earlier in 2024. Subsequently, in November 2025, more than 300 schoolchildren and staff were abducted from St Mary’s School in Papiri, Niger State, in the North Central region. Some were later released in December, while others remain in captivity.

What began in the North East gradually spread into the North West and other regions, where armed groups increasingly adopted mass kidnappings for ransom and leverage. Over time, these attacks altered something less visible: the way families think about education itself.

In 2021, UNICEF warned that attacks on schools and kidnappings “discourage parents from sending their children to school and leave children traumatised and fearful of going to classrooms to learn.” That fear now shapes daily life in places like Mussa. “My boys will not return to school anytime soon,” Kellu said. “I don’t want to lose them, too.” The incident had left her devastated, Emmanuel said. “The three boys are in my house,” he added.

Mussa itself was once emptied under the weight of conflict. Residents fled in 2015 as insurgent violence intensified across southern Borno. Many only returned the following year. “When we first came back, we could farm far outside town,” Emmanuel said. “Now, we barely go beyond one kilometre.”

Even nearby communities remain tense. In Lassa, residents had already panicked before Friday’s attack fully became clear. The previous day, according to Andrew, gunmen had abducted a logger near the town, killed five others, and burned their vehicle.

Amid all this, schools still reopen every term. 

By the time the announcement that Abu Bilal Al-Minuki was killed reached the outside world, the strike itself was already hours old. In the early hours of Saturday, May 16, somewhere in Metele, in Borno State, northeastern Nigeria, a compound had been hit. 

First, US President Donald Trump posted a statement on Truth Social. Another came from Bayo Onanuga, Special Advisor to Nigeria’s president on Information and Strategy, on Facebook and X. Al-Minuki, described as one of the most senior figures inside Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), was dead, both statements claimed.

“Tonight, at my direction, brave American forces and the Armed Forces of Nigeria flawlessly executed a meticulously planned and very complex mission to eliminate the most active terrorist in the world from the battlefield. Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, second in command of ISIS globally,” Trump said in the post.  

The Nigerian military said special forces were deployed to block escape routes while air components executed precision strikes against what was described as a “concealed and fortified terrorist enclave.” The mission was completed, the military added, “without casualties or equipment loss on the part of friendly forces.”

During a televised interview, the Director of Nigeria’s Defence Media Operations, Major Gen. Michael Onoja, explained that the US military provided intelligence and surveillance support, while Nigeria deployed boots on the ground for the operation. 

“There were no foreign boots on the ground during this operation. What we received were intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance support and other force enablers,” he said.

There was only one problem: according to the Nigerian military itself, Al-Minuki had already been killed once before – in 2024.

For nearly two years, Al-Minuki’s name – also known as Abubakar Mainok or simply Abu-Mainok – had existed in the strange afterlife of Nigeria’s counterterrorism war; a conflict where terrorist commanders are frequently declared dead only to reappear later through propaganda videos, from Abubakar Shekau to Abu Mus’ab Al-Barnawy. 

“Our determined Nigerian Armed Forces, working closely with the Armed Forces of the United States, conducted a daring joint operation that dealt a heavy blow to the ranks of the Islamic State,” President Bola Ahmed Tinubu said in a statement issued from Aso Villa on Saturday. “Early assessments confirm the elimination of the wanted IS senior leader, Abu-Bilal Al-Manuki, also known as Abu-Mainok, along with several of his lieutenants, during a strike on his compound in the Lake Chad Basin.”

However, in the counterinsurgency operations in northeastern Nigeria, where insurgency and information warfare have become deeply intertwined, certainty is always expensive.

Strategic realignment 

Saturday’s strike was the first major public success to emerge from the military partnership between Nigeria and the US. The operation, designated under Nigeria’s existing counterterrorism framework as falling under Operation Hadin Kai, commenced at 12:01 a.m. and ended at 4:00 a.m. on May 16, according to a statement from the Joint Task Force North-East spokesperson, Lt.-Col. Sani Uba.

The operation reflects a rebuilding of the partnership after it had been almost damaged after a single catastrophic night on Christmas Day 2025, when Donald Trump ordered missile strikes into Sokoto State. Trump framed the strikes as retaliation against militants killing “innocent Christians”—a language that resonated with parts of his domestic base but landed badly across northern Nigeria, where the conflict is far more complicated than the religious framing imposed on it from abroad.

Several of the missiles reportedly malfunctioned. One strike landed near a civilian settlement with no known militant presence. Nigerian officials found themselves balancing two competing realities: the military needed American intelligence and surveillance capabilities, but the Nigerian government could not afford to appear subordinate to the US narrative of the war.

The months that followed produced a quieter arrangement. American military personnel arrived in northeastern Nigeria – eventually around 200 troops – under a structure designed carefully around optics as much as operations. Nigerian authorities retained formal command. The Americans supported intelligence gathering, aerial coordination, and technical operations around the A-29 Super Tucano fleet already deployed against insurgent groups in the Lake Chad Basin.

The choreography surrounding the recent announcement of Al-Minuki’s death was as deliberate as the operation itself. Donald Trump spoke first. Tinubu issued his statement a few hours after Trump posted on Truth Social. Major Gen. Samaila Uba, Director of Defence Information, released a detailed press statement under the Armed Forces of Nigeria letterhead, complete with Al-Minuki’s full array of aliases — Abu Bakr ibn Muhammad ibn Ali al-Minuki, Abor Mainok, Abubakar Mainok, Abakar Mainok — and a comprehensive accounting of his alleged roles. 

Everyone involved in the recent communication appeared determined not to repeat the Sokoto embarrassment on  Christmas Day, when Washington’s messaging had almost completely overshadowed Abuja’s.

“Nigeria appreciates this partnership with the United States in advancing our shared security objectives,” Tinubu said. “I extend my sincere gratitude to President Trump for his leadership and unwavering support in this effort. I look forward to more decisive strikes against all terrorist enclaves across the nation.”

The statement was noted for its tone and content. Tinubu’s public gratitude to Trump marks a significant shift from the friction that defined the relationship only five months ago, when parts of Nigeria’s political and diplomatic establishment, along with some ordinary Nigerians, were quietly furious over both the Christmas strikes and the framing of responding to the claims of Christian genocide that accompanied them. 

So who exactly was Al-Minuki?

Trump described him as “the second in command of ISIS globally.” AFRICOM called him “the director of global operations for ISIS”. The Nigerian Defence Headquarters offered the most specific claim: that as recently as February 2026, Al-Minuki “may have been elevated to the position of Head of the General Directorate of States, placing him as the second most senior leader within the ISIS global hierarchy.”

The same statement linked him to the 2018 Dapchi kidnapping of more than 100 schoolgirls, to the facilitation of fighters into Libya between 2015 and 2016, to weapons manufacturing and drone development, and to “economic warfare” coordination across the Sahel.

“His death removes a critical node through which ISIS coordinated and directed operations across different regions of the world,” the Defence Headquarters’ (DHQ) statement said.

Al-Minuki was a product of the insurgency itself. Born in 1982 in Mainok, a town along the Benisheikh axis of Borno State, he took his nom de guerre (pseudonym) from his hometown. Those who knew him in his early years, during the rise of Mohammed Yusuf, the founder of Boko Haram, told HumAngle that he was a young man who ran a small barbing salon in Mainok village, about 58 kilometres west of Maiduguri in northeastern Nigeria. Long before his name became associated with violence and insurgency, he was known simply as a village barber.

Before pledging allegiance to the Islamic State in 2015, he was a senior Boko Haram commander with a documented antagonism toward Abubakar Shekau. His split with Shekau was a result of competing visions of insurgency: Shekau operated through spectacle, brutality, and deliberate isolation from the Islamic State central command. The faction that became ISWAP sought structure, territorial governance, and integration with the IS international hierarchy. When IS reportedly requested fighters for Libya during the height of the Syrian conflict, Shekau refused. Al-Minuki, then commanding ISWAP’s Lake Chad division, complied — one reason, analysts say, he rose within IS’s provincial bureaucracy while Shekau remained suspect in its eyes.

The DHQ’s assertion that Al-Minuki served as “Nigeria-based al-Furqan GDP Office Emir” from 2023 onward is consistent with what analysts had been tracking for several years: his role as the connective tissue between ISWAP’s local operations and the IS’s transnational administrative architecture. His designation as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the US in June 2023 under Executive Order 13224, cited in Saturday’s military statement, reflected assessments that he had become central to ISWAP’s financial networks, weapons procurement, drone acquisition, and communications between the Lake Chad insurgency and IS-linked structures across West Africa and the Sahel. 

The “second in command of ISIS globally” framing is a political claim, pitched to an American domestic audience that requires a recognisable villain. Still, it doesn’t situate Al-Minuki well within ISIS’s formal hierarchy. 

Al-Minuki had long occupied a powerful position within the ranks of ISWAP, but his influence deepened after the deaths of Abu Musab al-Barnawi and, later, the death of Abu Rumaisa or Abba, both sons of Boko Haram founder Mohammed Yusuf in 2023, as reported by HumAngle. Their deaths created a vacuum at the centre of the ISWAP leadership structure and how it interacts with the Islamic State global networks, thrusting Mainok into a more strategic role in coordinating operations of the terror group across the Lake Chad region.

Al-Minuki was the man most responsible for keeping ISWAP wired into the Islamic State’s international infrastructure. His death is a meaningful disruption, but not the decapitation of a global terrorist hierarchy. 

ISWAP has repeatedly demonstrated that it can regenerate leadership after losses. It replaced leaders and survived the loss of top commanders. Its resilience has never derived primarily from any single commander; rather, it has stemmed from the political and economic conditions within Borno and across the Lake Chad Basin that continue to enable recruitment, taxation, and territorial control. The DHQ acknowledged as much, noting that “Battle Damage Assessment is ongoing, while follow-up exploitation operations are being conducted to clear remaining terrorist elements in the area.”

“Mistaken identity” 

The official statement from the Army said it was common for numerous terrorists to use the same names or aliases, suggesting that both the individual killed in 2024 and the commander killed in this strike shared the same name. It did not acknowledge any mistakes. 

“This time around, this individual [we killed] is the original owner of that name,” the Director of the Defence Media Operation said. 

Meanwhile, Bayo Onanuga, President Tinubu’s spokesperson, in a Facebook post on Saturday, claimed the discrepancy between the person killed in 2024 and the one killed now was due to a case of mistaken identity. He also warned that sceptics had “rushed to question the authenticity of the Nigerian-American joint military operation” and said the criticism was “premature and not grounded in the realities of modern counterterrorism operations.” He noted that Nigeria’s Armed Forces were “operating in one of the world’s most complex insurgency environments where targets often move across borders and use multiple identities.”

Nigeria has lived through this before. Shekau was declared dead multiple times across more than a decade until soldiers grew to distrust the announcements and civilians in Borno learned to reserve judgment until they saw real change on the ground.

The Presidency’s warning that “premature dismissal of military claims can inadvertently undermine operational morale and strategic messaging” is a legitimate concern. But it is also an argument for public deference rather than public accountability. 

For now, Trump has another example to point to as evidence that American military engagement abroad delivers results. Tinubu also has a successful joint operation that projects competence and international partnership without appearing commanded from outside.

The Armed Forces of Nigeria, in Major Gen. Uba’s words, have demonstrated “unwavering resolve to confront terrorism and deny extremist groups the ability to threaten national, regional and international security.”

But in the displacement camps and farming communities scattered across Borno State, the significance of Saturday’s strike will be measured differently. 

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), an international humanitarian organisation, has released its 2025 activity report for Nigeria, and the findings are sobering. The medical emergency organisation, also known as Doctors Without Borders, unveiled the report during an event in Abuja, North Central Nigeria, on Wednesday, May 13, documenting the disturbing rise in malnutrition cases in the country’s northern region.

With more than 3,500 workers delivering essential healthcare services across ten states, MSF reported treating over 440,000 children for malnutrition, more than 300,000 individuals for malaria, and assisting with over 33,500 deliveries in 2025.

This surge, according to the humanitarian organisation, underscores the fragility of Nigeria’s health system and the growing vulnerability of women and children in conflict-affected regions.

The 2025 report shows that MSF recorded more than 600,000 outpatient consultations, 48,000 inpatient admissions, and treated 341,239 patients for malaria, 38,753 children for measles, 6,123 patients for diphtheria, and 985 others for meningitis across its facilities in the region.

These findings are specific to the ten Nigerian states where MSF has been operating since 1996, including Jigawa, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Sokoto, Zamfara, and Cross River. The organisation says it has provided a wide range of essential medical services, including paediatric and maternal health care, treating children with malnutrition, responding to disease outbreaks, caring for survivors of sexual violence, offering mental health support, and performing life‑saving surgical interventions. 

The MSF country representative, Ahmed Aldikhari, revealed that in 2025, the organisation observed a pattern consistent with that of previous years, starting in 2022. Aldikhari stated that malnutrition is one of the year’s greatest challenges, linking it to the region’s fragile conditions, which are severely affected by insecurity that has worsened food security.

“We are seeing a vicious cycle where malnutrition is both a cause and a consequence of diseases such as measles, malaria, and diphtheria, among others, which continue to affect vulnerable communities, especially when healthcare is delayed or inaccessible,” he said, suggesting that Nigeria might soon experience the peak of the malnutrition crisis. 

“That is why we are consistently working side-by-side with the ministries of health, humanitarian affairs, budget and planning at the state and federal levels, and also, with our Nigerian colleagues to ensure that efficient services are provided, but they are not enough.”

HumAngle has previously reported on the broader impact of the crisis, stressing how displacements, insecurity, and climate change, among other natural and human-induced disasters, have compounded the problem. In July 2025, MSF, in collaboration with the Katsina State government, mobilised state and non-state actors to address the escalating malnutrition crisis in the northwestern region. 

During the 2024 MSF conference in Abuja, organised in collaboration with the North West Governors’ Forum and the Katsina State Government, stakeholders emphasised that malnutrition in the northwestern region is no longer a seasonal emergency but rather a structural crisis that requires urgent mobilisation. The governors acknowledged that insecurity and climate pressures were eroding food systems, but MSF urged greater investment in therapeutic feeding centres and preventive programmes.

Northern Nigeria continues to face a critical malnutrition crisis, with Katsina particularly affected, according to MSF’s 2025 activity report. Findings reveal that since 2021, MSF has been present in the state, with the organisation’s leadership revealing that they have witnessed a sharp rise in the number of malnourished children since responding to the growing crisis in recent years.

In 2025, MSF reported treating the highest number of malnourished children in Katsina. With the support of the state Ministry of Health, the organisation focused on preventing illness and malnutrition to reduce mortality and morbidity among children suffering from acute malnutrition.

“Katsina State has faced a chronic malnutrition crisis for over a decade, driven by insecurity, climate shocks, limited primary healthcare services, and high birth rates,” the report revealed. “Throughout 2025, MSF admitted 26,445 patients for inpatient care, provided treatment to 146,301 children through its outpatient centres, and conducted 15,387 outpatient consultations for malaria.”

In response to this, MSF established a new Ambulatory Therapeutic Feeding Centre (ATFC) in Mashi and a second inpatient therapeutic feeding centre at the Turai Yar’aduwa Hospital to handle the increased patient load during peak seasons.

Beyond nutrition in Kebbi, the report states that MSF responded to multiple infectious disease surges and outbreaks by tackling the increase in meningitis cases from February to May, while supporting the Ministry of Health facilities in Jega, Gwandu, and Aliero with logistics, medical supplies, staff training, and facility rehabilitation.

Following the escalating insecurity in neighbouring Zamfara and Niger that led to mass displacement to the Danko-Wasugu areas of Kebbi State as of June, the humanitarian organisation provided basic healthcare and distributed non-food relief kits to vulnerable households.

In Zamfara alone, MSF admitted 47,164 children to inpatient therapeutic feeding centres and provided 14,167 outpatient consultations in 2024, with numbers continuing to rise in 2025. According to Aldikhari, this increase in admissions is due to multiple overlapping crises, including conflict and insecurity in the northwestern and northeastern regions, which have displaced thousands of families, cutting them off from farmlands. 

While the 2025 activity report warns that malnutrition is no longer a seasonal emergency but a permanent feature of Nigeria’s humanitarian landscape, it also highlights the fact that the sheer scale of admissions suggests the crisis is outpacing the humanitarian response. 

It is Ramadan, and Bintu Suleiman, a 55-year-old mother and trader from Ngoshe in Borno State, North East Nigeria, is about to break her fast with her family.

Then, the gunshots begin, and within the hour, her home is on fire. As the terrorists round people up, she manages to slip away with her children and grandchildren into the bush. Later, she realises four of them did not make it with her. They are somewhere up in the mountains.

In this episode of #VOV, we see that, after the attack, Bintu, now displaced, is sheltering at a government primary school in Pulka and has no news of her children and grandchildren.

Reported by Sabiqah Bello

Voice acting by Rukayya Saeed

Multimedia editor is Anthony Asemota

Executive producer is Ahmad Salkida

On a hauntingly cold night in 2008, a 28-year-old impressionable fan of Mohammed Yusuf sat in the latter’s compound in the London Ciki area of Maiduguri, northeastern Nigeria, at 1 a.m., placed his hand in his, and swore to give his life for Boko Haram. He would advance to become a top commander in the terror group.

That night, the Man was accompanied by a few trusted friends, all of whom pledged their allegiance to the cause. Yusuf started by reciting eight commandments to the small group and asking that they swear to abide by them. He made it clear they could refuse to join the army, in which case, they were not to disclose any of the things that happened that night to another living soul. 

Many of them would die in battle in the years that followed, and Yusuf himself would be killed in a matter of months, but the Man would survive. He had been led there by his friend, who had also been led there by his own friend. 

Mohammed Yusuf, the founder of the Boko Haram terror group, was preparing to wage war against the Nigerian state and was assembling what would later become an army. This army would go on to kill over 35,000 people between 2009 and 2020, indirectly lead to the death of over 300,000 others, and displace over two million more. Through fieldwork involving extensive interviews with a few first-generation members of the terror group who are still alive, victims, and a review of nearly 100 archival materials, such as newspapers and videos, this report documents the strategy that made that army possible.

Since his preaching was still largely peaceful at the time, Yusuf recruited men covertly, so as not to alert the government to the war he was planning. 

But the story of the Man’s radicalisation began long before that night. As far back as 1995 and 1996, the Man, then merely a boy, had begun to listen to Mohammed Yusuf’s preaching, agreeing with a lot of the things he was hearing. But beyond Yusuf, the Man was also an ardent follower of Sheikh Jafar Mahmud, who had been schooled at the University of Madina, Saudi Arabia, a feat he found astonishing.

“That time, I was impressed with the way Malam [Mohammed Yusuf] was. He was a young man like me–he was just a bit older than me. But he was so educated, and that was my dream, too. To become so knowledgeable about the religion,” the Man told me one October afternoon in 2025 in northeastern Nigeria. We were sitting on a mat just outside a rafia hut.

“He had started becoming popular among the Izala and the Abba Aji students, just like how the likes of Gambo Kyari, Bukar Mustapha, Umoru Mustapha, and the rest were popular then. Like Malam Ibrahim Gomari, Bashir Kashara, who was killed, and so on. He [Mohammed Yusuf] was their peer when it came to Islamic scholarship.” 

His ideologies aligned with those of scholars like Sheikh Jafar, who was based in Kano but was preaching regularly at and leading prayers at the Indimi mosque every Ramadan in Maiduguri. In 1999, Yusuf’s fame began to rise beyond his immediate community, his words taking root in the minds of young men and women all across Borno State. The support and fandom were massive. The Man thinks this was due to two things.

“One, he was very young then. Two, he used to preach in both Hausa and Kanuri.” This enabled him to reach a wider audience without a language barrier, as these were among the most widely spoken languages in Borno State. 

Over time, around 2000 and 2002, his preaching began to diverge from that of the likes of Sheikh Jafar and other revered scholars popular at the time. He began to speak against Western education, voting, democracy, and modern science and civilisation. He preached about a radical form of religion that had total government control over the people’s private and public lives. 

In about 60 videos of him around this time that HumAngle reviewed, each 3-6 minutes long, he can be seen preaching against democracy and the West. “The thing the West brought is apostasy,” he said in one of them. “We reject it. This democracy is not good. These soldiers are not genuine soldiers–they do not protect the religion of Islam… God said we should kill them. Allah said in the Qur’an that he would humiliate the enemy by our hand. Did you think he meant our hands holding prayer beads?” and here he chuckles. “Of course not,” he answered himself to the ecstatic screams of his congregation. “He was referring to our hands wielding guns.”

At this time, many of the scholars he used to be known with began to withdraw from him. Rather than see this as the alarm that the larger public saw it as, the Man and many young people like him saw it as a sign of legitimacy. They saw Yusuf as brave, courageous, and unwavering. 

“We believed what he was preaching was the truth because what he was saying regarding the government, jihad, correlated with Qur’an verses and hadiths,” he said. He quoted verses from Chapters Ahzab and Taubah to back up his claim, saying that the scriptures had already said that nothing could change the world if not jihad, which he personally interpreted as war.

Islamic scholars have long disproved this interpretation of scripture and the word ‘jihad’. HumAngle shared the Man’s interpretation of the verses in Ahzab and Taubah with a prominent Islamic scholar, Prof. Ibrahim Maqari, who currently serves as the Chief Imam at the central mosque in Abuja, the federal capital. He said the interpretation was inaccurate. 

“Those verses have been taken out of context. Islam is very clear on there not being compulsion in religion,” he said. “Islam allows war only when war is brought upon you. In that sense, you have a responsibility to fight back in order to protect yourself. There are laws on how warring parties must treat even animals and trees–how can the same religion be used as an excuse to slaughter innocent, unarmed populations, if even animals and trees are expected to be protected even in times of war?”

He also offered an additional, but often ignored, definition of the word: restraint, whether emotional or mental. 

“To stay away from what one craves but has been outlawed by Islam could also be a form of jihad.”

The Boko Haram group views it differently. “Jihad means blood must be spilt,” the Man said.

Following his split with Sheikh Jafar, Yusuf stopped preaching at the Indimi mosque and began preaching in his home, then at the Al’amin Daggash Mosque for several months before he was kicked out again, before eventually establishing the Markaz (Ibn Taimiyya) mosque. 

“Only about 40-50 of us went with him then. That was 2002–2003. With the help of Allah, after like two years, Markaz couldn’t even contain people; we could not even count the number of students anymore.”

There were very few journalists or researchers at the time who were able to accurately document this sociological (and religious) revolution. One of them was Ahmad Salkida, who dispatched the first-ever news article on Mohammed Yusuf in 2006 and was the first to alert the public to what was brewing. He observed in one report that Yusuf enjoyed wide acceptance from young people at the time because of the effects of bad governance and the resulting socioeconomic inequalities—corruption, rampant inequality, lack of education. 

By appealing to a shared victimhood philosophy, he created an Us (victims) Vs Them (the government/the oppressor) dichotomy and garnered a large following. The weaponisation of a sense of community to further genocidal violence is a tactic that is recurring in speeches of warlords or leaders of violent movements. It was apparent in the popular 1943 speech made by Heinrich  Himmler, one of the key military leaders who executed the Holocaust. In it, he frames the killing of jews as a moral obligation, while making the Nazis out to be the victims.  “We have a moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to kill [some use the word ‘destroy’ here as the original speech was in German] these people who would kill us… We have carried out this most difficult of tasks in a spirit of love for our people,” he said in the speech. 

As the number of his students and followers began to increase, Yusuf decided it was time to take his message beyond his house and Maiduguri. He began to travel to Konduga, Bama, and Gwoza. He soon went beyond Borno State into Yobe State, to places like Potiskum, Gashua, Geidam, and others. He also went to Bauchi. 

“We started getting senior students like Abu Mohammed Bauchi, Abu Maryam, etc. It later crossed to Kano, and there, we got senior scholars, even though they later withdrew.”

It was at this time, when his preaching became regular in Bama, that Fatima, another first-generation member of the group, began to attend. Alongside her entire family, she became a loyal follower of Yusuf. She took the bay’ah in a way that resembled what the Man described. 

“We were gathered around 4 p.m. and then separated into men and women, then took the oath,” she recalled. At this time, the preaching was mainly that the government did not have their best interest at heart, and did not care about Islam. Fatima went alongside her parents and husband. She remembers being told that the Nigerian constitution was forbidden for them to follow or abide by. They also told them that they might be killed, but they should rest assured that they would go straight to paradise if that happened. 

“There are people, these days, who claim that the drinking of blood is somehow part of the oath-taking process. This is not true. At least, not during our time,” she said.

The preachings, at this time, had started to grow more and more radical and inciting.

“This caused some people to lose their wives, some their parents, some their trading partners, and some to destroy their school certificates,” the Man said. Young people, in compliance with the very foundation of Boko Haram, which directly translates to “Western education is forbidden”, began to publicly burn school certificates that they had already acquired before they became radicalised.

“We all knew this was going to happen; it wasn’t a secret,” the Man said of the eventual uprising. “There are scholars who would preach saying we have to shed blood in this country, but once they are done preaching, you will see them with the same government they are criticising in their houses, with cars given to them. But Malam was never like that. He was never in cahoots with the government, so we all believed in him and that he was going to carry out what he had intended–the war.”

The early army

The Man claimed that Yusuf first appointed 11 close friends, whom he termed his commanders. They were the first members of the Boko Haram army. He sat with these 11 and explained the reason for the war, assuring them it would happen soon. He told them they each must be willing to sacrifice their lives if it came to that, and also bring men who believed in the cause and would be willing to do the same. 

He trained them for an initial period of nine months. Some CDs were played for them on war preparation. There were long periods of preaching and indoctrination. 

“Some of these men are in prison, but most of them have died. The only person who is not in prison and is alive was released from prison two years ago: Mohammed Idris. He was imprisoned in 2009. There is Usman Sidi in the Malam Sidi deradicalisation centre in Gombe, and Ibrahim Agaji, who is still in prison. And so on.”

It was one of these first 11 commanders who reached out to the Man, inviting him to join the army. Yusuf had mandated that each of them come with three trusted men who could join. This was not as easy as it sounded, especially because speaking to the wrong person could jeopardise the entire plan if they chose to go to the authorities with what they knew. When the commander reached out to the Man, he explained this, adding that he himself did not know up to three people he could trust, only the Man. He asked the Man to bring the other two. He, too, only trusted one person and asked that person to bring one person as well. In that way, the commander fulfilled his assigned quota of three. Soon, the 11 commanders and their individual recruits totalled 40. Together, they formed the first version of the army, gathering in Yusuf’s house that night in the London Ciki area of Maiduguri and taking the bay’ah after listening to the commandments.

“The first commandment was that we must agree to give our lives if it came to it; then, seeking Islamic knowledge to understand our ancestors; we must also not do things except as stated in the books, whether we like it or not; then, there was confidentiality. I have forgotten most of the conditions. There were like eight conditions. If you agree to them, Malam would take your hand and hold it as you took the bay’ah. You would promise never to discuss it with anyone. If you do, it’s like you have betrayed the religion.”

After that night, they proceeded to undergo a four-month intensive period of prayer and training. They had access to one man, Habib, who used to be a sergeant in the Nigerian Army but whom Yusuf had won over with his preachings. He trained them in combat. Yusuf had also won over one medical doctor, a prominent consultant from Yola known as Abu Adam. He equipped them with basic medical skills, including how to remove a bullet lodged in a wound and how to stitch a wound.

“To this day, whenever my kids get sick, I am able to administer injections for them once they are prescribed and I buy them, because of the skills I learned from that doctor,” the Man said. 

The initial group of 40 was also mandated to come with recruits – some were mandated to come with up to 10 recruits each, others were mandated to come with only three – and in that way, the army expanded little by little. Once they were in their hundreds, Yusuf broke them into battalions and named each battalion after an Islamic historical figure. The Man was under the Zubair Ibn Awwam battalion. Those who later moved to the Timbuktu triangle were named after Umar Farouk. Each of the 11 commanders was also assigned four sub-commanders known as Munzir. The Man was a Munzir at this time. Each Munzir was in charge of about 70–100 people. The Munzirs, in turn, appointed people they called the Naqeeb, each of whom had 25 people under their care. This system made organising easier. 

“Whenever Mohammed Yusuf says to the leader of Zubair Ibn Awwam battalion, ‘I want you to gather your people for me,’ the leader would look for other Munzirs and me. At that time, four of us were Munzirs under that battalion: Mohammed  Sani Tela, Bako Mai Madara, Abdullahi, and me. So, when Malam says to our commander, ‘Gather your people for me,’ he would just call us (the Munzirs) and say, ‘Gather your people.’ If, for example, I have 100 people under my care, how would I reach them? They’re too much for me, so I would call my Naqeeb and tell them to each bring the 25 people under their individual care. You see, this way it is easier for both me and my superior because 25 people are not a lot to gather.”

“That time, we had not yet relocated to the forest. This all happened in Maiduguri,” he clarified. 

There were several locations used for training in Bauchi and Biu in Borno. As things began to heat up, with preparation for the war being heavily underway, Yusuf got word that the government suspected a war was brewing and planned to attack him and his followers. He was invited multiple times by the DSS and the police in both Maiduguri and Abuja, where he was detained briefly and interrogated over those allegations. He denied arming or preparing for war.

“Since they were planning to attack us, we were supposed to also get ready for them. Before they attack us, let’s attack them. We should just be prepared. So we got ready as much as we could. We got our war arms–Malam and a few people had been getting the arms ready all this time with the help of the former sergeant in the Nigerian Army.”

Just then, they began to face some logistical challenges. Some members of the group who had been entrusted with guns in the past few months of preparation and had been told to bury them for safekeeping suddenly said they no longer remembered where they had buried the guns. This caused a setback with planning, and Yusuf, at first, found it puzzling. 

“But he later said we are going to be optimistic, whether they did not buy it, whether they cheated, or they did buy it and truly couldn’t find the place they buried it, it was still amusing. But he said we will not dwell on this, we will just seek Allah’s help with what we have with us.”

According to another source, another setback in the arms gathering department involved a man known as Aliu Tashaku, whom Yusuf met and presumably radicalised during one of his detentions at the Police headquarters in Abuja. Tashaku was later accused by Yusuf and several Boko Haram leaders of defrauding the group. They say he collected millions of naira with a promise to deliver dozens of AK-47 rifles, which he never fulfilled.

Still, plans continued. From Friday to Sunday, dawn till dusk, they were trained to use the guns they did procure: how to cock and shoot them. “Only a few of us were taught how to wield guns. Just the leaders. Not everyone.”

Finally, on that fateful day in June 2009, the ‘helmet’ incident happened. The incident has since been regarded as the beginning of the war. Some even say it was what caused it.

“I need you to understand,” the Man said, “that the helmet incident was not what led to the war. We had already assembled the army, gathered arms and supplies, and put the structure in place.”

What the incident did was accelerate the inevitable.

The helmet incident

In January 2009, authorities in Borno announced that anyone wishing to ride a bike in Maiduguri must wear a helmet as a safety precaution. The Boko Haram group did not agree with the rule (“how dare an illegitimate body tell us what to do?”). And so on that fateful day in June 2009, they came out en masse to bury four members who had died in a motor crash, flooding major roads. Many of them rode on bikes, and there was not a single helmet in sight. The police formed a blockade and refused to let them through, daring them to cross a particular line. They crossed the line, literally, and the police opened fire on the unarmed crowd. It was an act of extrajudicial violence, but for a people who already fancied themselves a parallel and legitimate government, the sect saw it as an act of war. And so they responded, warring for five days and killing indiscriminately across Borno, Yobe, and Kano. A review of Daily Trust newspapers during the whole week showed that the war dominated its front pages from July 27 to July 31 2009. Reports say that up to 800 people were killed. Abubakar Shekau, who was second-in-command at the time and would later lead the violent group after Yusuf, was wounded.

Yusuf himself was in Kaduna, northwestern Nigeria, on the day of the helmet incident. Sources say he flew into a rage when he learned of it. It was when he returned that he became more public and explicit about the war that must be fought, since the state, he said, had drawn first blood.

“He preached that if we didn’t do anything about these soldiers talking about helmets, there wouldn’t be peace, so at that time, he had not yet been captured. It wasn’t long after that the war happened in July, when everything became messy in Markaz. He spoke during evening prayers that this war was beyond us. For three days, it was like victory was on our side, but now security forces were well prepared, planning to attack us, and the little we had was already finished, and our senior commanders were all dead, so he said everyone should just find their way. That was when we went out, that was when he was arrested.”

The last time the Man saw Yusuf, they were trying to escape from their location as authorities advanced. One of his students insisted that Yusuf hop in his car so they could leave together, but Yusuf refused. By this time, he had sustained a bullet wound to the arm. And so when news of his capture and eventual summary execution arrived, it did not come entirely as a shock to the Man.

Ahmad Salkida, who was being held in a cell at the police headquarters at the time Yusuf was killed there, wrote that over 50 policemen emptied bullets into his body, making sure to avoid his head so that his identity could never be disputed. 

In a video of Yusuf’s remains that HumAngle obtained, there were tens of bullet wounds, his body mangled as though slashed open repeatedly, the inner bloody flesh hanging out in several places. The only body part that remained unwounded was his head. His eyes remained open, as though staring straight ahead. In the background, voices could be heard worrying about the stench. In another video I reviewed, this time of Yusuf being interrogated after he was arrested, he was questioned about medical supplies and arms being found in his home. This corroborates the Man’s accounts about medical supplies and arms having already been gathered. 

Later, the government claimed he had been trying to escape when he was shot and killed. The execution drew nationwide condemnation, and the then-President Umaru Musa Yar’adua ordered a probe into the officers responsible.

In the immediate aftermath, authorities went on a hunt for all members of the group. So the premature army and other followers of the group dispersed, and the Man himself relocated to Gwagwalada in Nigeria’s federal capital, Abuja.

He lived there for about two years with his wives and children, until one day, when former associates found him. Abubakar Shekau had healed, emerged from hibernation, and was ready to lead the army into war, the associates told him. He had sent them to him to deliver the message, and they would do so to as many key members of the army as they could find. They put him in touch with Shekau on the phone. 

“We spoke, and he said he was in good health, and he tasked me with gathering the people from my battalion and to lead them since our leader, as I told you, got captured and was only released last year. That was when I felt the weight of the world on my head because we were in hiding, and now we were being told we were to continue with operations.” 

And so the work of regrouping commenced. The structure that Yusuf had put in place helped in this process. Each commander searched for his Munzirs, and each Munzir searched for his Naqeebs. It was not as easy as it would have been were they all still in Maiduguri and not in hiding, because now they were scattered everywhere, and some people had even died.

HumAngle gathered that at this time, several members whom Yusuf facilitated in their travels to North Africa for arms training and other terrorism-related operations, a clear signal that preparations for war were underway long before the July 2009 ma’araka, returned to boost the army Shekau was assembling. Many of them were unable to return by the time the conflict erupted.

Once they had regrouped, the strategic efforts to topple the Nigerian government and establish what they believed to be an Islamic state started. This strategy, mainly, had to do with bombings, abductions, assassinations, and taking control of certain villages and towns to be able to forcefully radicalise and loot.

“We bombed towns, mosques, markets, and churches, too. We were the ones who put everything together. We later realised staying in town would not work because they started arresting our people. So we went to the forest.”

When the group migrated to Sambisa Forest, they turned it into their daulah – the “sovereign territory” – and operated fully from there. But this, in no way, lessened the brutality of the operations. This brutality was due, in part, to the fact that they had run out of supplies and money and were frantic. The Man had sold the lands he owned and used the money to purchase arms, and so had many others. Yusuf’s death had decimated a lot of plans. So they began to take villages.

On the surface, when villages fell to them, it was because they wanted to recruit or radicalise. But they were aware that no village or town could stay in their grip for long, as the Nigerian Army would eventually take it back. So, the more urgent reason was to loot the banks in the villages as soon as they took possession. 

“We held towns for months, except for places like Mubi, which wasn’t held for long but which still yielded us a lot of money because it had like nine to ten banks then. Only three banks were looted before the soldiers came and took over the town. So we started using the money, though a jet came and burnt down the money later on.”

HumAngle has interviewed dozens of people who were stuck in villages like Bama, Kirawa, Gwoza, Kumshe, Boboshe, Andara, and many others, during the periods when Boko Haram held the villages hostage. They described a heavily militarised setting, with people being killed on often unfounded allegations of spying. Baana Alhaji Ali, a man who used to be a trader in Andara before it fell to Boko Haram, told me that many of the laws sought to take complete control of their lives. “They refused to let us go out of the village; they imposed their laws on us; they said we shouldn’t allow our women to fetch water, gather firewood, and that we should be doing all that for them. Our women were never to be seen publicly. They took foodstuff away from us.”

During this time, the government was announcing on the radio that if anyone was brave enough to escape the villages and make it to Maiduguri, the capital city, they would be safely accepted and put into Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps. Thousands of people took the risk. Some were caught by the terrorists and brutally killed, but others made it out safely. Tragically, many of them were intercepted on the road and profiled by the Nigerian Army as members of the terror group. They went on to be detained without trial at detention centres like Giwa barracks, Borno Maximum Security prison, and Wawa military cantonment for about a decade. Some of them died. Others disappeared and have never been seen again. Baana and his family made it to Cameroon, where the local army transferred them into the hands of the Nigerian Army in Banki, a border town. While his wife and children were allowed to go, Baana was detained on allegations of being part of the terror group and held for seven years in conditions that bring tears to his eyes to recount. 

“We didn’t get enough water … some people died of thirst,” he said. “There were about 400 people in one cell, and people died from the heat … We didn’t have proper toilets at first, just plastic buckets to urinate and defecate. People would take them out when they were full and empty them.”

Amid all these, when taking villages became no longer sustainable, the Man said, they began to abduct for money. Though the Chibok abduction of 276 schoolgirls, as has already been extensively reported, was not planned but executed by lower Boko Haram members on their way back from a different assignment, it turned out to be one of their most successful money-making attempts. The Man says up to ₦300 million was paid as ransom for each girl who was released. Reports show that between 2016 and 2018, 103 girls were released, with the BBC reporting that $3.3 million was paid for them. The government, officially, insists that no ransom was paid.

“Abducting the Chibok girls became a blessing for us all in the forest because it touched the whole world. We got a lot of money. Money was made that time! At the time, the group was already facing financial difficulties. You know, when we first migrated to the forest, we would go and break into a shop and steal money, or steal cows and sell. We were struggling financially.”

The Man lived in Sambisa for over a decade with his three wives and nine children. He held numerous positions, including commander, judge, and, later, member of the Shura council.

Once in Sambisa, under the heavy-handedness of Shekau, he began to find ideological differences between what Shekau was doing and what he himself believed the scriptures said to do. This is a popular complaint among members of the group. Shekau believed deeply in violence and had no patience for negotiations. He believed that anyone who did not live in the daulah deserved to be killed. Hence, the bombing of markets, motor parks, mosques, churches, and other public places within state-controlled territories.

“We, on the other hand, believed our target was the Nigerian security forces and those who deserved it. We all agreed on that, but carrying out attacks on mosques, churches, motor parks, and killing children? We were not in support of Shekau doing that,” the Man said of himself and a growing group that had begun to plan to rebel.

“With Shekau, anybody that does not live within those forests, even if he prays, even if he goes to the Holy Ka’abah in Saudi Arabia to pray, then comes back every day, he sees him as a non-believer. He can be killed, and his money or belongings can be collected.”

There were also allegations of witchcraft against some elderly women in the group, who would then be stoned to death and sometimes beheaded. According to Fatima, the follower from Bama, things escalated wildly during that time and caused many people to fear. 

And so in 2016, a faction led by Mamman Nur, another high-ranking member, decided to break away into what is now known as the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), linked to the global Islamic State (IS) group.

ISWAP, at the time and perhaps even now, fancied itself purer and less violent than the Shekau-led sect. Still, over time, the Man began to feel as though even they were “not honest about the work they were doing.” 

As he spoke, it became clear to me that though he was no longer part of the group, he still believed in the cause and thought there was an “honest” or “right” way to do it. And so I asked: Why did he leave the terror group and return to state-controlled territories?

He paused for a moment, then asked, “Are you a Muslim?”

I said yes.

“So you know about the Islamic Khalifs?” he enquired. 

“Yes, Ali, Umar Ibn Khattab, Usman Ibn Affan and the rest?”

He nodded in satisfaction. “Those people you mentioned were among the Prophet’s most knowledgeable and trusted advisors. So, whenever they spoke or offered counsel during that time, they were listened to and taken seriously. We were supposed to be that for ISWAP, but whenever we spoke up against things that were wrong, nobody listened to us. It was made as though we were the ones spoiling people, even when all we were doing was finding them ease.”

He explained that his decision to leave was the culmination of many things, not just one, but the refusal to listen to him and his peers made it clear that the original cause, which he believed in and was once prepared to lay down his life for, no longer existed.

Leaving was risky because he was very high-ranking, he said. It meant that he could never just change his mind and decide to go back because he would be executed. It meant he would leave behind all the wealth he had acquired over the past decade. It also meant he would leave behind a life of status and comfort and take on an uncertain future, doubtless filled with hardship. 

Finally, in 2024, less than two full years ago, he defected with his entire family and surrendered to the Nigerian state. He underwent the Borno state-modelled deradicalisation programme – which is different from Operation Safe Corridor – and offered up his services to the state to aid its fight against the insurgency. He provides regular high-level intel to the government, remains a law-abiding citizen, and in return, the state pays his house rent.

“They paid last year, and they just renewed it this year,” he said.

Towards the end of our interview, I asked what he would do if a young man came to him today seeking guidance on how to join Boko Haram. 

“Kai. I’ll stop him!” he said immediately. “I can’t tell anyone to go, I am even trying to tell those there to come back. I won’t advise anyone to go because if that’s the case, I wouldn’t have come back.”

His own children now go to school. I ask what has changed to make him agree to them going to school, especially since the very foundation of the insurgency was that school was forbidden.

“There were a lot of mistakes I made from the start, and I admit this without shame. One thing we didn’t understand then was that, despite our fears about the ills of Western education, it was still useful. Now, I have come to understand that I only need to arm my children with a good upbringing at home and Islamic knowledge, so that when they come across any harmful teachings in school, they would have the sense to not take them to heart… I have a daughter who has graduated from secondary school, a son who is now in SS1 and another who is going to JSS1 soon.”

I spoke to several other former members whose children are now in school and who now share the same line of thinking.

The Man is now engaged in efforts to deradicalise young people at risk of falling into the same errors he made many years ago. Sometimes, he posts videos on TikTok, countering violent extremism and challenging violent interpretations of scripture. 

Researchers insist that accepting surrenders from people like the Man has always been integral to counter-terrorism efforts worldwide. But many Nigerians, especially those who have lost loved ones, feel differently, because there is still so much suffering, there is little justice and chance of reparations to those who have been wronged, and the institutional failures that led those young boys to Yusuf’s house that cold night in 2008 to take the bay’ah still remain.

Before the war, Baana Alhaji Ali, the man who fled with his family when Boko Haram attacked his village and was subsequently held for seven years in detention, was a trader who lived peacefully with his family. Now, he lives in a tarpaulin tent in Nguro Soye, cramped with his family, with no access to education, healthcare, or basic amenities. The past decade has seen him in prison, in a camp for internally displaced persons, and now in a resettlement site. 

When I talked to his wife about their feelings about former combatants being allowed back into the community, she was angered.

“All I can say is that we have been cheated, we have been violated, and we have been dehumanised.”

HumAngle has chosen to use the phrase “the Man” to anonymise the central source for this story in order to protect him from harm. 

In one of the world’s most deprived and volatile regions, HumAngle’s reporting and experience reveal that journalists in Nigeria are not just observing suffering but are pulled into it as they try to report it. Consequently, they say, they find themselves paying out of pocket to feed the people whose stories they are trying to tell.

In theory, the profession is expected to observe some emotional distance from its sources and the stories they tell. However, that model is inoperable in conflict-affected regions of northern Nigeria and the Sahel.

Journalism here is embedded in environments shaped by violence, poverty, and dense social networks. Since these variables affect people at random, the reporter is not an outsider; sometimes, the conflict directly affects them as well. Ethical decisions are then made under pressure, repeatedly, and often without the comfort of certainty.

HumAngle operates in this space. Its work across Lake Chad, Central Africa, Nigeria’s Middle Belt, the North West, the South East, and other conflict zones forces a confrontation with a difficult question: What does ethical journalism look like when the people you report on are not just sources, but individuals whose survival may intersect directly with your presence?

The limits of imported ethics

Global journalism standards discourage payment for information, and while exceptions exist, they do so under strict editorial oversight, a clear public-interest justification, and transparency. Journalism teachers say that, though these frameworks are expected to provide clarity, they don’t in conflict-affected Nigeria, where the assumed context doesn’t apply. The ideal context has clear distinctions between sources and service providers and functioning identity systems. This is hardly obtainable in conflict-affected environments.

Dr Kabiru Danladi, a Mass Communication scholar with the Ahmadu Bello University in northwestern Nigeria, says, “Our curriculum borrows heavily from Euro-American ethical frameworks – objectivity, detachment, neutrality – principles rooted in relatively stable societies. The failure becomes evident when our graduates are deployed to cover issues that weren’t directly taught in class, or they are sent to cover conflicts in places like Zamfara, Sokoto, Kebbi, Borno, Yobe or Benue, where journalism is not just a profession but a survival exercise.”

Dr Obiora Chukwumba, a researcher and media expert in Abuja, identifies the same problem in the moral obligation created by field contact. “There is no ethical barrier to a journalist intervening on grounds of goodwill to assist a source who is in a vulnerable position,” he said.

The reality of field reporting

A fixer in Zamfara, where terror groups continue to kill, abduct, and loot, is not simply an access broker but may also translate, assess risk, and act as a negotiator in certain environments. A driver in Borno, North East Nigeria, may carry more situational intelligence than any formal briefing. An intermediary in the southeast may navigate relationships across vigilante groups and separatist networks.

These individuals are essential. Without them, our reporters’ access vanishes. But they are also embedded in the same systems the journalist is trying to understand, which creates layered risks, including legal risks that emerge when payments made for legitimate services are later interpreted as material support. 

Barrister Joseph Danboyi, a senior lawyer in Jos, North Central Nigeria, says, “Payment to a fixer creates liability if the journalist knew his connection with criminals. Ordinary payment for information is insufficient. The journalist will be aiding and abetting when payment is purposefully linked to criminal conduct.”

He goes further to add, “The practical bottom line is that a journalist who unknowingly pays a criminal for information is generally not liable… liability requires knowledge… and intent to help or further it.”

This distinction between knowledge and intent anchors the legal reality that sits beneath field decisions. 

Dr Obiora also treats fixers and access arrangements as part of newsroom operations, not automatically as ethical breaches. “Parts of the routine (investigative) costs tied to the operations of a newsroom include such services as engaging fixers, obtaining access to a reasonably considered newsmaker, and appreciation handouts,” he said. “They are all legitimate operational costs.”

There is no procedural checklist that eliminates these risks. What exists instead is a need for structured awareness and disciplined judgment in newsrooms.

The Knifar women: A case that reshapes the debate

HumAngle’s engagement with the Knifar movement brings these tensions into focus. The Knifar women are part of a grassroots movement shaped by prolonged suffering. Their husbands, sons, and brothers were detained during military operations, often for years, without trial. In many cases, these men were the primary providers, and so their absence triggered cascading consequences for these women, including food insecurity, poverty, and social fragmentation. The women organised into a pressure group to demand accountability for the detention of their male relatives.

HumAngle’s reporting amplified their efforts, influencing outcomes that ultimately led to the release of over a thousand men that the women were advocating for. 

Our work required prolonged engagement with the women, whose daily reality was defined by deprivation. In some instances, our journalists provided stipends. In other cases, some of these women became part of the reporting process as fixers and contributors with fixed incomes in our newsroom. We have even given some of them ‘additional reporting’ credit for their work. Since they are both sources and resource persons for our newsroom, we are often clear about what we are paying them for – their work, not their information. We have spoken publicly about the dynamics of our relationship with these women, including in a Pulitzer Centre-supported documentary.

Kunle Adebajo, a renowned award-winning investigative journalist, reflects on his own experience in being moved to provide money to vulnerable sources: “I’ve often had to pay vulnerable sources. This is because the majority of them live from hand to mouth and rely on wages from daily labour to get their sustenance, and so such interviews could be very disruptive and uncomfortable for them. Oftentimes, they also have to transport themselves to meet at the interview location. The sums given were trifling, and there was never an understanding that the interview itself was transactional. 

Dr Obiora agrees that the understanding must always be clear. “If the source or interviewee presents the personal need to overshadow the reason for the meeting with the journalist, then that could be a red flag,” he said, “pointing to potential compromised narrative or ‘adjusted facts’ from the source or interviewee.”

When observation is not enough

Journalists are trained not to pay sources because it could risk distortion and affect credibility, but what happens when the people you are interviewing live in destitute conditions?

“I met residents, elderly men and women who could not feed themselves, who could not afford basic healthcare. I met a father who lost his wife to a particular ailment, and whose two kids are still suffering from the same ailment. Yet, he could not help.”

The award-winning journalist said he felt compelled to help. “I offered to buy meals for some of them through my fixer. Yes, I offered them some cash to buy what they needed. When I got back to my hotel room that evening, I actually cried. I felt the depth of these people’s suffering.”

He is not unaware of the ethical grey spots in giving money to sources. “Ethically, I did not really care at that point whether offering them some cash would be seen as an inducement. I told myself that I had to act as a human being at the moment and drop the toga of ‘a journalist’ at that point.” 

Dr Danladi understands this and says that “Students must be taught that they are a journalist, yes – but they are also human beings. Refusing to help in the name of ‘objectivity’ can itself be an ethical failure.” He says that liability only becomes possible “where the journalist knows or is willfully blind to criminal activity… or where the payment itself is tied to illegal conduct.”

Another journalist from southwestern Nigeria, who declined to be named, described facing similar situations in which his sources were suffering. 

“They had had to eat rotten food sourced from the nearby markets, and sometimes they went days without eating anything because their husbands, who provided for them, had been killed. I saw that most of their children were malnourished and looked so skinny. It was such a touching situation, and I couldn’t help but give them some money that I had with me so that they could buy food and cook.”

The practice of support

Payment for content implies a transaction because it links money to information, but support that exists independently of reporting is different. It protects the integrity of the story while still acknowledging the reality of the environment.

Hauwa Shaffii Nuhu, an award-winning journalist and newsroom manager, said that though in her early days as a journalist, she could not resist the urge to help vulnerable sources, she has now learned to favour long-term external support. “Now, I connect them [the vulnerable subjects of her story] with NGOs… or make it possible for society to donate directly to them or through an independent third party like a fixer.”

In cases where reporters have to provide any form of support, journalism scholars like Obiora say documentation matters. Record decisions and rationale for such actions while in the field. According to Obiora, “one of the most important structures for documenting and reviewing ethical footprints in the newsroom is within the internal editorial space.” He proposed an Editorial Board of Line Editors, chaired by the title editor, and another layer through an Editorial Advisory Board, where “it would be necessary to bring the platform’s legal advisor as a member.”

“These steps will not protect you from state action if authorities choose to act,” a senior security official said. What they only do is to protect the integrity of your journalism, he implied. They help you draw a line between necessary support and inducement, between humanitarian assistance and conduct that could be interpreted as enabling someone directly or indirectly tied to the crime you are investigating.

The unresolved tension

Speaking more to the legal position of a source, unknown to the journalist, being tied to criminal activity, Danboyi reiterates that a journalist who unknowingly pays a criminal is generally not liable, as exposure begins when there is knowledge, or when you consciously ignore signals that should raise concern.

Consider the fixer a journalist has worked with closely. Not a transactional contact, but someone embedded in the reporting process, with days, sometimes weeks, spent together. The journalist has covered his meals, made stops at his home during fieldwork, supported him beyond the assignment, helped with school fees, and contributed when his child was ill. Then, months or years later, the fixer is named in a crime. The record of the journalist’s relation with him exists: Transfers, messages, shared locations. A traceable history of proximity that can be turned into proof of complicity.

A different kind of responsibility

The Knifar women’s story forces a reconsideration of responsibility and demands a different approach to how journalism ethics is taught and judged. “We graduate students who know the code, but cannot survive in the field,” says Dr Danladi.

Dr Obiora returns the question to dignity. “A journalist whose interaction with a source contributes to lifting the source’s dignity has discharged his or her obligation professionally.”

In environments where silence sustains suffering, the act of telling a story, and the way that story is told, carries consequences beyond journalism.

In Nigeria’s North East, the Boko Haram insurgent group once carved out territory and declared a caliphate. In the North West, terrorist groups operate as fluid, profit-driven networks, embedding themselves in local economies. In the Middle Belt, communal violence reflects deeper contests over land, identity, and survival. In the South East, separatist agitation by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) has fused with armed enforcement and criminal opportunism. Along the southern waterways, oil theft and piracy threaten economic lifelines.

Across all these theatres, one institution has remained consistently engaged: the Nigerian military, often as the default responder in the absence of effective civilian governance. Public perception often frames this engagement as a failure as attacks continue and civilians remain vulnerable. A closer, evidence-based reading tells a more complex story, however, though available data remains incomplete and, at times, contested. 

The Nigerian military appears to have adapted under pressure and recalibrated aspects of its doctrine, and, in key moments, helped reverse trajectories that once pointed toward state collapse. It has delivered tangible gains, some strategic, others tactical, many costly. Still, those gains sit on unstable ground because governance gaps, political interference, corruption, and weak institutional follow-through have repeatedly blunted them. Communities liberated from one threat find themselves exposed to another. 

The North East war: reversing a collapse

By early 2015, Nigeria was on the brink of losing control in the North East. Boko Haram had evolved from an insurgent group into a territorial force controlling large swathes of Borno State and parts of Yobe and Adamawa. It administered territory, collected taxes, and imposed its authority over local populations. Gwoza was declared the headquarters of a so-called caliphate. Entire communities were displaced, and military formations overrun.

The turning point came with a shift in military posture, in which command structures were reconfigured, and the operational headquarters was relocated to Maiduguri, the Borno State capital, bringing leadership closer to the frontline. Coordination with regional forces under the Multinational Joint Task Force (MJTF) also intensified as air and ground operations were synchronised.

The results were immediate and significant, though the durability of these gains has varied across locations. Key towns like Monguno, Bama, Dikwa, and even Gwoza, the symbolic heart of Boko Haram’s territorial claim, fell back under government control in rapid succession. Data from ACLED shows that between 2015 and 2025, the military recovered at least 259 territories. 

With this territorial success, supply routes were disrupted, and fighters were killed in large numbers. Civilians began to return to these areas, in some cases under fragile security conditions. 

It marked the collapse of Boko Haram’s experiment with territorial governance, and the battle for Sambisa Forest reinforced this shift.

For years, Sambisa had functioned as a strategic sanctuary where fighters trained, hostages were held, and leadership structures operated with relative security. It also carried psychological weight. As long as Sambisa remained intact, Boko Haram retained a sense of permanence.

The military’s assault on the forest required sustained effort involving navigating difficult terrain, dealing with improvised explosive devices, and confronting entrenched fighters. Airstrikes softened targets while ground troops advanced in phases, enabling special forces units to penetrate deeper into the forest.

The symbolic impact was significant, though not decisive in ending insurgent capacity. Boko Haram could no longer claim a fixed territorial base for as long as was once the case. Its command structure was disrupted, and its image of invincibility weakened.

And so Boko Haram fragmented into factions. The Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) emerged as a more structured and strategic actor while the Shekau-led faction became more erratic, marked by extreme violence and unpredictability.

The military adjusted again.

Operations shifted from territory holding to mobility and disruption. Intelligence-led raids targeted leadership and logistics. Airpower became central to deep strikes in difficult terrain. Operation Lafiya Dole, the codename for the counter-insurgency operation, transitioned into Operation Hadin Kai, reflecting a recalibrated effort.

Today, the insurgency remains active, particularly in remote areas and along the Lake Chad basin. But the scale and nature of the threat have changed.

The North West: fighting a war without frontlines

The North West posed a different challenge. Armed groups here are diffuse. It lacks a central command and is driven by economic incentives rather than ideology, so groups form, splinter, and realign quickly. Local grievances and criminal enterprise also intersect here.

Estimates suggest tens of thousands of terrorists operate across this region, covering multiple states including Zamfara, Katsina, Kebbi, Sokoto, and Kaduna. This fragmentation complicates the military response, as frontlines, headquarters, and leadership structures (the usual strategic targets) are not clear. The military has responded by leaning heavily on airpower and targeted ground operations. This has not gone without major problems, such as the repeated “accidental bombing” of civilian populations, which have drawn criticism from rights groups and affected communities. 

Still, airstrikes have been used to hit camps deep within forested areas that are difficult for ground troops to access. Intelligence plays a critical role in identifying targets. Data shows that the sustained air campaign has yielded at least 909 strikes and 10,237 fatalities in 10 years. ACLED data shows that about 560 of these fatalities were civilians.

Ground forces usually conduct follow-up operations to recover weapons and temporarily secure areas.

Large numbers of kidnapped victims have been rescued during coordinated operations. Livestock, often a key economic asset for communities, has been retrieved. Such attacks have also killed some high-profile terrorist leaders, but they have also led to the loss of officers. 

In some areas, these operations appear to have had a temporary stabilising effect, though violence frequently resurges. Communities report periods of reduced attacks, farming activities have resumed in limited corridors, and confidence in security presence has improved, though often temporarily. 

Still, armed violence regenerates as the effects of weak governance in the North East are the same in the North West: new leaders emerge, and fighters disperse and regroup. Economic incentives remain strong. 

The Middle Belt: stabilising a political conflict

Violence in the Middle Belt is often described as a farmer-herder conflict, but the region’s violence reflects a complex mix of land disputes, ethnic tensions, and environmental stress. Armed militias operate alongside opportunistic criminal actors, while cycles of reprisal deepen mistrust between communities. 

There are too many dynamics in play here to reduce the crisis to a “military versus any specific group” conflict. Most of the time, softer kinetic actions, such as arrest and deterrence, are used. 

In certain corridors, the presence of military forces has reduced the frequency of mass casualty events. But the limits are clear. Several parts of the region still depend on self-help vigilante groups, who are often outgunned during terror attacks. 

There is also a growing distrust between communities and security operatives, who are sometimes accused of slow response and complicity. In April, residents of Gashish, a rural community in Barkin Ladi Local Government Area of Plateau State, staged a protest over continued attacks in the community despite military presence. A checkpoint manned by troops of Operation Enduring Peace was destroyed during the demonstration. 

The military has denied such accusations, but independent verification remains limited. 

However, in other areas, the visibility of armed forces has also had a deterrent effect on opportunistic attacks. 

At its core, the conflict in the region is driven by political and environmental factors. It revolves around identity and access to land and water. While military deployments can suppress violence temporarily, they cannot resolve competing claims or rebuild trust between communities. Without political solutions, stability remains provisional.

The South East: managing a hybrid threat

The South East presents a hybrid security challenge. Separatist agitation, particularly linked to IPOB, has evolved into a mix of political mobilisation and armed enforcement. The group has enforced sit-at-home orders through violence and intimidation while the Eastern Security Network (ESN) operates in forested areas.

The military’s response has been presented as targeted and intelligence-driven. Operations focus on dismantling camps, intercepting arms, and arresting key figures. Urban centres are secured to prevent escalation into wider insurgency.

Yet the approach carries risks.

Heavy-handed operations have generated grievances. Allegations of abuses have eroded trust in some communities. This complicates intelligence gathering, which is critical in a conflict where fighters blend into civilian populations. 

The Niger Delta and maritime domain: securing economic lifelines

In the South South and along Nigeria’s maritime corridors, the military, particularly the navy, has delivered some of its most visible successes. A decade ago, the Gulf of Guinea was a global hotspot for piracy. Sustained operations, including improved surveillance, increased naval patrols, and collaboration with international partners, have changed that landscape. These have led to the destruction of illegal refining sites and to arrests that disrupt networks involved in oil theft.

These gains have helped to protect revenue streams, stabilise energy production, and reinforce Nigeria’s position in regional maritime security, although illegal activities have not been fully eradicated. 

“The Nigerian military is overstretched”

According to World Bank data collected from development indicators in 2020, Nigeria has roughly 223,000 active personnel across the army, navy, and air force. The army, which carries out most internal operations, has about 140,000 to 150,000 troops.

In the battlespace, there are simultaneous operations in at least six theatres. That constitutes multi-domain internal security warfare. Nigeria has about 0.1 per cent of its population under arms. When compared to countries facing sustained internal conflict, which often exceed 0.3 to 0.5 per cent, the country is operating below the threshold needed to dominate territory.

On the geography front, Nigeria is over 923,000 square kilometres, with vast forests, porous borders, and ungoverned rural space. It is impossible to hold ground everywhere with the limited available personnel. So troops are cycled, which then leads to fatigue because units stay deployed for long periods with limited rest.

Retired Lt. Gen. Tukur Buratai, the country’s former Chief of Army Staff, recently said, “The military is overstretched, defence budgets are diverted to routine policing duties, and the Armed Forces’ preparedness for conventional threats is reduced.”

However, there are also welfare issues and equipment gaps, especially at the tactical level in remote theatres. The result is predictable: Tactical wins, like killing terror commanders or rescuing hostages are visible, but strategic stagnation remains because you cannot sustain presence everywhere.

The structural constraint: why gains do not hold

Despite these efforts, Nigeria’s security situation remains volatile. 

In many areas, once the military has cleared armed actors, there is limited follow-through by civil authorities, as local administration is weak. So, communities do not experience the full return of the state, allowing armed groups to exploit this gap to re-enter or reorganise.

Economic conditions sustain conflict. Studies have shown that high levels of poverty and unemployment, particularly among young people, create a pool of potential recruits when armed groups offer income, however precarious.

Trust deficits also weaken intelligence because communities that distrust state actors are less likely to share information. This limits the effectiveness of intelligence-led operations and increases reliance on force.

Finally, strategy remains fragmented. Nigeria faces different types of violence that require tailored responses. Yet policy often treats them through a similar lens. Counterterrorism approaches are applied to terrorist attacks, while military solutions are prioritised in conflicts that require political negotiation.

The Nigerian military has played a significant role in preventing state collapse in multiple regions.

At the height of Boko Haram’s expansion, the possibility of sustained territorial loss was real. That threat has been largely reversed. In the North West, despite persistent violence, terrorist groups have not been allowed to consolidate into a territorial authority. In the South East, tensions have been contained below the threshold of full insurgency. In the maritime domain, economic lifelines have been secured.

However, good governance remains the only real pathway out of a cycle of violence. 

Yet the reality remains harsh. Lives are still lost daily. Families continue to sell everything they own to pay ransoms. The military has contributed to pushing back elements of the threat with measurable, though uneven, success, but it has not eliminated them.

Additional data provided by Mansir Muhammed. 

September 2024 came with water. It moved through Maiduguri, in Nigeria’s North East, in fast, stubborn currents, destroying homes and property, and displacing thousands.

In many affected areas, like London Ciki, where Khadija Usman lives, it washed away firewood and charcoal, a critical source of cooking fuel for many homes. She was home alone one afternoon when that absence settled into something practical. Khadija wanted to cook, but there was nothing to burn. 

“The water destroyed almost everything,” she said. “It became difficult to find firewood and charcoal.” Moving out to search for fuel was not easy, as she uses a wheelchair. And like for most people here, the expectation did not shift with the flood. Meals still had to be prepared. 

So, Khadija turned her attention to what was left behind: charcoal residue, bits of waste, and a technique she had once seen. “I decided to come up with a solution,” she stated. She gathered what she could, shaping it into compact pieces that might hold a flame. When it finally caught, it was small, steady, and enough. 

Not yet a long-term solution, but a way through that day.

In the weeks that followed, that small flame evolved into something more substantial. The turning point came when she visited a friend, Zara Tijjani, who also has a disability and was cooking over firewood. The smoke stung Zara’s eyes as she struggled to keep the fire alive. Inspired, Khadija went home, made briquettes, and then returned to show her friend how to make them as well.

From there, the knowledge began to spread among women, particularly those for whom gathering firewood posed significant risks or challenges. What Khadija started in the aftermath of the flood has since contributed to a broader shift in Borno, where biochar is gradually being adopted. However, her focus remains shaped by those around her: women navigating limited mobility, daily cooking demands, the risks of gathering firewood in terror-controlled territories, and a changing climate.

When cooking depends on the forest

Across Maiduguri and much of northeastern Nigeria, cooking still depends heavily on firewood and charcoal. For many households, especially in low-income and displaced communities, these remain the most accessible and affordable sources of energy.

National data reflects this dependence. The 2024 Nigeria Residential Energy Demand-Side Survey by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) shows that about 67 per cent of households rely on firewood, 22 per cent on charcoal, and only 19.4 per cent on liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). In the North East, the pattern is even more pronounced. 

The report shows that wood use rises to 93.4 per cent in the region, the highest in the country, while LPG remains limited, particularly outside urban centres. Electricity and kerosene play only marginal roles in cooking.

In Borno State, reliance is near-total. A 2019 joint assessment by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and the World Food Programme (WFP) found that 98.7 per cent of households rely on firewood and charcoal, with only a small fraction using cleaner fuels. Even access to these traditional sources is constrained. Many households purchase firewood rather than gather it, reflecting both scarcity and restrictions on movement in conflict-affected areas. This aligns with humanitarian reporting that “firewood is the primary source of cooking energy” in Borno.

This dependence carries layered costs. Trees are cut steadily to meet demand, placing pressure on already fragile ecosystems. For women in these communities, who are primarily responsible for cooking, the burden extends beyond the home. Finding fuel often means travelling to the outskirts of town or into nearby bush areas, where risks of harassment and violence persist.

The September 2024 flooding deepened these pressures. Supply chains were disrupted, stored firewood was washed away, and charcoal became scarce and more expensive. In homes already navigating scarcity, cooking became uncertain.

Beyond immediate access, the environmental toll is significant. The NBS 2024 General Household Survey shows that Nigeria consumes an estimated 30 billion kilogrammes of fuelwood annually, driving deforestation. In regions like Borno, where vegetation is already sparse, this accelerates land degradation and desertification, reinforcing a cycle of environmental stress and energy poverty.

Health and safety risks are also closely tied to this dependence. Smoke from firewood and charcoal contributes to indoor air pollution, which is linked to respiratory illnesses, particularly among women and children. In the North East, these risks extend further. Women who gather firewood often face threats of harassment, violence, and abduction, making the simple act of cooking fuel collection a dangerous task.

Within this system, energy, environment, and security are tightly bound. It is this reality that shapes both the problem Khadija is responding to and the limits of the solutions emerging around it.

Improvising in the aftermath of the flood

Khadija’s first attempts were small, almost tentative, as though she was testing not just the materials in her hands but the possibility that something useful could still be made from what the flood had left behind.

Without equipment or formal training, she worked with what was available: charcoal residue, scraps of household waste, fragments others might have discarded without a second thought. She burned them, pressed them, broke them apart again when they failed — testing what held, what crumbled, and what caught fire and stayed lit. The process was slow.

There was no machine then. No structured method. Only a need that could not be postponed.

The knowledge has since gone from one woman to another: Women with limited mobility. Women navigating spaces where stepping out to collect fuel is not always safe.

Within the disability community, the effort did not go unnoticed. 

“We rallied behind her,” said Hassana Mohammed Bunu, women’s leader of the Association of Persons with Physical Disabilities in Borno State. 

“I have stopped using charcoal and firewood ever since I began using her briquettes,” Zara said. Although Zara has been taught how to make them, she prefers to buy them from Khadija. “She uses a machine to make them. And they are more compressed than handmade,” she added. “It is smokeless, and they burn longer.”

Climate shocks uniquely affect persons with disabilities in Nigeria and other parts of the world. These disasters deepen already existing barriers. Mobility becomes more difficult. Access to resources narrows. In conflict-affected settings like Borno and much of the North East, those constraints are often sharper, less visible, and rarely addressed directly.

In energy access, the gaps are even more pronounced. Clean cooking programmes, where they exist, are not always designed with accessibility in mind. Physical barriers, cost, and social exclusion often limit participation. Nigeria’s legal framework, including the Discrimination Against Persons with Disabilities (Prohibition) Act, exists, but its translation into everyday interventions, particularly in climate and energy responses, remains uneven.

Scaling a local idea

To sustain what she had started, Khadija began to think bigger.

She raised her first capital in small, deliberate ways, selling caps and setting aside the earnings. With that, she bought sawdust, Arabic gum, and starch, enough to stabilise her production and move from improvisation to something more consistent. What began at home remained modest but steady, supported by family, friends, and members of the disability community who saw the value in what she was building.

In 2025, her work drew the attention of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). After three months of training at the Abdul Samad Rabiu Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Maiduguri, she received a grant that marked a turning point. With it, she purchased a briquette-making machine.

With the machine, she could produce up to 100 bags of briquettes per day, each sold at ₦6,500.

To deepen her technical knowledge, she partnered with Faaby Global Services, a Maiduguri-based environmental organisation, where she now works closely with a production team. There, she contributes not only as a learner but as a practitioner. 

“She shares her ideas in production and on tackling some challenges,” said Heriju Samuel John, an assistant manager at the organisation. “She is also a native of this town, so she helps us in sourcing raw materials.”

Her machine is now one of three in the facility, a small but significant marker of how far the work has moved from its starting point.

Yet, the broader briquette ecosystem in the region remains uneven. Programmes led by organisations such as FAO have introduced briquettes and fuel-efficient stoves to thousands of households across Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe, often linking energy access to protection concerns.

But outside these interventions, the market is still thin. Production is limited. Adoption is inconsistent. Many initiatives remain tied to donor funding rather than sustained commercial demand.

In that landscape, Khadija’s work sits somewhere in between, not fully independent of institutional support, but not entirely defined by it either.

Can briquettes change the equation?

The briquettes Khadija produces are made largely from what others leave behind. Charcoal residue. Sawdust. Rice husks. Groundnut stalks. Agricultural waste is sourced from farmers and traders who would otherwise discard it. Coconut shells, when available, add density, though they are harder to find in places like Maiduguri and are more expensive.

The materials are burned in a low-oxygen environment, then converted into biochar, and finally ground into fine particles and bound together using eco-friendly binders such as gum arabic or starch. What emerges is a compact fuel that holds its shape and, according to Khadija, burns longer and with less smoke.

“We are recycling,” she said, describing a system that pulls from multiple points in the local economy.

Farmers sell their waste. They also source leftover charcoal and firewood particles from traders. Additionally, waste management actors like the Borno State Environmental Protection Agency (BOSEPA) deliver degradable materials. 

To manage fluctuations, especially during the rainy season when materials become scarce, Khadija stores raw inputs in bulk in a rented facility in the Abbaganaram area of Maiduguri. 

Her briquettes now move through different layers of the market; restaurants, bakeries, and roadside food vendors buy in bulk. Households purchase for daily use. Some consignments travel beyond Maiduguri, to nearby towns like Bama, and even across borders into Cameroon, with up to two trucks dispatched weekly.

For women, particularly those with disabilities, the impact is measured less in scale than in use. Khadija sells at discounted rates within the community and has trained more than 20 women to produce their own briquettes. “She taught some of our members,” Hassana said.

In some households, Khadija told HumAngle, the shift is already complete. Firewood has been replaced. “This gives me joy,” she said, adding that the transition could extend further. “If people fully understand the benefits, they would stop using charcoal and firewood.”

But the shift is not without constraints.

Raw materials fluctuate. Storage remains limited. Transport is still a challenge. And beyond logistics, there are social barriers that do not disappear with production. “People say I am doing what able-bodied people should be doing,” she said. “Being a woman makes it even worse.”

Still, she continues to plan, looking toward a larger production facility that could employ more women and stabilise supply.

Before he became a fugitive preacher, during which time security officials learned to mutter his name with a foreboding weight, culminating ultimately in his killing,  filmed and circulated across local and international news platforms, Mohammed Yusuf was a boy seated before his father, learning the Qur’an. This is where this story begins.

Not in 2002 or in July 2009, which are often cited as the landmark years. The beginning lay far away from prying eyes, in the ordinary intimacy of religious learning, in a world of fathers and sons, mallams and pupils, recitation and repetition.

Those who knew Yusuf’s early life describe a child shaped in his father’s image. According to one of his sisters, who does not wish to be named, “He learned to recite the Qur’an under Baba. He was our father’s student before he became anyone else’s.” He imbibed that discipline, the rigour and rhythm of recitation, correction, and memorisation. 

He went on to study under Goni Bulama, who was reportedly knowledgeable in fiqh (the human interpretation and application of Sharia law). Later, he travelled to Potiskum in Yobe State to continue learning under his uncle, Goni Madu. He stayed there for two or three years, “then he returned home and continued seeking knowledge in several places” as part of the Almajiranci system, his sister recalled. 

Among the clerics repeatedly named by people who followed that part of his life is Goni Modu in Lamisula, a suburb in Maiduguri. He occasionally took lessons from the late Sheikh Abba Aji, a well-respected Mufassir (Qur’anic exegete)in Maiduguri. “Yusuf did not emerge from the bubble; he was shaped through the interplay of ideologies,” said Kyari Mustafa, a researcher and one of Yusuf’s former students. One of his childhood friends, who is now a moderate cleric in Maiduguri, described Yusuf as a very curious child, adding that he thinks “that was what made him learn faster than all his peers”.

According to many who encountered Yusuf, he was many things, some of them deeply dangerous, but he was not a man who wandered by accident into religious influence. He read, listened, argued, absorbed, and faltered like many clerics before him and after him. He later recast those ideas into a corrosive, doctrinal political weapon, with devastating consequences that plunged more than five countries bordering Lake Chad into violence, killing and maiming tens of thousands, and uprooting millions from their communities.

Long before he created a movement the world would come to know as Boko Haram, he moved through circles of da’awah and doctrinal activism that were themselves products of a wider shift in Muslim politics. At one stage, he was linked to the Muslim Brothers, a movement of mostly students active in the 1980s and 1990s that promoted political Islam and reform. Some accounts also linked him to circles associated with Sheikh Ibrahim El Zakzaky, the Shia cleric and leader of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria. Those familiar with that era said Yusuf pulled away immediately from what he regarded as Shi’a framing by key figures in the movement, since he was inclined toward Sunni religious beliefs. However, Yusuf was not separated from their struggle; instead, he was separated over the terms, over authority, aqeedah, and over who would define the path ahead.

The claim that Yusuf was a disciple of the late Kano-based Salafi scholar Sheikh Ja’afar Mahmud and his circle does not hold under closer scrutiny. However, those who observed the stint at Muhammad Indimi’s mosque in Maiduguri and the eventual split describe a sharper divergence. “Ja’afar argued that Muslims should engage formal schools and institutions, then reform them from within. Yusuf rejected that path, calling for a boycott. He pushed for parallel systems built on Islamic guidance with zero secular influence,” said Mustafa.

From the beginning, there were overlaps between Yusuf and dozens of clerics in broad questions about jihad and Sharia. Still, Yusuf pushed toward establishing a totalitarian Sharia system on terms others did not share, or not yet. Across the Sahel, a broad clerical ecosystem continues to propagate hardline doctrinal interpretations reminiscent of those once advanced by Mohammed Yusuf. Many remain obscure, not for lack of ideological alignment, but because they have not transitioned into open confrontation with the state. Unlike Yusuf, whose influence escalated when he mobilised disaffected youth into armed resistance, these figures operate below the threshold of insurgency and restrict themselves to preaching. 

There was also an organisational history that has been largely buried beneath the violence that came later. “Yusuf was once part of a movement in 1997/1998 identified as ‘Jamatul Tajdid Islami’, which was first created in Kano and headquartered there,” said Malam Mohammad, Yusuf’s former associate now based in Kano. By early 2000, he was back in Maiduguri, beginning or deepening preaching activities across several mosques. He was pushed out from Mohammed Indimi’s Mosque, moved to Al’amin Daggash Mosque, was stopped again, and then continued from his own house, given to him by his father-in-law. He named the sanctuary Ibn Taymiyya Masjid after a 13th-century Islamic scholar. 

This was a precursor phase built on a study circle, not an insurgent cell. At the time, young men in white jalabiyas and their wives in black long jalbabs flooded Maiduguri. They were encouraged to bond tightly, abandon schools, and resign from secular institutions. “They shared food amongst themselves. They sold farm produce at subsidised rates from their large farm in Benisheikh. They provided free medical care through two clinics in Maiduguri. They ran a small revolving loan scheme for indigent members,” said Malam (name withheld), one of the movement’s former clerics currently in Maiduguri.

A fighter still active told HumAngle he dropped out as a sophomore at the University of Maiduguri, leaving his parents’ home to move in with a member of the group. “Between 2006 and 2007, I had no skills or a job. I survived on daily meals and food stamps from the Ibn Taymiyyah mosque. I will never forget that support by Malam Mohammed Yusuf,” said the 42-year-old Boko Haram member.

Ideology and a premeditated war

Boko Haram did not erupt because of the high-handedness of security agents, though that high-handedness was real and consequential. It did not begin because Mohammed Yusuf was extrajudicially killed in July 2009. However, that killing transformed him into a martyr in the eyes of his followers and helped harden the foot soldiers in the war that came thereafter. It did not begin because of one helmet law, one police confrontation, or one week of clashes in Biu, Bauchi, Maiduguri, Damaturu, Potiskum, and elsewhere.

Those events merely accelerated the rupture.

The deeper fuse was ideology, and that ideology did not grow in isolation. It travelled with money, with wars fought elsewhere, with transnational religious currents, and with the afterlife of global politics that Nigeria still refuses to examine closely.

In the 1980s, amid oil-fuelled prosperity and the protracted Cold War contest in Afghanistan, a distinct wave of Salafi thought was actively scaled by a Gulf state. It travelled through well-funded clerical networks, charities, publications, scholarships, and layers of international patronage that gave it both reach and structure.

For external backers, the fine details of ideology did not matter. What mattered was shared strategy. As long as this movement in Afghanistan put pressure on the Soviet Union, its beliefs were rarely questioned and were sometimes quietly supported.

In Afghanistan, jihad evolved from a theological concept into something more kinetic, a pathway, a destination, and, for many, a defining personal transformation. Young men from across the Muslim world answered that call. Nigerians were among them. Many of them were strikingly from the southwest region, but when they returned, they did not find the same fertile conditions in their home environment for a project of violent proselytisation. The idea survived, but it did not easily reproduce itself in that terrain.

In the north, these returnee fighters from Afghanistan did not arrive on stable ground. They met a generation of young men with little education and a grim future, a generation that knew the state only through force, neglect, and theft. They met boys raised on the daily humiliation of poverty and poor investment in education by corrupt officials.

That was the combustible field in which Yusuf picked up most of his ideas in the late 90s and began to nurture them into a movement in the early years of 2000. By the time the July 2009 ma’araka occurred, the insurgency had already been imagined, nurtured, and prepared for years. The movement had passed through the stages of learning, da’awah, withdrawal, factional dispute, internal sorting, and ideological hardening.

“Operation Flush” and the broader security pressure during that period disrupted a longer period of preparation. When the confrontation came, the group had not yet fully built what they intended to build. If they had been left to prepare longer, and if the rupture had come later rather than in July 2009, Nigeria might have faced a movement with greater organisational maturity and strategic capacity.

In the weeks after the confrontation between Boko Haram members and Operation Flush in Maiduguri, triggered by the enforcement of helmet regulations on motorcycle riders, tensions escalated sharply. Security forces shot around 20 sect members, an incident that hardened positions within the group and deepened mistrust of state authority.

Mohammed Yusuf responded with an open declaration, signalling that the group would confront the state if certain demands were not met. Within the cult-like community, preparations began quietly but deliberately. Members started liquidating personal assets. Cars, motorcycles, and even houses were sold. Women parted with jewellery and household items. Contributions came from across the network, each person offering what they could.

This mobilisation unfolded in earnest in the month leading up to July 2009. 

Long before the war, there were also fractures inside the movement that foreshadowed what would come later. One notable example is that of Muhammed Alli, who, after disagreeing with Yusuf, left for Hijra to Kanamma in Yobe State with dozens of youths in 2003. They isolated themselves from normal civil life in a remote location. When the traditional leader in the vicinity noticed a strange group of people in his turf in December 2003, he approached them, and one thing led to another; the group had violent confrontations with the Police that resulted in the loss of lives and properties. 

At the height of Yusuf’s sectarian authority between 2006 and 2009, a fracture was already taking shape within his movement. Beneath the surface, a harder, more impatient current was consolidating around Abubakar Shekau, his top lieutenant. “Yusuf believed in sequencing. Build strength first. Recruit deeply. Arm deliberately. Accumulate resources. Then, confront the state from a position of capacity,” said Mustafa.

Shekau, like Muhammad Ali, who led Kanamma, rejected that procedure. They both pushed for immediacy. Strike now and absorb the consequences later. Death itself, whether inflicted or received, was framed as victory through martyrdom, according to those inclined to Shekau’s hardline views.

Malam Hassan (Gandrova), a staff member of the Nigerian Prison Service, who was radicalised during one of Shekau’s brief remands at the Maiduguri Maximum Security Prison, would eventually join the terror group’s bomb-making unit. On Friday, July 24, 2009, he was assembling an IED with two other individuals at his rented apartment in Umarari, ‘Bayan quarters’ in Maiduguri. “Hassan and the two other bomb-making members of the sect were unskilled at the time, and their explosives blew up everyone in the room,” said a former member currently in one of Nigeria’s deradicalisation programmes set up to reintegrate former fighters back to normal civil life in their communities. 

The following day, Saturday, July 25, Yusuf’s followers were attacked in Bauchi. On the night of Sunday, July 26, Yusuf faced mounting pressure from his own ranks after the bomb incident and the raids in Bauchi, compounded by a sting operation by the police in Maiduguri, “who falsely tipped Yusuf’s men that security forces would launch an assault against them before dawn,” said a senior police officer familiar with the events of July 2009. Shekau’s more radical supporters within the group demanded action.

On the evening of July 26, 2009, hours before they launched an attack on the Borno State Police headquarters, Yusuf condemned the attacks on his men during an interview with this reporter, who worked for Daily Trust at the time. “What I said previously that we are going to be attacked by the authorities has manifested itself in Bauchi, where about 40 of our brothers were doing what Allah said, arm yourself and your religion in the face of an attack and an attack was imminent. This was what Malam Hassan [bomb victim] was doing when he became a martyr,” he said.  

Had Yusuf refused the group’s attack on the Police Force headquarters in Maiduguri, he would not have remained leader after that night, said several senior members of the group interviewed by HumAngle. The movement was already shifting beneath him. At best, he would have been sidelined. At worst, he would have been removed entirely by the very hardline faction he had tried to restrain.

Blood ties and the machinery of war

To understand how this story has unfolded, one has to see Yusuf as the centre of a household as well.

He had four wives and a large number of children, between 24 and 26, according to the accounts available. His first wife was Aisha, also known as Ya Bintu or Yaya Bintu. Among the children attributed to her are Yusuf, Habib, Ibrahim, Ahmad, Imam Muslim, Abdullahi (also called Abba), Isa, and Abdulazeez.

His second wife was Fatima, also called Ummu Zara. Children linked to her include Zarah, Alhaji Ba (recalled unclearly in one account), Iya Gana, Ummu Kulthu, Aish, Uma, and Abdulwahab.

His third wife was Hajja Gana, also called Ba’ba. Children associated with her include Zainab (often called Ummi), Maryam, Umar, and Khadija (also known as Ya Dija).

The fourth wife was Ummu Tulaf, or Ummuthulab in some accounts. Muazu is consistently named among her children. This is not a perfect register, but a family history carried through oral memory, insurgent secrecy, death, displacement, and the distortions that come when names are repeated across generations. But the uncertainties do not dilute the central point. Yusuf did not leave behind a disembodied ideology. He left behind a house, and that house has remained part of the machinery of war to date.

One relative of Yusuf, based in Kano, who spoke in detail about the family, put it simply: “All of his children are part of the insurgency. Some are dead now. But they are all part of it with no exceptions.”

The first son, Yusuf, married in Hotoro, Kano State, in 2010. The marriage was brief; he died not long after, leaving no children. His death followed the September 7, 2010, prison break in Bauchi, when Boko Haram freed hundreds of their members. Some of the escapees of that prison break were later traced to a hideout in Hotoro, where Yusuf lived. Security forces moved in. In the exchange that followed, Yusuf, the first son of Mohammed Yusuf, was killed.

Habib, the second son, known as Abu Musab, became the most consequential. Family testimony about his domestic life varies in detail, as such testimony often does in clandestine worlds, but the core is clear. He had multiple wives and many children. Zainab is recalled as one wife, Halima as another, Aisha as another. Their children, depending on who recounts the family tree, include Mus’ab, Humaira, Rumaisa, Muhammad, another Muhammad, Shifa’u, Ramla, Zarah, Rufaidah, Kasim, Abdullahi, and Amir. In one account, there is mention of a concubine or enslaved woman who bore him a daughter. 

After the July 2009 violent outbreak, most of Mohammed Yusuf’s children, except his first son, were moved out of Nigeria. They were first taken to Kusiri in northern Cameroon, then to N’Djamena in Chad, where they continued their religious education under Sudanese and Chadian tutors. This relocation appears to have taken place within months of Yusuf’s death and was aimed at preserving both their safety and their symbolic value within the movement.

In 2012, after Abubakar Shekau left Rijiyan Zaki in Kano and established himself in the Sambisa forest, he ordered Yusuf’s children to be brought back into the insurgent enclave, which the group had begun to frame as its Daula. This move reflected a deliberate effort to consolidate legitimacy by reabsorbing Yusuf’s lineage into the insurgency’s core.

Among those elevated during this period was Abu Musab al-Barnawi. He was progressively assigned roles that combined religious authority and operational relevance, positioning him as a bridge between doctrinal leadership and battlefield command.

From 2015 to 2016, tensions between Shekau and ISIS leadership intensified. The central issue was Shekau’s expansive use of takfir, particularly Takfir al-‘Umum, which justified violence against broad segments of the Muslim population. ISIS leadership, including Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, engaged in repeated efforts to moderate Shekau’s position. These attempts also addressed concerns over targeting practices, the use of female suicide bombers, and command discipline. All efforts failed.

In August 2016, ISIS formally intervened. Through its Al-Naba publication, it announced the removal of Shekau as leader and the appointment of Abu Musab al-Barnawi as Wali of the Islamic State’s West Africa Province (ISWAP). This marked the formal split between Boko Haram and ISWAP. The decision was externally driven by ISIS central and reflected a strategic shift toward a more controlled and population-focused insurgent model under new leadership. 

Abba (aka Abu Umaysa), whose given name is Abdullahi, is also one of Yusuf’s sons. He reportedly had multiple wives and children, including Muhammad, Maryam, Aisha, and at least one other son. Within the insurgent structure, he played a technical and operational role, particularly in communications. Sources indicate he was responsible for managing encrypted messaging platforms that facilitated contact between ISWAP leadership and ISIS-linked actors in the Middle East.

Despite his communications role, Abba was known to participate directly in combat operations, a pattern that reportedly drew disapproval from senior leadership due to the sensitivity of his liaison responsibilities. Internal disputes led to repeated detentions. Abba was imprisoned on four separate occasions by his brother Abu Musab, including periods of detention alongside that of Mamman Nur, a senior figure associated with Mohammed Yusuf’s lifetime.

In one instance, he escaped custody with other fighters and fled to the Niger Republic, but later returned. According to a source, he was subsequently pardoned and allowed to reintegrate without facing the death penalty typically imposed on members accused of attempting to defect.

A senior ISWAP defector, Malam Ibrahim, stated that during one period of detention linked to internal disagreements, ISIS-linked contacts “declined communication with ISWAP as long as they did not hear his voice. He was released immediately to continue his work.” 

Abba later died in early 2023 during an engagement with the Multinational Joint Task Force in the Kangarwa forest area.

The other sons, Muslim, Abdulazeez, Isa, and Abdulwahab, are described by one source as married and without children at the time of this report. However, Muslim was arrested in Chad when he was trying to defect from the group to live outside of Nigeria. 

Even inside the household of a movement that would later devastate the northeast, family life is still narrated through the intimate vocabulary of births, marriages, hopes, namesakes, and unanswered prayers for children. That is exactly why the story resists easy reduction. The people at the centre of violence remained human in their own domestic worlds. That does not mitigate their responsibility, but it explains how such worlds sustain themselves.

The patriarch’s execution

Yusuf’s rise spiked because of his soft-spoken, unusual, and persuasive verbal skills rather than his scholastic proficiency. He did not need the theatrics many expected from Sahel’s religious authorities. He could name what young men already felt but had not yet organised into doctrine. Corruption. Injustice. Absence. State impunity. The feeling that rulers had abandoned both God and the governed. He took those scattered injuries and gave them a single haunting frame.

Yusuf was carrying a worldview shaped by transnational currents, doctrinal disputes within Nigeria and the broader Sahel Islam, and his own insistence that the Nigerian state was religiously illegitimate.

Then came the extrajudicial killing.

Outside the police headquarters in Maiduguri, Yusuf was captured on camera,  alive in custody, seated and handcuffed. Later, he was dead, his body riddled with bullets. The state said he had been shot while trying to escape. The footage with his hands tied, however, invalidated that claim.

What followed was brutal and systematic. Raids spread across northern states, with Maiduguri at the centre. Security forces targeted hospitals and local pharmacies. They forced staff to identify and lead them to patients treated for gunshot wounds or related injuries. Those patients were taken to the State Police headquarters. Some could barely stand. Some were on crutches. Some were executed at close range in the presence of this reporter, as documented here.

For followers, the image of Yusuf became proof of everything he had preached about state injustice. This was the moment the war entered the family’s bloodstream. His children, who had already grown up under his teachings, now witnessed his extrajudicial death. 

Abu Musab was central to the next phase.

The rise and fall of Abu Musab

Relatives remember him first as a disciplined son who rose through the ranks. He became a Munzir, later Ka’id, fiya, then a Waliy. He read deeply. He gained influence not only because he was Yusuf’s son but because he appeared to embody knowledge and steadiness.

Some accounts describe him as a serious internal voice within the insurgency, especially in doctrinal disputes over takfir and the treatment of ordinary Muslims. At one point, some within the movement argued that any Muslim who refused to migrate to the bush and live under insurgent control was an unbeliever. The practical effect of that doctrine was robbery, extortion, and killing. 

Abu Musab is remembered by those close to him as having resisted that direction. “People had reasons they could not leave,” he said in one of his recorded messages. “Not everyone outside the bush was an apostate.” That detail does not make him humane in any broad sense. He remained a leader in a movement that killed, abducted, raped, extorted, and terrorised civilians. But it does place him more accurately within the insurgency’s internal tapestry. He was part of the crop of leaders who believed Shekau had gone too far.

That split would define the next phase of the war.

After Yusuf’s death, Abubakar Shekau turned what remained of the movement into a machine of spectacle and indiscriminate terror. His fighters razed villages, bombed markets, assassinated Muslim clerics, and turned young women and girls into delivery systems for explosives. Entire communities were punished under expansive accusations of unbelief or collaboration. Shekau did not merely fight the Nigerian state. He fought whole populations, including the Muslims his faction claimed to defend.

Inside the movement, dissent built over time. Some of Yusuf’s old followers, including members of his family, believed Shekau had broken from the founder’s original doctrinal line. They still believed in jihad. They still rejected the Nigerian state. But they did not accept his disregard for restraint and counsel.

When the movement pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, those internal disputes widened. That split changed the insurgency’s logic. Shekau’s faction remained rooted in Sambisa and in a politics of fear, punishment, and theatrical violence. ISWAP, under Abu Musab, moved toward an equally brutal but more organised form of insurgent governance around the Lake Chad Basin. It taxed fishermen, farmers, and traders. It built courts, regulated movement, and sought not merely to kill but to rule.

It was still a terrorist organisation. It still abducted, extorted, murdered, raped and coerced. But its method of domination differed from Boko Haram. Where Shekau often destroyed civilian life outright, ISWAP frequently sought to occupy it, supervise it, and harvest from it. Communities brutalised by both insurgents and the military often did not think in abstract moral categories. They thought in terms of survival. To some, ISWAP looked more predictable than Shekau’s men, less erratic, and more likely to tax than to massacre. In this phase, Yusuf’s family became an infrastructure.

Some sons moved into command, others into ideological work. Some daughters married senior figures, tightening bonds between bloodline and leadership. One of Yusuf’s wives, Hajja Gana, later married Abubakar Shekau. The geography of Lake Chad then amplified everything.

Once a vast inland body of water, the lake has, over the decades, become a shifting geography of reeds, channels, islands, marshes, and seasonal passages where state borders blur, and state authority thins into abstraction. A fighter can move from Nigeria into Niger or Chad with less friction than a trader might face at a conventional checkpoint. Armouries can be hidden on islands. Training camps can be relocated across terrains that conceal unfriendly surveillance. Tax routes can be imposed on fishing channels more effectively than the Nigerian state can regulate ordinary commercial life in some border communities.

Yet dynasties do not move cleanly. They fracture from within.

Abu Musab’s rise inside ISWAP did not end in settled power. Internal struggles sharpened. Rivalries widened within the rank-and-file and the shura. Family accounts describe a period of captivity that placed him in real danger. The Boko Haram faction led by one Bakura Doro wanted him dead. Some within ISWAP opposed his return to influence, reflecting deeper internal fractures shaped by ideology, loyalty, and competition for authority. Yet he retained a critical asset: He was a recognised member of the shura within the broader Islamic State network. That status placed him within a transnational decision-making architecture that extends beyond the Lake Chad Basin, linking local commanders to the central leadership historically based in the Levant and later dispersed across multiple theatres.

According to a high-profile source, “a decision was made to extract him, perhaps toward North Africa or the Middle East.” Such a move would align with patterns seen in the Islamic State’s global operations, where experienced figures are sometimes redeployed across provinces. These decisions are often driven by strategic need, internal distrust, or the desire to preserve individuals with institutional memory and ideological legitimacy within the wider ISIS ecosystem.

That plan never reached its destination.

Instead, he moved through Nigeria under concealment. He spent time with one of his wives and their child. He moved through Kano. He surfaced in Kaduna. The high-profile source said, “Kaduna was the location chosen for him to wait for his travel documents to be processed.” HumAngle gathered that he was in the process of obtaining a Niger Republic international passport. At his Kaduna hideout, between April 21 and May 19, 2023, one of his couriers was tracked and security agents followed the trail to the house.

What remains most striking is that they appear not to have known whom they were closing in on. They suspected criminality, but by available accounts, they did not know they were approaching Abu Musab al-Barnawi himself. 

Abu Musab heard heavy banging at the gate, mixed with men shouting and the rumble of vehicles. He knew immediately it was security forces. HumAngle gathered through extensive interviews that he was calm, almost detached. He told his young wife, who was holding their young child, to open the gate. As she moved toward it, he slipped into the room’s toilet. Moments later, he detonated the explosive vest strapped to his body.

The blast stunned everyone outside, including his wife. The sound cut through the compound without warning. He chose death over arrest, over public disgrace, over the certainty of spending the rest of his life behind bars.

There was no public announcement after the blast that killed Abu Musab, no official triumph, no clear state recognition that one of the most significant insurgent figures in the region had died in that house. The insurgents, too, remained quiet, neither publicly mourning nor confirming the incident. Instead, the kunya Abu Musab continued to circulate, adopted by others as part of the deception and continuity that sophisticated insurgent networks rely on.

So he died in near silence.

A complex conflict

The temptation in telling this story is to simplify it into a mirror, a dreadful, clean reflective script revealing the ugliness and wretchedness of ruthless power mixed with aloof governance. The state is wholly guilty. The insurgents are evil. The civilians are trapped. All of that is true, and none of it is enough.

Yusuf’s movement drew strength from three elements that must be held up together if the story is to make sense.

The first was ideology. A structured creed, nourished by transnational currents, that delegitimised secular authority and imagined an Islamic order justified by violence.

The second was a grievance about corrupt governance, collapsed services, absent justice, police extortion, and growing poverty and unemployment across northern Nigeria.

The third was impunity: lawlessness by the state, extrajudicial killings, collective punishment, detention without process, and the routine treatment of poor people as disposable.

Some of the young men who heard and looked up to Yusuf died in 2009, before the insurgency fully matured. Some fled and returned. Some crossed into Chad, Niger, Cameroon and Sudan. Some started living normal lives. Some became commanders, teachers, recruiters, executioners, or administrators in the insurgent order. Some of his children, like Abu Musab, moved into leadership. Others remained within family or support structures inside the insurgent ecosystem. Some died. Some vanished. Some married deeper into the insurgency. Some had children in forest camps and island settlements. Those children then formed a third generation.

That third generation may be the hardest part of this story.

Across parts of the Lake Chad Basin, children have grown up under insurgent authority or the culture of violence, with no memory of peace. Their parents’ stories are not about school, court, civic life, or public trust. They are about raids, camps, betrayal, martyrdom, command, and survival.

In Borno, Yobe, and across the Lake Chad region, insurgency is not sustained only by ideology at the top. It is sustained by marriages, kinship, cattle routes, fishing economies, clerical contentions, clans, dialects, borderland trade, and the practical calculations of communities trying to stay alive between insurgent taxation and military suspicion. A woman’s marriage can be an alliance, survival, coercion, and entrapment all at once. A boy’s movement from the city to the forest can be due to indoctrination, family obedience, or a lack of alternatives. A trader may pay insurgents not because he supports them but because the state has left him no other safe route.

That is also why the story cuts beyond Nigeria. 

The symmetry is brutal. The state killed the father after capture. The son killed himself to avoid capture. Between those two deaths lies the whole distortion of the northeast conflict. A state too often governed by force rather than law. An insurgency that chose violence over any serious claim to humanity. A population trapped between them, paying in graves, hunger, displacement, and silence.

More than a decade after Yusuf’s death, the conflict he helped set in motion has not collapsed into victory or defeat. Instead, it has settled into a prolonged contest between military containment and insurgent adaptation.

The Nigerian military and the Multinational Joint Task Force have, despite operational limitations, prevented a full territorial takeover by Boko Haram and ISWAP. At multiple points, especially between 2013 and 2015, insurgents controlled significant territory. That phase was rolled back through sustained military pressure.

However, these successes were fundamentally limited. The military has achieved containment, not resolution. This creates a circle where military gains are repeatedly eroded in the absence of credible state presence, turning the conflict into a durable stalemate rather than a solvable war.

The danger now is not only that Nigerians forget Mohammed Yusuf’s actual place in this history. The danger is that the next generation inherits only the myths. On one side, the state myth that terrorism came from nowhere and can be resolved through raids, procurement, press releases, and more force. On the other side, the insurgent myth is that an unbelieving state martyred a “righteous founder” and that his children merely carried forward a sacred duty.

Both myths kill.

The truer version is harder. Yusuf was a product of corrosive ideology, ambition, and grievance. That is why this story still matters.

Nigeria did not invent militant Salafi ideology. It did not write the script of the Afghan jihad. It did not create global takfiri currents. But Nigeria did something unforgivable in its own space. It abandoned millions of citizens to conditions in which men like Mohammed Yusuf could speak with authority. Then, when the blowback came, it answered with the same habits that had already emptied the state of legitimacy in the eyes of many.

There is one final image that remains.

Somewhere in northern Nigeria, perhaps in Lake Chad, perhaps in a displacement camp, perhaps in a community held loosely between one armed authority and another, a child is being taught. The question is not whether that child will learn religion. The question is what will be wrapped around it. 

At the end of every farming season, farmers across Kwapre, an agrarian community in Hong Local Government Area (LGA) of Adamawa State in northeastern Nigeria, come together to mark an annual event. Known for their guinea corn farming, the men in Kwapre take turns harvesting each other’s farms. A date is fixed for each farmer, and the rest join him on the farm. While the men work, a set of drummers line up behind them, and the women scatter across the field, singing and dancing to the melody of the talking drum.

Harvest season here was always a farming festival that held the community together for generations. It was the celebration of a bountiful harvest, and after every farmer’s crop had been harvested, the whole community came together to drink and make merry. The festival, however, would later stop as insurgency and violence steadily eroded the safety and cohesion of the community.

Buba Baba, a farmer who used to live in Kwapre, remembers the festival with nostalgia. 

“We were living well. We had an abundant food supply, and our families were well taken care of,” he recounted. 

Everything changed in 2014. The insurgency in the region intensified. The Boko Haram terror group peaked and began spreading its influence across Borno State through sustained attacks and by asserting control over captured communities. From Bama in Borno to Sambisa Forest, the group pushed into hinterland settlements, imposing its rule in areas under its control while terrorising those beyond it.

This influence extended across border communities, cutting through the edges of Borno and spilling into northern Adamawa. Violence moved easily through these indistinguishable boundaries, reaching rural communities in Adamawa. Places like Kwapre, Shuwari, Kaya, and several localities across Madagali, Hong, and Michika LGAs fell within the terror group’s reach. Across these local governments, communities faced the threat of displacement from their land and the loss of their ancestral culture, a fate that soon reached Kwapre. 

That same year, terrorists invaded the community. The annual farming festival became inconsistent over the years and eventually stopped when the once-vibrant area was finally completely abandoned in 2025. 

The violence that broke ties 

Buba is among the over 200,000 persons who have been displaced by Boko Haram in Adamawa State, with most of them from Michika and Madagali local government areas.

He told HumAngle that Boko Haram first attacked his community in 2014, and residents fled the area. After a year, the locals returned, but the terrorists kept storming the area at intervals. Some left for good, while others, like Buba, stayed behind, clinging to their ancestral inheritance and hoping that the violence would end. 

“We go back when everything is calm and flee when the conflict starts again, but by 2025, we have all left, and there is currently no one in Kwapre,” Buba said. 

Boko Haram has been displacing residents in Adamawa since 2014. About 40 people were killed after the terrorists attacked seven villages in Michika and its environs in 2014. In 2016, the group invaded the Kuda Kaya village of Madagali LGA and killed 24 people during indiscriminate shooting. 

In 2019, Boko Haram struck again, but some of them were killed in Madagali after they tried to infiltrate a military camp. However, one soldier and a civilian were killed. In 2020, Kirchinga village in Madagali was attacked after the insurgents stormed the area. Houses were razed and shops looted, causing residents to flee. 

Other attacks were unreported. Data from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) shows that a total of 665 individuals from 133 households were displaced from their communities in Madagali by a non-state armed group in June 2022. 

Chinapi Agara, a resident of Garaha, another community in Hong, told HumAngle that when the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), a Boko Haram breakaway group, attacked a military base in the area in February, communities within Garaha had experienced a surge in kidnappings in the last few years, which had forced many to flee. 

“Lots of communities like Kwapre, Gabba, and Lar have been completely displaced,” he said. Chinapi’s relative died from a stray bullet during the attack. 

Shuwari in Kirchinga, under the Madagali LGA of Adamawa State, is one community that has been deserted following insurgents’ attacks in the area. Despite the recurring attacks in the last decade, locals stayed back, but in February, the entire village was deserted after Boko Haram stormed the area and opened fire on locals. HumAngle learned that 21 people were killed, including the Shuwari community leader. 

Bitrus Peter, a resident of Kirchinga, told HumAngle that this was not the first Boko Haram attack in the area. “Since we came back from displacement in 2015, we have been facing this challenge. Sometimes, they give a break of a year or two and then return,” he said.  

Gambo Stephen, a survivor of the February attack in Shuwari who has since fled the area, told HumAngle that residents have now been scattered across various places.

Back in Shuwari, Gambo owned a barbing salon that brought in a modest income to support his wife and four children. “I opened the shop immediately after I was done with my tertiary education, and for years, it helped me to provide for my family,” he noted. 

On February 24, when Boko Haram raided Shuwari, Gambo’s salon was burnt to the ground alongside other houses and properties in the area. “I narrowly escaped because five people who were running with me were all shot dead,” Gambo said. 

‘Geographically threatened’

These localities around Kirchinga are geographically at risk of cultural loss.

Kirchinga town itself is a border settlement between Adamawa and Borno states. It lies along the banks of a large river that sustains a livelihood built around fishing. Even with seasonal drying of the water, satellite imagery shows stretches of low-lying land between the levelled terrain,  supporting farming during the dry season.  

Beyond this, the area serves as a pathway between Borno and Adamawa, with a road tracing the river’s path and linking a chain of localities. Agricultural fields, water sources, and this road network connect these settlements across the local government area through markets and other primary commercial activities. 

The land around the settlement dwarfs it. The road sustains movement and exchange, but along that same path is the spread of insurgent influence.

Zooming out from Kirchinga through satellite imagery reveals the other settlements facing similar patterns of displacement and abandonment. To the north lies Bikiti. While its layout differs from Kirchinga, the parallels are clear in the vast cultivation fields surrounding the settlement. Alongside these are a mix of swampy wetlands and local streams, supporting a range of ecosystem services, from farming to aquatic life and small game. 

Beyond this lies a large stretch of uninhabited land, many times larger than the settlement itself, composed almost entirely of cultivated fields. Further out, this landscape opens into forested areas that connect toward Sambisa Forest, long associated with insurgent strongholds.

Though these places differ in their satellite layouts, their cultural identities are evident from above. Whether through farming, fishing, hunting or trade, the patterns on the land reflect the life of the people who lived there. These are the same patterns that begin to disappear as displacement takes hold.

Kuda Kaya, another such settlement, offers another case in point. Located northeast of Kirchinga, it has become known for both attacks and displacement. 

It is a small settlement, easy to miss at a wider satellite scale. Within its tight layout are key structures: a primary school, a health post, and an administrative building, surrounded by clusters of homes. The settlement itself is heavily vegetated, with tree cover rising to roof level. Beyond this, shorter grasslands spread into cultivated fields, intersected by small streams. While hunting may not be the dominant activity, the landscape supports tree crops and grain farming.

The intent behind settlement patterns becomes clear when looking at historical imagery, even as far back as 2004, available on Google Earth. The ancestral communities chose flat terrain near rivers or streams, or large forest areas, settling in compact clusters while using the surrounding land for food production.

At present, signs of abandonment are not always as obvious as in parts of Borno or Benue in the country’s North Central. Some of these communities endured repeated attacks, with residents returning each time. But over time, the strain of persistent insecurity led to wider displacement and, in most recent cases, total abandonment.

In a few years, many of these buildings will begin to collapse. Roofs will give way, and some structures will be burned, patterns already observed across abandoned communities affected by insurgency in Nigeria. What will also become visible is the absence of farming. Recent imagery already shows early signs of neglect across what were once actively cultivated lands. 

The same likely extends to the rivers. While satellite imagery cannot fully capture changes in aquatic life, the absence of regular human activity around these waters will affect both the ecosystem and the human systems tied to it, similar to what has been observed in parts of the Lake Chad region.

Zooming further out shows northern Adamawa marked by these border communities, many of which are now within displacement hotspots.

Today, many of their residents live in resettled communities and displacement camps still active across the region, some farther away, removed from the cultural heritage their ancestral lands once provided. They adapt to the host communities, the only available way for them. They can no longer point to land and trace ownership or inheritance. Even when they take up familiar activities like farming, fishing, or hunting, they remain outsiders for a time.

The geographic shift may not always be extreme, but the separation from their roots is. The connection is severed, even when practices are carried into new environments. For those displaced, especially across generations or into prolonged uncertainty, that break becomes harder to repair. It is reinforced by the trauma of the violence that forced them out.

Some still hold on to the hope of return. Others are already preparing to move on, regardless of what becomes of home.

Resettlement 

When the terrorists returned to Kwapre in 2025, Buba faced a near-death experience, and that was the last straw. He fled with his wife and five children alongside other community members when the village was being set ablaze. 

“I left home empty,” he stated, adding that his family didn’t flee with any belongings. 

Buba moved into Hong town, where he settled with his family. With each passing day, he remembered home, but he knew it would be unwise to return. It’s been about a year since Buba resettled in Hong town. He describes the last couple of months as hell. 

“We are suffering, and since I was born, I have never suffered like this,” he said. Buba is unsure of his exact age, but is estimated to be in his 50s. “We have to pay for house rent, and there is no money to do so. We are always pleading with the landlord. We are also managing food supply,”  he lamented. 

Back at Kwapre, Buba had his own house. As a full-time farmer, he said his harvest was always bountiful, and his family was always cared for, but now, they even struggle to feed themselves. He currently works as a labourer on a construction site. His task is to fill up trucks with sand and transport them, but the wage barely covers his family’s needs. Since he has been a farmer all his life, Buba acquired a plot of land in his new area so he could cultivate crops, keep some, and sell the rest to augment his income from his labouring job. 

“I cultivated last year, but it was destroyed by cattle, and I couldn’t get even a bag of maize during the harvest,” he said. 

While he considers himself lucky to be alive, Buba says life has taken a difficult turn. “I can’t even pay my children’s school fees. I registered them in a school here in Hong town but they have just been sent back home,” he said. 

After making it out of Shuwari, Gambo travelled to Yola, the capital of Adamawa State, and settled in an old secondary school in Saminaka, a neighbourhood in the city. 

“I didn’t leave with anything because they burnt everything, so someone gave me a student mattress to lie on,” he said. 

After taking shelter at the school, he was able to phone his wife, who had made it out safely with his four children. 

“They are currently staying with her relatives in Madagali town,” he said. 

Gambo feels his family is better off without him because he has nothing to offer them. 

“Thank God for relatives because they do buy things and give them, and also some friends. If I had left home with some of my valuables, I would have started a business, but I don’t have anything on me. They (Boko Haram) also burnt my farm produce, slaughtered all my cattle alongside others in the village,” he said. 

If the violence ever ceases and peace is permanently restored, Gambo said he would never return to Shuwari, for he had seen enough. 

“My friends died there, and it’s only God that protected me, especially my wife and children,” he said. 

Gambo told HumAngle that the community is completely deserted and that his main concern right now is raising capital to start a business at his new location in Saminaka. If things somehow get better, he would send for his family to join him. 

In 2025, HumAngle reported how many displaced persons from Adamawa are stuck in displacement camps for about a decade because their hometowns remain unsafe. 

Ghost towns

While he has not kept in touch with anyone from his community since he fled, Buba fears that the name ‘Kwapre’ will be erased from history, as the once-lively village now lies empty and silent. He wished things were different. He dreams of a time when the terrorists will stop invading the area, and his people will return and carry on with their regular lives. He looks forward to the annual harvest festival, but he believes his aspirations are not enough to hold water. 

“People from Kwapre have been scattered across different regions. It’s even difficult to keep in touch with close relatives,” Buba said. 

But if the violence ceases and peace is permanently restored, Buba said he will return home even if it means he will be the only one living there. At least, he’ll have his house, his large farmlands and grains filled in his store. His children won’t go hungry, and he won’t have to labour day and night. 

However, some questions linger in his mind: When will the violence end, and even if it does, will Kwapre be the same again?

According to Gambo, the fact that he misses Shuwari can’t be denied. It was the only home he had known all his life. “We used to celebrate together when we were in the village. We lived peacefully, but when the insurgency started, everything crumbled,” he said.

While he misses the community that has stood by him his whole life, Gambo has made up his mind: he is done with Shuwari.

“I won’t go back because the village is on the border of Sambisa Forest,” he said. 

Studies have shown that the Boko Haram insurgency in Adamawa, which targets communities near the Sambisa Forest, has caused several communities within the Northern Senatorial District of the state to vanish. Madagali, Michika and Hong local governments specifically have the highest number of abandoned communities as attacks continue to intensify. From 2023 to 2025, villages in Kwapre, Zah, Kinging, Mubang, and Dabna in the Hong local government, with a combined population of over 10,000, were said to have been massively displaced, with many residents fleeing to safer towns. 

Sini Peter, the youth leader of Kirchinga community in Madagali, told HumAngle that a lot of cultural festivals have stopped due to Boko Haram’s consistent attacks in the area. 

The Yawal festival, the most popular cultural event in the area, was held annually in the middle of the year and is no longer held. 

“A grass would be tied to a guinea corn stem, which is a year old, and we would go out early in the morning, around 3 a.m., to chant,” Sini recalls how the festival used to be held. 

The Yawal festival was so significant to the Kirchinga people that the ritual had to be completed before locals could carry out their daily activities. The chants were traditional songs believed to ward off death from the community and were sung every morning on the day of the festival. Locals were always eager to participate in the ritual and sing the song until terrorists started invading the area.

However, they no longer believe in the ritual’s efficacy or mark the festival, according to Sini. “Boko Haram attacks made death a normal thing to us today,” he said. 

According to the youth leader, the February attack on Shuwari, which had caused residents to flee the area completely, shows a broader displacement pattern across Madagali communities that have been affected in the area. 

“Villages like Imirsa, Madukufam, Balgi and Yafa, which are bordering Kirchinga, are empty due to the Boko Haram issues,” he said, adding that the terrorists have been looting properties like roofing sheets in some of these communities from time to time. 

While many have deserted these areas for good, including Kirchinga town, Sini is among those who stayed behind. “I know that wherever a Marghi man goes, he will remember home because he will not enjoy anywhere like home. Even with the killings, we don’t have anywhere like Kirchinga,” he stated. 

Speaking on the security situation in the area, he noted that the security architecture in Kirchinga is very poor. “What should be done is not done because fear is all over us, including the security personnel,” he said. 

When Ahmadu Fintiri, the governor of Adamawa State, visited the area following the attack in Shuwari, he vowed to secure the area, but Sini fears the promise will not translate into action. 

“There are people trained now; they are called Forest Guards, and when the attacks happen, they do not have arms, but after the governor left, they were given AK-47s, but when they want to go for duty, they have to go to Shuwa to get the arms and return them after duty,” Sini said. 

He explained that this strategy might not work, as the forest guards spend over ₦1,000 daily to obtain and return arms in Shuwa, as protocol demands. 

It’s been a month since people treaded the Shuwari path, and with the community now completely deserted, Gambo fears that his children might never know their ancestral homes or experience the cultural heritage that once united their people. 

What’s left of the ghost towns?

The analysis of satellite imagery from 2013 to 2025 across 14 communities in Adamawa State, using specialised satellite sensors (Landsat/Sentinel), shows environmental change linked to abandonment and displacement. When fields are left uncultivated, the land does not simply freeze in time. In some areas, weeds overtake cultivation, while in others, the soil and greenery collapse, leaving the land barren. 

In communities like Larh and Dabna, the data shows a steady increase in shrubs and bushes. In recent times, peak vegetation values in Larh have risen by nearly 12 per cent, as weeds are left unattended in places where farmlands used to be. 

The seasonal variation has also increased, indicating that the lands now support vegetation growth in response to rainfall rather than following a stable, cultivated rhythm. Mubang and Banga show similar trends, with significant growth in peak farmland weed growth over the same period. The land is reclaiming itself in a chaotic, unregulated way, with invasive, fast-growing plants dominating.

On the other hand, several communities tell a different story. Kirchinga and Kopa have experienced dramatic declines in greenness, with vegetation dropping by 27 per cent and 23 per cent, respectively. These are areas where abandonment appears to have compounded other pressures, such as erosion, burning, or neglect, leaving the soil exposed and vulnerable. 

Shuwari and Yaza have also lost nearly one-fifth of their peak greenness over the same period. Unlike Larh or Dabna, these communities are not witnessing vigorous shrub growth. Instead, the land shows signs of degradation, with both peak greenness and seasonal variability shrinking, suggesting that vegetation’s capacity to recover is weakening. 

This has long-term implications for returnees. The data highlights a dual response to abandonment. In some areas, the absence of farming has allowed nature to fill the gaps, though not always in ways that benefit local livelihoods. In others, the land deteriorates quickly once cultivation stops, leaving behind increasingly unproductive expanses. 

These two observed outcomes will shape the future of the homes should locals return.