North-West

It was at 11:21 a.m. on Sunday, June 21, that things started to fall apart. Aliyu Muhammad was in the Malali area, Kaduna, northwestern Nigeria, working underneath a car when he missed a call from his wife. When he called back, someone else answered and asked him if he knew the owner of the phone. 

“He said whatever he would tell me are just unconfirmed suspicions,” he recounted. “Then, he told me some women saw my wife and suspected she was a child kidnapper. I told him that I left her at home and she was supposed to attend an event. He said that’s exactly what she told them, but the people, seeing a stranger with a hijab and niqab talking to some children while there is a high rate of kidnapping, were suspicious. He asked me to send a representative since I wasn’t around.”

The man who called introduced himself as the Mai Anguwa (community head). Aliyu sent his friend, Suleiman Isa, to fill in for him. Fortunately, the man knew the friend.  

Ummulkhairi left her home in Sabon Gari Marraraban Jos, Kaduna, that morning to attend an Islamic lecture in Madrasat Tashiyhul Iman, an area she wasn’t familiar with. This led her to ask a group of children for directions. However, being a fully covered Muslim woman with a hijab and a face veil (niqab), some of the residents profiled her as dangerous. They mistook her for a child kidnapper. Within a short time, a mob gathered, and they eventually killed her, then set her body on fire, despite attempts to save her life.

The Kaduna State Police Command claimed that officers attempted to save her life, but the mob stormed the police station, overpowered them, and forcefully took Ummulkhairi out. However, eyewitness accounts tell a different story. 

Zainab Musa, Ummulkhairi’s sister-in-law, who was at the scene, said it was the Divisional Police Officer (DPO), CSP Abdullahi S. Akai, who handed her over to the mob, and that she tried to pull Ummulkhairi away from him but to no avail. Other witnesses, including Ummulkhairi’s co-wife, Hussaina Sani, corroborated this account. 

HumAngle visited the police station in Marrarraba Jos, where sources said the DPO “had been transferred to the Force Headquarters for investigation”. On the afternoon of Jul 16, we met DSP Mansir Hassan, the Kaduna Police spokesperson, who said he could not answer any questions because the case is under investigation and officers were not allowed to comment outside the earlier press statement.

After she was lynched, the DPO visited her house with some journalists, who interviewed him right in their compound at the centre of the family’s grief. 

“[The DPO] lifted his trousers to show us the injury he sustained from the mob. He even told us that his car was damaged, and all I could think was how any of that concerns us,” said Aminatu Isa Abdullahi, Ummulkhairi’s mother-in-law.  

On the day it happened 

As Aliyu struggled to reach the scene after the phone call, each passing second deepened his fears. “It was hard to get a bike from where I was in Malali Low-cost, so I had to walk,” he recalled. “While I was walking, I was anxiously calling my friend [Suleiman], but his number wasn’t connecting. I rushed to get my brother-in-law in Kawo Park, and we flagged down a bike.” He also called Zainab, his sister, who in turn contacted Ummulkhairi’s colleagues, who were also supposed to attend the event. 

The bike ride felt slow that day, and Aliyu’s anxiety worsened as he started receiving calls from people asking where he was as the crowd was becoming more erratic. When they reached the Marrarraban Jos Bridge, he saw cars and lorries parked on the road. The motorcyclist dropped them on the other side, and they continued on foot. 

He saw smoke from a distance. Then, as if on cue, his second wife called.

“They have killed her,” she said. 

Those words echoed in Aliyu’s head. He was struggling to hear what she was saying because she couldn’t stop crying, and when he started to ask questions, she couldn’t respond. Instead, she ended the call. 

“When I arrived there, I saw her friend. They were all crying,” he said.

Eventually, he saw his sister and second wife returning with a piece of clothing he immediately recognised as his wife’s hijab. The lemon-green fabric was torn. 

Aliyu had spent the previous night with Ummulkhairi. Every evening, even on the nights he stayed with his second wife, he would stop by to see her and the children. Every morning, before leaving for work, he did the same.

The evening before Ummulkhairi was killed was no different. She told him about her day, served him tuwo and vegetable soup, and they talked as they usually did. 

“I will always remember this as the last meal I had from her,” he said. 

The following morning, when he returned for his daily greetings, he found her seated at her favourite place, with her Qur’an open in front of her. “She reminded me to greet a sick neighbour who was her friend. I told her I would do so when I return,” he recalled.

It was then she informed him about the programme in Madrasat Tashiyhul Iman to which she was invited. He wished her well, and she asked the children to pray for him. 

Neither of them knew they were saying the final goodbye, nor did he know that hours later he would be standing at the police station, where her remains were. 

“I saw my wife’s body, burned and covered with a leaf,” Aliyu recounted. 

That day, he granted some interviews to journalists before the police released Ummulkhairi’s body to the family. “We returned her home and buried her,” he said. It was only afterwards, he said, that another loss struck him. “The phone you saw me give my daughter earlier was her phone, and something that further triggered me was when it was returned to me, I realised that I didn’t even think where her things were. The Mai Anguwa sent someone to give it to me, but he returned her shoes to me himself.”

Witnesses to tears 

When Suleiman Isa answered Aliyu’s call for help that morning, he didn’t know how the day would fracture his friend’s life. He arrived before the situation spiralled, helping to secure Ummulkhairi inside the police station. Believing she was safe, he stepped out to answer a phone call and meet a potential business customer. When he returned to the police station, he didn’t know she had already been dragged out and handed to the mob. 

“I started asking people where she was, and they told me that she had already been killed. At that point, my head turned, and I just started crying,” Suleiman recounted. 

He walked through the back entrance to the main gate, where Ummulkhairi’s body lay. “Some of us tried to stop the burning, after which we covered her body in leaves and put her on a stretcher,” he said. The family later took her home for burial. 

Although Suleiman and Ummulkhairi were not particularly close, he said the events of that afternoon left him shaken.

Grief was the last reason Ummulkhairi visited Hussaina Sani, her co-wife. Now, it is the reason Hussaina spends her day in the family compound, where Ummulkhairi lived, helping to hold together the space she left behind. 

Though the two women lived in different neighbourhoods and rarely saw one another, their relationship was warm whenever they met, Hussaina recounted. 

She had rushed to the police station after their husband called to tell her what had happened. When she arrived, Ummulkhairi had already been placed in a separate room. Inside the station, Hussaina encountered two women accusing her co-wife of being a child kidnapper. 

“They seemed angry, saying that they would not tolerate what happened. One of them got into a scuffle with the police officers,” she recounted. Unable to stay silent, Hussaina confronted one of the women herself. “I got upset and asked her if she saw her kidnapping any child. The woman said her child was kidnapped before. I asked her if it was Ummulkhairi who was responsible, and we kept going back and forth.” 

Outside, the crowd grew increasingly restless. Police officers fired tear gas over the station walls in an attempt to disperse them, but it did little to calm the situation. Soon, stones began raining into the compound. 

The officers moved the women into another room for safety and told them that reinforcements had been called. They also said Ummulkhairi would be transferred to Kaduna. Then the DPO arrived. 

“The first thing he said was, ‘Where is the culprit?’ Our sister-in-law then said, ‘Do you mean to say the suspect?’ and pointed to the room she was kept in. However, he came out dragging her, and my sister-in-law demanded to know where he was taking her. When she couldn’t stop her, she helped Ummulkhairi remove her niqab, and the DPO reached for her hijab, but Ummulkhairi held onto it tighter.” Despite the sister-in-law’s attempt to pull her back, he still pulled her outside and handed her to the mob. 

They heard her scream as the mob descended on her, but none of them could intervene because of the overwhelming crowd. Hussaina’s voice started rising as she recalled the events of the day.

She rejected the police’s account that the crowd had stormed the station. 

“I have no idea how many people there were,” he voice cracked. “There were hundreds, including men, women, and even children. At one point, both roads were filled with people; how could she even fight them?”  

Their sister-in-law, Zainab, ran into the streets pleading with the crowd to listen, explaining that Ummulkhairi was innocent. No one did. At one point, a police officer grabbed Zainab and warned that if she didn’t lay low, the mob might turn on her as well. Zainab was later taken out through a backdoor. 

The ones left behind 

On the morning of July 2, when HumAngle visited, Ummulkhairi’s home was thick with grief. In the midst of it, her children were playing about. Nearby, her mother-in-law, sister, and co-wife were moving around the hearth, trying to fill in the space her absence had left behind. The grief had thickened into the walls, but its weight was evident, even when they welcomed me with a warm smile. 

If Ummulkhairi were there, she would have woken up for dawn prayers, swept the house, and ensured her children were bathed and fed. She would have thrown danwake (bean dumplings) into a pot over the fire, like she did the day she was killed, and sliced pieces of onions into the hot oil. She would have plated it on the colourful plates her sister was now washing. 

Afterwards, she would have taken down her bag from the wall and revised what she would teach her students in her next class or left for school. If she did go to school, she would have returned around 2 p.m. Had I visited then, she would almost certainly have insisted on serving me a plate of food, even if it meant going without herself.

“Tell me about Ummulkhair,” I asked as I sat across from her younger sister, Ruqayyah Abbah, on the multicoloured mat in the sitting room. Ruqayyah had travelled from Gombi, Adamawa State, in northeastern Nigeria, after the news wrecked their home. She paused, as though weighing the question, before she started to speak. 

“Ummulkhairi had always taken care of the people around her. Ever since I knew her, she had always been one to feed and take care of any child. I can confidently say she is the kindest among us all,” she started. “But in a span of a day, all that was taken away when she was wrongly accused. I know she is innocent because I have known her all my life, and even if she wasn’t my sister, I would have said the same.” 

Ruqayyah recounted memories from when they were kids, how Ummulkhairi, who is fondly called Ummi by her family, always stayed away from fights, even when she was teased. As a child, she often preferred to play alone. 

Ummi Abba Gambo was her maiden name. She attended Gombi Primary School and Government Girls Secondary School, Gombi, for her secondary school. After marrying and relocating to Kaduna State, she enrolled in an Islamic school. Upon graduating, she was retained as a teacher due to her diligence. She taught both the children and adult sections. She last visited her family home nine months ago for her father’s funeral. 

“I would say she was the most easily terrified person I know. She always avoided things that would put her in scary or uncomfortable situations. After how she was attacked that day, even if they had left her alive, I don’t think she would have avoided being traumatised by the whole situation,” Ruqayyah said. 

When the news of Ummulkhairi’s death reached Gombi, it landed first in Ruqayyah’s ear. That morning, she and their mother had been trying to reach Ummulkhairi to talk about her youngest daughter’s education. 

“She hasn’t been put in school yet due to financial problems, and our mother wanted to send her the money. After Zuhr (midday)  prayers, I tried her number to let her know, but I couldn’t reach her,” she recalled. “I informed my mother, and we decided to call her later in the day, not knowing that she had already been killed at that point. By the time he called me, they were either about to go bury her or were coming back from it.” 

The details came in bits and pieces, because the grief hit before she could hear the rest of it. She learnt about the gut-wrenching details from their older sister, whom she called after she managed to stop crying. 

Ruqayyah arrived at Marraraban Jos on Tuesday, June 23, two days after the incident, but the reality of her sister’s death did not fully settle until she reached the family home. The first sign of absence was the lack of phone calls from her sister, who often called en route to see how her journey was going and to ask what she wanted to eat when she arrived. That had been the routine every time she travelled to Kaduna in the past. 

This time, the phone never rang, at least not from Ummulkhairi. 

“To think she couldn’t find safety in the police station. What’s the point of authorities that can’t protect someone in that situation?” The anger found its root in her voice. It wasn’t just that her sister died; it was that the system designed to protect her failed to. Her voice softened as one of Ummulkhairi’s daughters walked into the room. 

Seeing her nieces and nephews the day she arrived, she said, was the moment the reality of the loss finally overwhelmed her.

“I just hope the government gets us justice, so that these children and their father can get some peace. I feel so bad for the children. I know how much their mother loved them and how she could breathe for them if she could,” she added. 

Ruqayyah reached for a lemon-green storage box filled with the things her sister treasured. Inside were photographs from her youth and with her family. In one, she was holding one of her children, her eyes looking straight into the camera. In another, she was with friends, her face glowing with the promise of youth. 

As we looked through the pictures, three of her children gathered around, adding the little they knew to the history her sister was sharing. It was then that her second son, Usman Aliyu, brought me her favourite Qur’an, its battered pages, evidence of her love. 

Ummulkhairi is not the only victim of mob violence in Nigeria. It has become a recurring feature of public life in Nigeria, fuelled by distrust of formal justice systems and the widespread belief that communities must protect themselves. 

Suleiman Usman Yusuf, a security consultant and human rights advocate, said the roots of the problem lie not simply in public anger, but institutional failure. 

“The biggest reason is institutional failure compounded by deliberate impunity. When citizens repeatedly watch genuine criminals walk free, whether because evidence disappears, witnesses are intimidated, prosecutors receive phone calls, or judges grant bail to [people] who return to terrorise the same communities, a dangerous conclusion takes root in the public mind: that the formal justice system is not for them,” he said. 

He added that mob justice is not primarily a product of ignorance or barbarism. It is a deeply wrong response to a system that has consistently failed to deliver consequences. 

“People do not burn suspects because they enjoy violence. They do it because they have been taught, through repeated experience, that violence is the only language that produces results,” he added. “The second layer is impunity for the mobs themselves. When a crowd kills someone, and nothing happens, that crowd becomes a template. The next community that is angry enough simply follows the same script.”

He pointed to a pattern stretching across more than a decade. “We saw it with the Aluu Four in 2012. We saw it with Major General Idris Alkali in 2018. We saw it with Deborah Samuel in 2022. We are seeing it now with Malama Ummulkhairi in 2026.”

Although the incidents occurred years apart and in different parts of the country, he said, they shared a common thread. 

“Nobody was ever made to pay a price serious enough to deter the next mob,” he said. 

Suleiman believes legislation remains necessary, but it must be matched by visible accountability. He argues that Nigeria needs at least one high-profile conviction that would send an unambiguous message across the country to stop the cycle. He has been advocating for the Prohibition and Protection of Persons from Lynching, Mob Action, and Extrajudicial Bill passed by the Senate in 2017 to be signed into law. He has written formal letters to the House of Representatives, the President of the Senate, and others.

Amnesty International recorded at least 555 victims of mob violence in Nigeria between 2012 and 2023, with 33 people burnt to death. The regions with the highest cases were the North West (100) and the South West (98), mostly as a result of being accused of witchcraft, theft, blasphemy, or taking part in rituals. 

In Ummulkhairi’s family, however, mob violence is no longer a mere figure. It is a loved one, whose absence is felt every second. Her mother collapsed after hearing the news of her daughter’s death. Family members in Gombi said she remained in a state of deep distress, unable to eat or move normally after the incident. Due to pre-existing issues with hypertension and back pain, the journey was impossible for her to make down to Kaduna, but every time she remembered how her daughter died, the memories triggered another health crisis.

The last meal Ummulkhairi prepared for her family was danwake, but it was forgotten when the news reached the family. The next day, it was thrown into a basket as it had started to spoil. What happened next will haunt their paternal grandmother, Aminatu Isa Abdullahi, forever.

Twelve-year-old Usman, Ummulkhairi’s second son, attempted to eat the spoilt meal. “He looked at us and vowed that he must eat it even if it was spoiled,” Aminatu recounted. They watched him as he shoved handfuls into his mouth, an attempt to save his mother’s last meal, further breaking their hearts. 

“One day I was sitting with her youngest daughter, and she said to me: ‘Will you stay with us until our mother comes back?’” That was another exchange that shattered Aminatu’s heart, and recalling the memory made her break down in tears. She promised her she would stay as long as she was needed, not having the heart to explain that her mother was never returning. 

Aminatu called for justice. Her prayers echoed through the wall, her pain spreading through it. When she arrived at Marraraban Jos after she got the news,  the town was in uproar. As they tried to get a bike to take them to the house, someone warned her to stop crying so hard in case people suspect they are Ummulkhairi’s relatives and try to attack them too. 

“We couldn’t even do the funeral bath for her; we just had to sprinkle water on her burnt body,” Aminatu said. She had declined to see the body, afraid of what would stick in her memory. “They bought some security personnel with guns around the house, and all I could think was what they thought they were trying to protect when we had already lost her.” 

Hamza Dantani, a human rights lawyer, has since submitted a petition calling for a thorough investigation into the circumstances of this case. The alleged negligence contravenes the Police Act 2020 and violates Sections 33 and 34 of the 1999 Nigerian Constitution, which protect the fundamental rights to life and dignity. 

A history of violence 

About seven years ago, Marraraban Jos started having security issues; before then, stories like that were tales coming from far-away places. Sometimes, others from neighbouring villages would call residents to ask if they saw kidnappers approaching their side. This earned the neighbourhood its nickname, Sambisa. 

Things have eased up a little for the neighbourhood, as it was a lot worse three years ago. They hardly went a week without someone being kidnapped there. The men formed a night neighbourhood watch to protect what they could. The women at home live with anxiety every time their husbands and sons go out, not knowing how the night would end up for them. Aliyu was among the men who used to patrol the community.

Ummulkhairi’s family moved to the neighbourhood in 2020 and had lived in their current house for about two years. Right behind the house stretched acres of empty land, extending beyond what the eyes can see. 

“The men usually go out around 11 p.m. to start their patrol. Sometimes, they come back with wounds as a result of hiding in the bushes. I sometimes hear gunshots from my room, especially when one of our neighbours was kidnapped. I started to sleep fully dressed; I would wear trousers and keep a hijab beside me just in case I get kidnapped,” said Habiba Muhammad, Ummulkhairi’s friend and neighbour. 

Recently, residents said kidnapping rates had reduced, but cattle and animal rustling still happens often around that area. Still, they have never seen security personnel posted to their neighbourhood. Years of living with fear had made residents increasingly suspicious of strangers. There were times when people fled their homes simply because they feared an attack was coming.

“We can’t leave because we don’t have money to go elsewhere, and even if they kidnap us, they won’t get much. When we used to run, I would go to my grandmother’s place in Kaduna town. It disrupts our children’s education too; sometimes, they close up the schools when the kidnappings worsen. But now, I have accepted this fate; I don’t want to run anymore,” Habiba said. 

This anxiety is shared with several other people HumAngle spoke to in the area. However, some unanimously agreed that even though kidnapping was common in their part of Marraraban Jos, child kidnapping on its own rarely happens.

 “Sometimes when they can’t find the men, they will kidnap their wives, except in some circumstances where they would kidnap an entire family,” she said. Habiba recalled the experience of one neighbour whose family was attacked. “Because his wife was pregnant and couldn’t walk, they beat her up and abandoned her on the way. They also threw down one of her children when he peed on their body, and he even broke his arm.”

Retracing memory 

Aliyu has a lot to say about Ummulkhairi; her loss is overwhelming. 

“She was very kind to me, and there were many times I would be in distress, and she would offer warmth and support, even when we were going through hard times,” he recalled. “This place you are sitting in used to be her favourite place, and when she is not busy with other tasks, she prefers to sit there and study her books. Sometimes, other women from the neighbourhood come in so she can help them with theirs.” 

As he dug into his memory to answer the questions, his second son lay down the mat as he slyly tried to take his father’s phone as he spoke. When he succeeded, his legs swung in an upward motion as he lay on his stomach, playing with the phone as we spoke about his mother, a contrast from the young child who shoved pieces of spoiled food in his mouth over a week ago. 

“There are so many things I can tell you about Ummulkhairi, but I don’t even have the words. God knows I have suffered such a great loss; the only thing I can do now is pray for her,” he said. 

Uba Sani, the Kaduna State Governor, has claimed that “about 41 persons have been charged with culpable homicide. And about 41 went through investigation also; that’s 82. Thirty suspects have also been charged with unlawful assembly”. 

A June 24 report shows that 24 alleged suspects – 20 males and 4 females – have been arraigned on charges of criminal conspiracy, inciting public disturbance, mischief, mischief destruction of public and police property, and culpable homicide. 

This news reached Aliyu and his family through social media. “They said they were taken to court, but I don’t know much about that. The video I saw showed some people lined up, but I couldn’t really see their faces clearly; I only recognised one face, an old man that I see around,” he explained. 

The family, still waiting for answers about the circumstances surrounding Ummulkhairi’s death, felt excluded from the process meant to deliver justice. “No one briefed us; we have to depend on rumours for information. Her youngest son told me yesterday that if they get justice for what was done to their mother, he thinks he will be better, and I could only try not to cry,” Aliyu’s brother, Abubakar Muhammad, added. 

The recorded videos of the lynching are also a huge wound to the family, and they couldn’t bring themselves to watch them. “I cannot watch these kinds of videos. I avoid social media for that reason. I usually only go in to respond to condolence messages,” Aliyu said. He wished people cared more about how things like this would affect them.

Abubakar said Aliyu often told him that he was worried about his wife during the past few months due to the loss of her father, as it seemed to be taking a toll on her. But even then, she had continued to live life as she always had.

“The most painful part was hearing what the oldest son was saying about taking vengeance for what was done to his mother. I tried to placate him. I even tried to close his mouth, but he pushed my hand away. Things like this can only be solved by justice; only that can give us relief. And if this keeps happening, no one is safe,” Abubakar said. 

Ummulkhairi did not disappear with the smoke that burned her alive in broad daylight that day. She is present in the edges and corners of the house, on the walls where her bag lies, in the kit where she once kept everything that matters,  and in the memories of her loved ones.  

NORTH West has flashed a massive new face tattoo and lip rings ahead of her tour across the US.

Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s eldest daughter, who recently showcased two fresh body piercings, debuted her dramatic look on Instagram.

She pulled up her striking blue hair into an up-do so her face art could be showcased to full effect.

After applying pink eyeshadow and black false lashes, North finished off her look with the writing on her right cheek which read: “Are you ready for the Kimokawaii tour?”

The tour – which spans 14 dates across the US – sees the budding songstress team up with Molly Santana for the shows.

The gigs come after North penned a huge deal with Mariah Carey’s record label and was confirmed to be “recording music”.

While her face tatt – which is likely to be fake or temporary – took centre stage, North made sure her lip and ear bling was on point for the sassy snap.

In her caption, she put two question marks, but fans were quick to reply to the question posed by her body art.

One wrote: “Ohhh yesssss”.

Another confirmed: “Yess can’t wait”.

A third then put: “So pretty omg”.

North is no stranger to vamping up her look.

In another Instagram snap she showcased two piercings on her pointer and middle fingers, which she debuted in November.

Over the last few months, North has flaunted numerous body and face piercings, tattoos, heavy makeup, and drastic hair transformations.

Her followers expect to see even more shocking makeovers now that she’s branched out from posting on a joint-TikTok account with her mother to her own Instagram page.

North shared her first post on the platform on December 19th, sending social media into a frenzy.

Many fans have criticized her mom Kim for allowing her daughter to “grow up fast” and not act her age.

Kanye, 48, has shared the same thoughts, publicly calling out his ex-wife numerous times in the past for letting North be on social media and to dress in a mature way.

The former couple is also parents to a daughter, Chicago, 7, and sons, Saint, 10, and Psalm, 6.

All of their children are primarily in Kim’s care, despite their 2022 divorce settlement granting them joint legal and physical custody.

There is almost no landscape across the West African Sahel that cannot be accessed from the back of a motorcycle. That is why terrorists operating in the region prize them so highly. In various terror operations, motorcycles are used not only as vehicles, but as weapons, and even as a form of currency.

In April, terrorists abducted five residents from their farms in Anka, Zamfara State, in Nigeria’s North West, and demanded a ₦3.8 million ransom. After the affected families managed to raise the money and paid it, the abductors issued another demand: they were to return with motorcycles before the hostages would be released. 

“They told the families that they would kill the victims if they did not bring a motorcycle,” Ciroma Ade* said. He was tasked with travelling to parts of Sokoto, or somewhere else, to buy the motorcycles and deliver them to a location that would be communicated to him later, in his experience, usually around Gurusu Forest between Anka and Gusau. 

It was not the first time he had made the run. Over time, he unintentionally became a ‘middleman’ in the motorcycle ransom economy. He was also one of its victims. In 2024, he bought motorcycles to secure the release of many of his relatives. Buying a ransom vehicle is never straightforward because the region is now more conscious of its purchase, and many vendors will no longer sell the vehicle in that part of the country. 

Sometimes the terrorists arrange for an anonymous ‘middleman’ to travel far, often to the trading hubs in Kano, to source motorcycles on their behalf. Ciroma has his own networks. He knows which traders to approach in Sokoto or Zuru, in Kebbi State, despite the growing difficulty of buying the machines. 

Over the years, he has repeatedly relied on those contacts to secure abducted villagers, including many of his relatives. Once the motorcycles were purchased, the terrorists would arrange a meeting point for delivery. He did the same this time. Most of the time, the hostages returned alive. The terrorists appeared to understand the continuing value of keeping captives alive; they were useful leverage for future negotiations. 

This time was different. The victims were killed anyway.

An emerging trend has taken hold across parts of northern Nigeria. Terrorists have created a self-sustaining system in which motorcycles have become a form of ransom. Each abduction helps replenish the very machines used to carry out the next one. The motorcycle has become both the means of violence and its reward.

HumAngle learned that terrorists in the region frequently use commercially available motorcycles, especially Honda models, for their durability, availability, and suitability for rough terrain. They ride them into battle, use them to swarm a target, and conduct large-scale operations like mass abductions. 

Ciroma, for one, knows this too. As one of the reluctant middlemen who helped bring ransom motorcycles into the system, he believes his community has become both a source of motorcycles for terrorists and one of the least safe places in the country.

While researching how motorcycles have become inseparable from conflict in the Sahel, I could not find many stories that told the tales of war from the motorcycle’s perspective. Almost every day brings reports of non-state armed groups using motorcycles to attack villages, ambush troops, abduct civilians, or simply move from one place to another. Yet the motorcycle itself rarely occupies the centre of those stories. 

Conflict reporting understandably focuses on bloodshed, casualties, military operations, and the growing sophistication of insurgents’ weaponry. Compared with assault rifles, rocket launchers, or improvised explosive devices, motorcycles appear almost mundane. But this overlooks one of the constants of modern insurgency.

Across Nigeria’s conflict theatres, and much of the wider Sahel, the motorcycle is present regardless of the group, geography, or operation. It functions simultaneously as a transport, a logistics platform, an escape vehicle, and a weapon. There should be a literature that treats it as the protagonist rather than merely part of the scenery.

This is what we are attempting to do. 

Ciroma had just returned from the cemetery, where he and other villagers buried five people killed by the terrorists, when he heard that a journalist wanted to know about the motorcycle ransom economy. He spoke passionately about the suffering of his community. 

During his final assignment, he deliberately delayed delivering the motorcycles until every option had been exhausted. After the victims were killed, he sold the motorcycles and distributed the proceeds back to their families. 

As he told members of his community, he wanted nothing more to do with the “thieves”, including playing a part in the supply chain that sustained them.

If soldiers were willing to follow the motorcycle tracks into the forests, he said, he would guide them himself. He knew the routes. He knew the delivery points. Together with the local vigilantes, they could reach the camps where he had previously delivered motorcycles. “They could clear the thieves out,” he said. 

The rider 

Back in Abuja, I needed more perspective if I was going to write this story. 

I left my estate and approached a commercial motorcyclist waiting by the roadside. He eyed me suspiciously. He wanted no association with terrorists, even if it meant nothing more than answering a journalist’s questions.

Standing nearby was another rider, Musa Abba. He waved me over, introduced himself, and agreed to speak, but only off camera. I asked him what it felt like to ride his bike every day. 

“There is no place I cannot reach with this machine,” he said. 

Musa trusts his motorcycle more than anything else. He kicked the engine to life and gestured for me to climb on. He had decided the interview would be better conducted while we were moving.

As I settled in behind him, my thoughts drifted, not to motorcycles, but to horses. I found myself thinking about how civilisations across the ancient world discovered the extraordinary power of a mounted rider. Horses became indispensable: first for farming and transport, then, most significantly, for war. They were the all-important multipurpose machines of their age.

They could hardly have imagined that one day a two-wheeled machine would replicate the power of a cavalry many times over. Perhaps they wondered about it. Back then, even with other machines of war, such as the horse-drawn cart, the camel caravan, and eventually some mechanised infantry, the role of the rider in battle remained central.

Motorcycles have inherited that role.

Some recent research has begun to recognise this. Analysts have documented the emergence of a ransom economy in which insurgents increasingly demanded motorcycles instead of cash. Communities are taxed to replace bikes lost during military operations. The most in-depth literature was compiled by the Global Initiative, an international think tank that interviewed people across the West African Sahel and found that motorcycles were stolen and trafficked over the years to sustain transnational criminal operations in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and the Republic of Benin.

Not much was said about Nigeria in the report. However, the Nigerian Army has, in press statements, documented the seizure of thousands of motorcycles in counterinsurgency operations in Nigeria. Beyond those records, evidence also lies along the routes connecting illicit smuggling and trafficking hubs, with networks tracing back to the organised trans-Saharan trade from the 8th to the 16th centuries. Today, those same corridors still carry motorcycles used for smuggling and for slipping along clandestine routes that let riders avoid conventional roads and border checkpoints.

The motorcycle is now so woven into life across West Africa, the Sahel, and the Lake Chad Basin that the mobility it provides sustains entire communities, and many people in the lower and middle classes cannot imagine life without it.

As we continued the ride, Abba said, “When it is time to work, the only road I cannot enter is a place I am not allowed to work.” 

The war machine

How does a bike measure up to the cavalry? Scottish engineer James Watt coined the term ‘horsepower’ in the late 18th century, defining one horsepower as the daily output of a strong working horse. In reality, a horse sustains only about half that output over the course of a day. 

I wondered whether the rider ever feels limited by terrain, and what it must feel like to have such command of the road. 

“Surely you cannot climb rocks with it,” I said in Hausa, pointing at a hill we were riding past. “There is no place I cannot reach with this machine,” he repeated over the soft rush of wind. “Wannan karfe ne,” he continued. This is metal. 

His Hausa made the argument sound more emphatic.

“It is not like rubber-rubber,” he went on, referring to the flashier plastic-bodied motorcycles. “A bike like this,” he said, gesturing at his motorcycle, “is the most durable of them all. You don’t need to maintain it much, and it doesn’t consume as much fuel as most other brands. You can change the oil just once in a while if you like. It can go anywhere, enter almost anywhere, and its second-hand value is even better than rubber-rubber [brands].”

Abba went on and on about what makes a motorcycle valuable in everyday life, and in doing so, he laid out exactly what makes it valuable to a terrorist across the conflict zones of Nigeria.

Measured by sustained power output, a Honda CG125 delivers roughly the equivalent of about 16 working horses. By that measure, a single terrorist on a motorcycle is riding with the power of about 16 horses at a time. 

What we found

Over months of work, we built a database by measuring hundreds of military operations conducted over the past decade, logging every reported incident of motorcycle seizure and the count attached to it. Between February 2015 and November 2025, the Nigerian Army reportedly seized at least 2,607 motorcycles across 300 separate encounters. Taken together, this aggregated press data describes the logistical philosophy of the terror groups that the troops fight. 

The seizure records also reveal distinct phases. At various points, different armed groups appear to have dominated motorcycle use, and there were periods when almost every operation reported by the military involved recovering bikes. Yet the headline figure of 2,607 motorcycles over ten years tells only part of the story.

In the early years of military engagement in the insurgency, the totals were driven by a handful of major discoveries, followed by long runs of tens of operations, each yielding only a single vehicle. These recoveries were not sustained by patrol pressure; they came when a campaign stumbled on a cache. 

Over time, however, the army evolved its tactics. It pushed deeper into the terror enclaves in the forests, adopting specialised strategies, including the so-called strangulation strategy of the late 2010s, which was designed to starve the groups of the fuel and resources that kept their motorcycles running, and in many ways they set up the clearance operations that produced the few thousand vehicles in the record.

The earliest phase of this campaign against the motorcycle is unclear in the data. In late 2015 and 2016, at the peak of the Boko Haram insurgency, motorcycles were still being treated as secondary characters in the war. At the time, Boko Haram could field a 15-gun-truck convoy against a Forward Operating Base in Borno, sustain multi-wave assaults with machine guns and specialised Type-36 hand grenades in a single engagement, and then publish videos of the attack to showcase its strength and firepower.

Counterinsurgency reports from the period mention motorcycles only in passing. The focus was on weapons recovered, fighters neutralised, and territories retaken. But the bikes grew more prominent as larger caches began to appear in the record around 2017. Most seizure events still involved a single motorcycle, but occasionally the numbers jumped to a few or to a large cache, almost always the product of a one-off encounter or an ambush on a terrorist base. 

As the military expanded its operations deeper into the forest to dislodge the groups, recoveries increased, especially in the northeastern region. I designate this as the first of two eras of riders, as the aggregated data reveal the core role of motorcycles in the wars.

The era of riders

On Feb. 17, 2016, soldiers of the 7 Division Garrison, on a clearance mission, entered Gulumba in Bama Local Government Area in Borno State. They found what they described as a small city where they had expected a makeshift camp. Inside were medical supplies stored in a field hospital, a sizable market, two logistics trucks, a grinding machine, and an industrial 100KVA Mikano generator. The most important find, though, was the transport garage of 180 motorcycles and 750 bicycles. In a single operation, at least 930 potential combatants were denied transport that day.

The period between 2016 and 2017 belonged to Boko Haram’s riders. Operation Lafiya Dole, a counterinsurgency operation of the Nigerian government, alone accounts for 57 per cent of all seizures in the dataset, with 1,792 motorcycles across 96 records, almost all recovered during camp-clearance operations in Borno. That works out to an average of 19.7 motorcycles per recorded operation. 

Viewed over the full 2015–2025 period, the distribution of motorcycle seizures tells the story of two distinct conflicts. The first peaks in 2016; the second begins to emerge after 2022. 

The defining year is 2016. Alone, it accounts for almost half of all motorcycles recorded in the dataset: roughly 1,300 bikes recovered across just 86 records, an average of 17 per record, far above any other year. This was the peak of Operation Lafiya Dole’s deepest push into Boko Haram’s territorial strongholds in Borno, where large-scale camp clearances dismantled the insurgency’s mobile logistics in bulk. 

The pattern continued into 2017. Although the database contains only 10 records for that year, it accounts for 331 bikes, carried almost entirely by a single cache of 301 bikes recovered at Njibulwa, an insurgent enclave in Borno State.

After that, the numbers collapsed. Between 2018 and 2022, annual recoveries averaged just 49 motorcycles. 

The second era of riders

Then there was another uptick in 2023, but it is a different case from 2016. This time, the centre of gravity shifted westwards. Kaduna led the increase, accounting for 88 recovered motorcycles, mostly linked in military reports to “terrorists”. The change reflected the growing prominence of motorcycle-riding armed groups in north-western Nigeria from around 2020 onwards.

Unlike the Boko Haram years, recoveries were no longer dominated by massive camp clearances. Instead, the database settles into a consistent pattern of around five to eight motorcycles per record, with a steady climb. The groups they were recovered from were labelled by the security forces as “bandits”, not Boko Haram. 

After 2022, the number of seizure records rose sharply, even as the number of motorcycles recovered in each operation remained relatively low. Instead of discovering large transport depots, security forces were finding motorcycles in small clusters during repeated engagements. Operation Shaaran Daji became the leading source of recoveries in the northwestern region, signalling that the motorcycle had become embedded not in large insurgent camps but in dispersed, highly mobile armed networks. 

The informal motorcycle networks through the Sahel

There are dirt roads in the desert that cross international borders and run through the Sahel’s sands, following routes that have connected communities for centuries. Many trace the arteries of the trans-Saharan trade, linking illicit hubs of smuggling and trafficking through networks first established hundreds of years ago. These pathways did not disappear as modern states emerged across the Sahel. Instead, they evolved alongside them. Most still exist today, at least as part of a broader web of formal and informal routes connecting contemporary roads to historical trading corridors that continue to facilitate cross-border movement.

Consider the recent ruins of Metele, which is comparatively recent than the historical networks, a Borno town brought down to rubble by the Boko Haram insurgency and abandoned for years, and crumbling into building blocks. After a decade of silence, the one thing that has only grown more visible is the roads, and in particular the ones made by motorcycle tracks. These have deepened with continued use, suggesting activities likely by insurgents operating in the area. 

Metele and hundreds of villages in northern Borno around it have been abandoned, leaving only insurgent camps and military bases that occasionally clash in the parts where these routes link them. Yet the old roads have only grown deeper, and new paths have opened across the empty ground, as seen in the satellite imagery below.

Let’s follow the Metele tracks eastward and see where it leads. It runs for about eight kilometres of the bike route, crossing onto the shore of an island in Lake Chad, and continuing from there across the flat terrain of the island, with many sub-tracks splitting off toward different corners, while the main track presses on east, along the shore and onto a much larger island with road networks also branching off on every side and onto other islands. We stop here because this island matters for a particular reason. Among its thousands of tracks sits a largely isolated compound in the island’s north.

In May 2026, US forces, working with Nigerian Army intelligence, carried out an airstrike on that compound and killed a senior ISWAP commander, Abu Bilal Al-Minuki. The site was geolocated using video of the strike released by United States Africa Command (AFRICOM). 

Al-Minuki served as a liaison between ISWAP’s various commands across the Lake Chad Basin and the wider Islamic State organisation. Different factions of the group operate on multiple fronts, with administrative functions carried out in locations such as this island. Senior commanders often gathered in secluded places like these, whether in forest compounds in Sambisa or in camps scattered across the islands of Lake Chad.

When fighters enter Nigeria, they may arrive by boat from neighbouring islands, or blend in with ordinary travellers using the road network. Once inside the theatre of conflict, however, the motorcycle becomes the preferred means of movement. It allows commanders to visit training camps, inspect fighters on different fronts, and travel rapidly between operational bases.

These tracks travel far and wide, meeting at certain points across the Sahel. They run north into Lake Chad, or northwest toward the Niger Republic. Cross-border routes make neighbouring communities, places like Diffa in Niger, feel as close as the other side of the street. The motorcycle gives its riders command at border crossings, and they hardly worry about checkpoints on official roads unless they intend to attack the location and run into state forces on either side. 

Here, the border itself counts for far less. This indistinguishable, landlocked frontier has been reshaped by centuries of informal movement, by daily life that transcends the very idea of nationality. These places have long borne the brunt of regional security forces unable to fully command the area, and in a geography this vast, with so many options and pathways, smuggling and trafficking are barely a challenge.

The network of informal motorcycle routes is still more intricate. Some lead into the ruins of the hundreds of villages, like Metele, abandoned across the area. The ruins of Metele is within 50 kilometres of the nearest fringe of communities where people still live. The tracks also connect to minor and major roads leading to inhabited areas, giving the motorcycles access for incursions. 

Eventually, these routes connect to every community in the region. Across the flatlands of Metele and Lake Chad through the desert of the border country, the motorcycle is highly effective, and this is why it is such a powerful weapon in the typical insurgent arsenal, despite the secondary attention it tends to receive next to the AK-47s and rocket launchers recovered alongside it in a raid.

The forest route 

You will rarely hear about motorcycle–riding terrorists being caught at a military checkpoint, on their way to an operation or simply travelling. For anyone who knows the terrain, there is often no need to cross a major road on most journeys in the region. 

The forests of Sambisa, Kyumbana, Mando, and the Mandara Mountains welcome the tyres of the war machine. HumAngle has previously reported on fighters travelling, moving, even migrating to another state through the interconnected, ungoverned forest reserves of the region, which give them multi-state reach and the ability to turn up in almost any part of the country.

Once through the forests and the mountain wilderness of the northeastern region, riders reach the other end of the country, though not necessarily in one go. They drop down now and then onto the main road, sometimes to refuel; there are reports of the military intercepting them and warning filling stations not to serve them. They settle for a while in certain towns, or in camps near towns, using the towns as supply bases before picking up the trail back into the wilderness and on toward their destination. 

The machines are useful throughout the journey, should they wish to travel from the northeast to the northwest. In 2022, HumAngle reported how fighters from the forests of the northwestern region, such as the Birnin Gwari and Kamuku forests, often travel through towns, stopping at communities where they are repeatedly reported to assault local residents, particularly women, often sexually, before continuing toward an operation elsewhere. The very sight of them on their bikes has already terrified those communities into compliance with whatever they demand. It has become a kind of tradition in Kaduna, in Niger, and even in Kwara State when these riders come into town.

From this end, too, groups like the Lakurawa have been reported riding into Nigeria. Locals often describe them as Arab-looking non-Nigerians entering through the porous borders in the northwest, and a similar pattern is evident along the Lake Chad Basin on the other side of the north. Recent reporting has confirmed the group as a faction of the Islamic State operating in West Africa, and in Nigeria in particular. 

They move through the Sahara along a network of ancient routes and illicit hubs where trafficking and underground resources are available to anyone on the road. This underworld of hubs and crossings is what lets riders pass between countries.

The Sahel underworld

When the collapse of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime released Libya’s vast weapons stockpiles into the region, it was this same illicit Sahelian underworld that carried many of those weapons into West Africa, including Nigeria.

Before he was killed, the terrorist kingpin Halilu Sububu was reported to ride with his gang across this terrain, loaded with gold sourced from the artisanal mining pits they controlled, and to return to Nigeria with weapons traded for that gold. Those weapons became the lifeblood of banditry in the country’s northwestern region and made Sububu the chief arms supplier to the various groups there. 

His advantage was not simply access to weapons, but access to the routes. He reportedly knew how to travel to the Sahel and return with arms without significant interference. His command of the motorcycle corridors enabled his network to move across borders with relative ease. The same routes connected him to weapons originating from the post-2011 Libyan arms outflow, and even allowed combat vehicles acquired by his organisation to be delivered through the network.

Critical transit and logistics networks span multiple border regions across the Sahel and West Africa, including the Burkina Faso–Côte d’Ivoire border, the Côte d’Ivoire–Mali–Burkina Faso tri-border area, and the Ghana–Burkina Faso frontier, where Hamile, Tumu, and Bawku serve as key crossing points. Further north, Ansongo in Mali, Arlit and Agadez in Niger, and numerous settlements across the Mali–Niger–Burkina Faso tri-border region function as centres for acquiring, consolidating, and redistributing illicit resources.

Perhaps the most famous network that leads into northern Nigeria is the one from Libya. It crosses through illicit hubs and artisanal mining sites, most of which are controlled by armed groups. The network of arms smuggling runs from Libya, usually from the desert oasis of Sabha; the journey flows through Fazzan in southern Libya and crosses the infamous Salvador Pass into the Republic of Niger, where illicit hubs and mining networks link to Sokoto, Borno and Zamfara states, connecting through Niger Republic routes from Agadez, Maradi, Tahoua, following ancient trade routes that continue to shape movement today.

These hubs share a profile of remote geography, thin state presence, weak governance, and established illicit trade networks that move goods and people across borders.

Motorcycles rule in this terrain.

Of middlemen and motorcycle bans 

We met another middleman, Abu Dogara*. Unlike Ciroma, he was not interested in sharing his experience, as his job still leaves a bad taste in his mouth. He answered mostly with short replies, with the occasional long clarification about the details of his involvement in the motorcycle ransom economy. 

Earlier, we talked about the middlemen: the mostly anonymous intermediaries who know how to secure the motorcycle for victims’ families when all other options are lost. Abu was a middleman, at least until terrorists abducted his sister-in-law. He wanted me to understand that the last time he was on the job, he had not dealt with the terrorists himself. They had taken his younger brother’s wife, so it was his brother who spoke to them. He had played the same role as always, travelling to buy the motorcycles.

As awareness of the terrorists’ reliance on motorcycles has grown, buying one anywhere near the axis has become increasingly difficult. Most of the people we spoke to about sourcing a ransom vehicle named far-off places like Kano, Kebbi, and even Lagos. This is part of what has driven the rise of the anonymous middleman, sometimes known to the kidnappers, and sometimes hired by the victim’s family. 

Abu travelled to Sokoto to buy the bikes. He searched and found nothing. An issue he hadn’t faced before. But finally, he met a vendor with a single one in stock, a Honda, exactly the kind the kidnappers wanted. The vendor let him have his last one, but warned that they were getting harder and harder to find in the area.

Across northern Nigeria, state governments have introduced strict motorcycle bans and usage restrictions to counter-terrorism and “banditry”. Niger State went so far as to ban motorcycle sales outright, specifically targeting high-capacity models such as Hondas, which are frequently demanded as ransom. Elsewhere, the measures range from outright commercial bans to localised movement restrictions, all intended to disrupt terrorist logistics. Katsina and Zamfara states have also introduced night-time curfews and complete movement bans in forested areas.

Abu does not like to dwell on the last job. He remembers only that the motorcycle cost more than ₦2 million, and that finding it was painfully difficult. At one point, he even asked his brother to persuade the kidnappers to accept cash instead. They refused. In the end, the Honda he bought in Sokoto secured his sister-in-law’s freedom. 

In Kano and Kebbi, the approach moved away from banning sales altogether, focusing instead on restricting how the bikes can be ridden to stop criminals from using them for quick getaways and remote logistics. Many sources we spoke with named Kano, Kebbi (Zuru), and Sokoto as sources for the machines, with Kano and Kebbi most consistently described as the last resort.

The machine they cannot beat 

To replace the motorcycles seized by the troops, terrorist groups tax the very communities near where those seizures take place. In one incident, terrorists taxed a community that had narrowly escaped a planned terror attack, saved only because soldiers happened to be in the village at the time. In another, one kingpin abducted a district head and party chieftain in a village in Zamfara, saying that his confiscated motorcycles were the reason for his actions, and he must be compensated.  

The military, meanwhile, has continued its effort to take this logistics core out of play. Beyond the strangulation strategy and the more than 2,600 confiscated motorcycles, different state security forces have also made a show of their counter-insurgency, such as setting whole sets of captured bikes ablaze to send a message, and recording large-scale successes in neutralising entire gangs and seizing hundreds of machines at a time. The groups have only pushed back harder, embedding motorcycles into ransom negotiations to secure both the financing and the means to replace whatever war machines they lose.

Across much of Nigeria’s North, attacks launched from the back of a motorcycle are becoming more common. The country is still dealing with motorcycle-facilitated crises at both extremes. It is the one insurgent tactic the Nigerian security forces have not been able to beat. Not with trenches on the battle fronts of the northeastern region, nor in the communities across the country where these raids have become a regular part of recent reporting.

The Nigerian Army has itself adopted motorcycles for parts of the same war. Boko Haram deserters recruited to support counterinsurgency operations ride ahead of advancing troops on motorcycles, scouting for ambushes, improvised explosive devices, and landmines. The machine has become indispensable to both sides.

For many survivors, the sound of a motorcycle engine will always bring up the worst of their memories.

The names of the middlemen have been changed to protect their identities.

When dozens of farmers bade farewell to their family members on the morning of Friday, June 12, and headed out in different directions to work on their farms, 17 of them were not lucky enough to return home alive. The farmers were killed after terrorists invaded their fields in the Maradun Local Government Area (LGA) of Zamfara, North West Nigeria.

Locals say 13 other farmers were injured during the attack, with three of them referred to the Usmanu Danfodiyo University Teaching Hospital (UDUTH) in Sokoto. A survivor of the attack, who identified himself only as Bello, told HumAngle that he was on his farm in the outskirts of Gora in the Maradun LGA, at around 9 a.m., when he heard the first gunshot. He said he thought it was one of the Yan Sakai local security guards, but it became clear that it was a terrorist attack when the gunshot sounded a second time. Yan Sakai security volunteers are young people carrying weapons to protect residents from terrorist attacks. 

Bello recalled that he was lying face down while others fled. As the gunfire persisted, he managed to pull himself to the other side of the road before running home. “I was lucky, my farm is right on the side of the road; most of those killed had their farms a little bit away from the road,” he said.

For over ten years, rural terrorism has become widespread and persisted in Zamfara and other northwestern states. In many ungovernable areas, farmers are compelled to pay a farming tax before they are permitted to work on their fields as the wet season arrives. The armed groups also require farmers to make payments running into millions to cultivate their crops. Even after paying, not all communities are granted access to their farmlands. Many communities have been displaced, and food stores have been torched because residents failed to pay the required farming tax.

HumAngle recently reported that about 40 leaders of a farming community were abducted at a peace deal meeting with a terrorist leader in a village in the Maradun LGA. The community leaders were lured into a meeting to discuss how much they would pay to a terror group, only for them to be abducted by the leader of the criminal syndicate. In a separate report, we also documented how farmers were being displaced after paying millions of naira as farming tax to terrorists in Zamfara.

“There were a lot of motorcycles with bandits on top, shooting sporadically, but I managed to escape. The bandits [terrorists] must have divided into groups because there were gunshots from all corners,” Bello said.

The chairman of the Maradun LGA, Sanusi Dosara, stated that the recent devastating attack reflects the ongoing efforts of terrorists to disrupt farming activities in the state. Since early June, there has been an increase in attacks aimed at farmers in Zamfara. 

Prior to the latest incident, two farmers were killed while tending to their fields near the Kaya community, not far from Gora in Maradun. Earlier, eight farmers were killed in an attack in Gima village, located in Anka LGA. According to locals, the farmers who lost their lives in the Gima assault were: Sani Kanen Tidurogo, Salisu Kadda, Bello Kyabe, Ibrahim na Yakubu Ziti, Yusuf Malan Rabi, Masaudu Sani Adake, Abdulmajid Sani, and Adamu Dungo.

“The terrorists are intentional about what they want,” Abdulmudallib Anka, a resident, told HumAngle. His house in Anka is filled with internally displaced persons from Gima and other villages. “The day of that attack, the terrorists circled a group of farmers working on their farms before they started shooting sporadically.”

Abdulmudallib noted that the recurring attacks have shown the terrorists are ready to continue their onslaught against the civilian population, so as to stop them from gaining access to their farms. There have also been reports of attacks in which farmers were killed in the communities of Kaura Namoda, Tsafe, Zurmi, and Birnin Magaji LGAs over the past few days.

Sulaiman Abdullahi, a youth leader in Birnin Magaji, said the situation has forced several farmers to stop going to the farm.

“Early June, farmers were attacked outside Tungar Danjuma and Gidan Kyafda, which led to the death of about six farmers with several others injured,” Sulaiman said. “That same day, farmlands on the Birnin Magaji – Kaura Namoda road were also attacked around 1 p.m.”

In Zurmi LGA, the terrorists struck on June 7 and invaded the outskirts of the town, along the road to Kaura Namoda, killing two farmers working on their farms. 

For two weeks, the fate of Major General Rabe Abubakar (rtd) had become a barometer for testing whether Nigerian authorities could secure the release of a high-ranking military officer from the hands of terrorists operating in the northwestern region.

The answer came on Saturday, June 13, in a press statement by Nasiru Muazu, Katsina’s Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs. The retired general could not be rescued, the Katsina government itself said. Rabe, who served as the Director of Defence Information at Nigeria’s Defence Headquarters between 2015 and 2017, died while in detention at the hands of the terrorists who abducted him. 

Rabe was abducted alongside his wife, Hajia Amina, on May 30. A native of Batsari from Katsina State, he was kidnapped on the Matazu–Sayaya road, a road that has now become one of the most volatile in the North West. 

“It is with profound sadness that we confirm the General’s death while in bandits’ captivity. Despite the relentless and concerted efforts of the State Government and various Security Agencies to secure his safe release, the situation ended in this tragedy. The deceased Retired General died a natural death from complications of diabetes and hypertension,” Nasiru said in the statement.

The abduction of the general had exposed how deeply terrorism has eaten into the fabric of Nigeria, especially the North West, where criminals have turned into full-time armed gangs that engage in kidnapping, pillaging, and other forms of terrorism. 

For over a decade, Katsina and other states in the region have faced incessant attacks from these terrorists, forcing local authorities to consider a “reconciliation” with the armed groups to restore peace. Some local government areas in Katsina, such as Jibia, Batsari, Kurfi, Safana, Danmusa, Matazu, Musawa, Kankara, Faskari, Malumfashi, and Bakori, have agreed to establish peace accords with terrorists in their areas. 

However, while some of these areas have seen relative calm, the situation in Matazu, Bakori, Musawa, Kankia, and Malumfashi has only deteriorated. The Marabar Musawa – Musawa – Matazu – Kafin Soli road (where the General was abducted) became volatile after the peace deal broke. 

Even before May 30, there were several cases of abduction on the road as well as attacks on communities and towns in the area. HumAngle reports that Muhammadu Fulani, the terrorists’ leader in the Matazu – Musawa area, is accusing the state government of arresting three of his men and seizing his livestock. 

Ambush on a wedding road 

Rabe was travelling with his driver and wife to Katsina for a wedding ceremony when the terrorists emerged near a village called Zakin Baure, blocked the road, and opened fire on his vehicle, a red coloured Peugeot 406 car, according to media reports. That forced the vehicle to a halt, enabling the terrorists to abduct him and his wife and push them into a nearby forest. His driver, however, escaped with gunshot injuries and was later admitted to a hospital. 

They were heading toward Katsina city for a family wedding through the perilous corridor, Marabar Musawa–Musawa–Matazu–Kafin Soli, which sits at the fault line of a regional peace architecture that has become increasingly fragile.

Abduction timeline 

June 6: The terrorists released a video clip of the couple begging for the government to rescue them. The wife, who spoke, asked the government to facilitate the release of some three terrorists arrested by security agents in exchange for the couple’s freedom. 

June 8: The terror group leader, Muhammadu Fulani, said he would not release the wife of the General, Amina, as promised, after the government dispatched security agents to the area to fight him. 

June 11: A video clip of the General, his wife and four others went viral on social media. HumAngle checks revealed that the other four persons in the video were members of the All Progressive Congress (APC) from Danja Local Government Area of the state who were abducted last month on the same road. 

June 12: A special prayer session was organised at the Sa’ad Bin Abi Waqqas Mosque in Barhim Estate, Katsina city, at 5 p.m.. Several relatives and friends of the Major General attended the prayer session, where the Imam called on the government to ensure the safe return of Rabe, his wife, and all abducted victims.

June 13 (morning): A WhatsApp message began circulating, especially in Katsina. The message said the General had died Friday night, June 12. “Innalillaihi wa ina ilaihil rajiun. This is to announce on a sad note. The death of General Rabe Abubakar last night at the hands of the bandits.” A HumAngle reporter also received a message from a retired civil servant asking for confirmation. 

June 13 (afternoon): The Katsina State government, through the Ministry of Internal Security and Home Affairs, confirmed the General’s death, saying that he died “a natural death from complications of diabetes and hypertension”. 

A symbol, and a warning

General Rabe’s death has reverberated through Nigeria’s security establishment and social media platforms precisely because of who he was: a man who had once stood before cameras explaining the state’s fight against terrorism. It also brings renewed attention to Nigeria’s growing terrorism and persistent security challenges facing several northern states despite ongoing military operations against the armed groups. 

Dikko Umaru Radda, the Katsina State governor, called the episode a “dark moment,” saying it highlighted the urgent need for a stronger, more coordinated security response, while pledging that those responsible would be pursued.

For residents of Katsina’s volatile corridors, Rabe’s death is a confirmation of what many have long understood: on the state’s insecure roads, rank, fame, and a lifetime of service offer no immunity at all.

His wife’s status was not addressed in Saturday’s statement, and her deceased husband was buried according to Islamic rites, but sources told HumAngle she was released alongside her husband’s remains.

Residents were thrown into despair after a terrorist leader, Jammo Smally, abducted 39 community leaders who had gone to discuss a peace deal with him. The dramatic incident occurred on Sunday, June 7, in the Maradun Local Government Area (LGA) of Zamfara State, North West Nigeria.

Jammo had been sending messages to the leaders in the Magamin Diddi community for over two months, calling for a meeting to discuss the terms of the peace deal as the rainy season approached. The terrorist leader, whose parents live in a hamlet not far from Magamin Diddi, had claimed he was tired of the hostility between his terror group and the community.

Following another invitation a few days after the Islamic Eid al-Kabir celebrations, the traditional and religious leaders decided to meet Jammo and his gang members in the forest. The two parties agreed to meet on Sunday to reach what the community leaders thought would be a peaceful solution to the recurrent attacks on their farms and homes.

“The first thing he asked when we reached there was the whereabouts of the three rifles the Askarawa took away from his boys two months ago,” Malam Aliyu, one of those who went to strike the deal, told HumAngle over the phone on  Monday. He had joined 46 other community leaders to strike the deal. “We were confused at first, because we were told that we would be discussing only a peace deal. We thought that he would ask us to give him money, but the first thing he asked was for his rifles.” 

“Askawara” is a local term for security volunteers of the state-backed Community Protection Guards (CPG) in Zamfara State. Local sources told HumAngle that towards the end of March, terrorists from the Jammo group had a gunfight with the CPG fighters and other vigilante group members, leading to the killing of two terrorists. Three rifles belonging to the terrorists were taken away by the CPG fighters. 

“We didn’t take his guns, but it’s obvious he has made up his mind,” Aliyu said. The terrorist leader released seven community leaders, instructing them to report back to the district head with his demands. He has one condition for the release of the 39 elders: either the rifles are returned, or an equivalent amount of money must be paid to him.

The terrorist leader also set ₦50 million for the peace deal. “He said if we’re still interested in negotiating with him, we should add ₦50 million to the rifles we’re returning. The money is for us to be able to live in peace, go to local markets, and go to our farms,” the community leader said.

Negotiations between terrorists and local communities aiming to establish peace are not uncommon in the ongoing crisis plaguing the northwestern region for over a decade. Typically, these discussions involve communities paying substantial sums to the terrorists under the guise of a peace agreement. However, such negotiations often yield little result, as terrorist attacks continue unabated even after agreements are reached, as seen in various regions of the state.

The Zamfara State government has consistently maintained its stance against negotiating with terrorists. Yazid Abubakar, the Zamfara State Police spokesperson, stated that they have initiated a rescue operation to free the captured individuals. 

“Upon receipt of the report, the Zamfara State Police Command immediately initiated efforts to trace the victims’ whereabouts and secure their safe rescue. Operational assets have been deployed, and security operatives are working on available intelligence to locate the abducted persons,” Yazid Abubakar said in a statement on Monday.

Hours after residents went to bed on the morning of Wednesday, June 3, sounds of gunshots pierced through the air as terrorists circled an off-campus hostel housing some students of the Federal Polytechnic Kaura Namoda in Zamfara State, northwestern Nigeria. The hostel, located in the Low-cost area, is meters away from a military checkpoint, according to residents. 

Students at the polytechnic had increasingly been moving into off-campus housing to avoid being abducted from their school.

As fear of what might happen enveloped people, the terrorists compromised the gate of the hostel and took away eight students of the polytechnic. Even as they fled with the students, they continued to fire shots in the air.

“Two of the students, Favour and Joshua Sunday, escaped while being taken away by the terrorists,” a resident who simply gave his name as Musa told HumAngle. “My house is not far from Oga Bulu’s house, which shares a wall with the house the students live in. I heard the gunshots and heard when they were leaving with the students.”

Since 2015, terrorists have terrorised the sub-region. Their activities have led to the death of thousands of people and the displacement of over a million. Attacks on schools and students have been on the increase since 2020, when terrorists stormed Government Science Secondary, Kankara and abducted 300 pupils.

Zamfara, which is considered the hotbed of the crisis, has recorded several school abductions in Jangebe, where over 300 schoolgirls were abducted, in Federal University, Gusau, where 24 students were abducted, and at the College of Agriculture and Animal Sciences, Bakura, where 15 students were abducted. 

Musa, the source, says Joshua Sunday told them six students (three men and three women) have been taken.

HumAngle reports that the Kaura Namoda area and other communities in Maradun and Bungudu fall under areas where the notorious terrorist leader, Bello Dan Sadiya, controls. 

An administrative staff member of the Polytechnic, who asked not to be named, told HumAngle over the phone that several staff members of the institution have relocated to Gusau, the state capital, for fear of being attacked. “Even me, I’ve relocated my family to Gusau. We have two staff, all senior lecturers, who are still with the bandits after they were abducted two months ago,” he said.

He said a ransom has been paid for the release of the lecturers, but the terrorists have continued to hold them.

Federal Polytechnic Kaura is located on the road to Shinkafi and Zurmi LGA, two areas in the northern part of Zamfara State that have witnessed repeated terrorist attacks.

The police public relations officer in the state, DSP Yazid Abubakar, confirmed the abduction and promised to release a statement, but has yet to do so.

Local authorities blame informants for the escalation of attacks in the town centre. The Chairman of the area, Mannir Haidara Kaura, told DW Hausa that the state government has taken measures to tackle the terrorists, but informants are sabotaging the efforts.

Let us begin with what has been forgotten. 

There is a field, roughly 22 kilometres southwest of Sokoto, between the Dange Shuni and Bodinga local government areas in North West Nigeria, that carries no particular weight to the eye. Grass grows there. Wind moves through trees at predictable intervals. The surrounding bush is in full silence, neither mourning nor celebrating. Nothing marks what happened here, and that, of course, is precisely the point.

The place is called Satiru. Or was called Satiru. The grammar is slippery, because the British, when they finished with it in the spring of 1906, did not simply defeat it. They made sure to erase it – razing buildings, enslaving survivors, most of whom were women and children, and stripping the site with the cleansing method of an administration that understood that a crushed rebellion, left with a location, becomes a shrine. And shrines become consciousness and arguments. Better to leave nothing. Better to leave nowhere.

And then the Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammad Attahiru II, the Muslim ruler (Sarkin Musulmi) whose fighters helped carry out the slaughter, reportedly pronounced a curse on anyone who would rebuild or farm on the ground. As the British Resident Burdon telegraphed proudly to High Commissioner Frederick Lugard: “All Sokoto went out yesterday to inspect [the] battlefield and raze Satiru to the ground. No wall or tree left standing.” The scholars Paul Lovejoy and J.S. Hogendorn, writing in the Journal of African History, note that “the deserted site of Satiru is on the edge of a forest reserve. It has not been inhabited since its destruction and the official curse.” More than a century later, that is still true.

This is what erasure looks like when it succeeds. For 120 years, the ruins of Satiru have remained untouched, a vanished town erased by British colonial forces after a 1906 uprising led by poor clerics, fugitive slaves, and peasants challenging both imperial taxation and the aristocratic order of the Sokoto Caliphate. 

But this story is not only about a massacre buried in colonial archives. It is about how modern Nigeria inherited the use of overwhelming force to suppress communities marked as threats. 

The thing Satiru was

Before it became a problem requiring artillery, Satiru was an answer to a different problem. To understand it, you need to understand the particular moral atmosphere of the Sokoto Caliphate in its late decline – the spiritual hangover, you might call it, of a revolution that had once been genuine.

Usman Dan Fodio launched his jihad in 1804 with an argument that was partly political and partly theological, but entirely serious: that the Hausa rulers of the time had corrupted Islam, that the ordinary people – the talakawa, the poor commoners – were being ground down by a system that dressed itself in religious language while behaving in wholly irreligious ways. Dan Fodio and his followers built the caliphate on the promise that this would change. That Islamic governance would be just. That scholars who held power would be answerable to something beyond their own appetites.

By the end of the nineteenth century, that promise had curdled into something its founders would not have recognised. The Fulani aristocracy that administered the caliphate had made a comfortable accommodation with power. Tribute collectors arrived in the villages. The talakawa paid. Palace scholars – the senior ulama (religious scholars), with their elaborate networks of family and commerce – found, in the more elastic corners of Islamic jurisprudence, reasons why this was all acceptable. The poor continued to be poor. The aristocracy continued to wear piety as a garment while extracting what they could.

The scholars of Satiru – humble men, as Lovejoy and Hogendorn describe them, “poor Muslim scholars engaged in farming and teaching,” with origins far outside the Fulani elite – found different reasons. Malam Siba, who founded the Satiru settlement in approximately 1894, was of Nupe origin. A second key figure, Maikaho, came from Gobir, the country that Uthman Dan Fodio himself had subjugated. A third, Malam Bawa, was from Zamfara, which had revolted against Sokoto on several occasions across the nineteenth century. What distinguished these men from the mainstream was not their learning – they were, by caliphate standards, minor figures – but their refusal to make the peace that more successful scholars had made with power. As Lovejoy and Hogendorn paraphrase the alleged statement of Malam Siba himself: he “was fed up with the exactions of the ruling class and was not going to obey the instructions of anyone anymore… [but instead] was going to set up a new great regime.”

What grew at Satiru, on the frontier of four fiefdoms – Danchadi, Dange, Shuni, and Bodinga – was something the caliphate’s administration regarded as an irritant and then, gradually, as something worse. The community refused to pay taxes. It refused to provide unpaid labour. It attracted, in growing numbers, fugitive slaves fleeing from the plantations and estates of the aristocracy. This last detail matters enormously. By 1906, British Resident Burdon would report that the adherents of the Satiru cause were “nearly all run away slaves.” Local tradition in Satiru itself held, as recorded by A.S. Mohammad in his foundational social history of the revolt, that “the leaders of Satiru abolished slavery and as a consequence… slaves flocked to them. The freedom of these fugitives was effectively and strenuously guarded.”

This was, in other words, not an uprising of the godless. It was an uprising of the structurally abandoned — poor clerics, dispossessed peasants, and fugitive slaves –   against the two interlocking systems that were destroying them simultaneously: the late-caliphate aristocracy that extracted their labour, and the British colonial administration that had, since 1903, added new demands of jizya (poll tax) and jangali (livestock tax) to communities that had never before paid such taxes to Sokoto. As a Sokoto citizen wrote bitterly at the time, and as quoted in Lovejoy and Hogendorn’s account: “We have been conquered. We have been asked to pay poll tax and cattle tax. We have been made to do various things, and now they want us to fight their wars for them.”

The movement Satiru had built was, in the framework laid out by Lovejoy and Hogendorn, a form of revolutionary Mahdism – distinct from all the other currents of Mahdist thought that ran through the caliphate at the time. It drew its support from peasants, fugitive slaves, and subject populations. It had no aristocratic supporters, no wealthy merchants, and no members of the established ulama. It was ethnically diverse in a way that the aristocracy was not: Hausa from various origins, Zamfarawa, Gobirawa, Gimbanawa, Kabawa, and Azbinawa – but, strikingly, no Fulani. The battle lines, as Lovejoy and Hogendorn note, mapped onto class so precisely that “the ethnic dimension… reflected the class division.” On the day of the final battle, “all the faces on the battlefield had Gobir, Kebbi, Zanfara, Katsina and other such tribal marks. Not a single Fulani talaka [commoner] joined them.”

What Satiru wanted, ultimately, was the recovery of the original promise – the caliphate that Dan Fodio had said was coming, and that had not arrived. You can call this politics, or you can call it theology. At Satiru, they did not distinguish between the two.

The spark and the suppression

The movement had been building for years, connected by threads of correspondence and travelling clerics to similar currents of dissatisfaction across both the British and French colonial zones in are now Nigeria and Niger Republic. On the French side of the boundary, a blind Zarma cleric named Saybu Dan Makafo had been the central animating figure – charismatic, mystically inclined, and reportedly possessing gifts of ventriloquism that contributed to his reputation as a waliyyi, a saint. 

In December 1905, violence broke out at Kobkitanda, 150 kilometres south of Niamey, in French territory in today’s Niger Republic. Saybu and his followers killed two gardes-cercles (colonial police) from Dosso. The French responded, the Mahdists absorbed losses, and Saybu fled east – eventually arriving at Satiru, where the local community had already been living in a state of armed readiness and messianic expectation.

The revolt was supposed to begin on the Eid El-Kabir (Babbar Sallah), February 5, 1906. It was postponed – there was an internal dispute about the recognition of Isa, the village head of Satiru, as the messianic successor figure who would accompany the Mahdi. The Satirawa (people of Satiru) resolved the question on February 13, when they attacked the neighbouring village of Tsomau. Fourteen people died.

The British response was swift and catastrophically misjudged. Acting Resident H.R. Preston-Hillary moved immediately with a column of about seventy mounted infantry under Major Francis Blackwood, armed with a single Maxim gun. He appears to have been entirely unaware that the rising at Satiru was connected to the weeks of violence that had already convulsed French territory. He rode toward the village with the assumption of a man who believed the gap between his weapons and his opponents’ was so vast that the details of the situation hardly mattered.

He was wrong. 

The Mahdists attacked the British column. Hillary and Blackwood were killed, along with three other white officers and 25 African soldiers. The West African Frontier Force (WAFF) suffered such heavy losses that it was “forced to retreat in disarray.” It was, as Lugard would later acknowledge, “the first serious reverse suffered by the West African Frontier Force since it was raised in 1898.”

The Satiru Mahdists were also severely wounded — their leader, Malam Isa, was struck during the initial encounter and would die two days later, on the morning he was supposed to unfurl the green flag and declare the jihad formally. He did not live to see what his movement had achieved: a genuine military victory over the empire. For a brief, burning moment, the talakawa had won.

The British did not pause to understand what had happened. They regrouped.

The reckoning

On March 10, 1906, a combined force of the British-run West African Frontier Force (WAFF) troops and Sokoto fighters approached Satiru. The Satirawa had dug trenches. But they did not stay behind them. They charged, repeatedly, in massed formation, against troops equipped with Maxim guns firing destructive volleys. Historian Richard Dusgate would later call what followed “the most bloodthirsty expedition in the history of British military operations in Northern Nigeria.” Margery Perham, in her biography of Lugard, noted that subsequent reports – kept secret at the time – found that the “killing was very free, not to say slaughter,” that the soldiers “killed every living thing before them,” and that “the fields were running with blood.”

At least 2,000 Satirawa were killed. An estimated 3,000 women and children were herded to Sokoto, many distributed among the aristocracy as effective slaves – a thinly disguised reassertion of the master-slave relationship that the very people of Satiru had staked their lives on dismantling.

Saybu Dan Makafo, blind and wounded, survived. He was captured and brought to Sokoto, where he was tried. His boy guide, according to a story collected by H.A.F. Johnston, reportedly shouted at the trial that if Saybu was given water, he would vanish into thin air – an indication of the extraordinary tension surrounding the proceedings. The public executioner decapitated him on March 22. His head was mounted on a stake in the market. Four subordinates suffered the same fate.

The political accounting that followed the massacre revealed what the British understood the suppression to mean and to communicate. The Colonial Office initially received dispatches that accurately attributed the uprising partly to the fugitive slave crisis –  Lugard’s own initial cable described the rebels as “outlaw fugitive slaves.” A marginal note in the Colonial Office files, as documented by Lovejoy and Hogendorn, captures the official response with bracing economy: “Better say nothing of slaves.” By May 9, Lugard had incorporated a sanitised version of events into his official reports. The slave dimension was quietly removed from the record. The most dangerous thing about Satiru – that it had articulated a class argument, that it had offered sanctuary to the enslaved, that it had made the connection between colonial taxation and pre-colonial extraction explicit – was the thing the British were most determined to forget.

The Sokoto aristocracy was rewarded for its loyalty. Marafa Muhammadu Maiturare, the Sokoto official who had commanded the local levies and whose authority was partly credited with preventing a general rising, eventually became Sarkin Musulmi in 1915. Hassan, the sarki of Dange, the fief nearest to Satiru, who had greeted Burdon warmly in the hours after the Mahdist victory, would become Sarkin Musulmi in 1931. The collaboration was not forgotten. It was promoted.

What the grammar inherited

Nearly a century and two decades later, an eight-year-old boy named Sa’id watched through a crack in the wall of his grandmother’s hut as the men of his family were dragged outside and shot.

His village, Kajen Shuwa, sat in Marte Local Government Area of Borno State, northeastern Nigeria, a Shuwa Arab community of cattle herders and storytellers, ethnically and linguistically distinct from the dominant groups of the region. Between 2014 and 2015, at the height of the military’s campaign against Boko Haram, soldiers arrived looking for a Boko Haram cell in a village called Kajen Kanuri. The names were similar enough. No interpreter had been brought. No local guide accompanied the unit.

More than 40 men died.

“They had the wrong village,” Imam Abdulkarim, now living with displaced survivors at the Garin Shuwa IDP camp in Bauchi, told HumAngle. “It was later we realised they were sent to Kajen Kanuri.”

One of the survivors told HumAngle in 2026 how the events unfolded as he watched from where he had hidden himself in a tree. He said he was watching when the men were gathered and ordered to produce Boko Haram members. The people apparently did not even understand what was being said to them, so the soldiers simply lined all the men up in a place resembling a ditch and shot every single one of them. Just like that. No trial. No evidence. Nothing. Everyone was killed.

Sa’id is nineteen now. He teaches Quran to children at the displacement camp — children who have their own mornings they cannot stop replaying. He speaks slowly. He flinches at loud sounds. When he told his story to HumAngle, tears came before words, and other residents of the camp stepped in to complete the parts his voice could not carry. They knew the story. They had assembled it over the years, in the way that displaced communities assemble the things they are not allowed to say publicly – from fragments, from the accounts of those who were in different parts of the village when it happened, from the silence of those who were not there to tell anything.

“The families of the killed couldn’t even raise their voices,” Abdulkarim said. “Everyone was afraid that he might be targeted too.”

No soldier was prosecuted. No investigation was publicly announced. No family received notification, compensation, or the minimum of official acknowledgement that their men had been killed by mistake.

What happened to Kajen Shuwa is not exceptional in the region’s chronicle of the last decade. Amnesty International’s 2015 report documented execution-style killings, torture in detention, and mass graves of individuals who had never been charged, tried, or formally arrested — people killed not for what they did, but for who they resembled, where they lived, what language they spoke when soldiers arrived. The Nigerian military’s response to that report was not to open investigations. It was to call Amnesty International a liar.

And then the world moved on, as it always does – to the next atrocity, the next set of statistics that briefly animated international concern before fading into the background noise of a continent the world has learned to observe without fully attending to.

Zaria massacre 

If Kajen Shuwa happened in the shadows – a remote village, an Arabic-speaking minority, a story reaching the press years after the fact — then what occurred in Zaria, Kaduna State, in the country’s North West, in December 2015 happened in full view, and still went unanswered.

The Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN), led by Sheikh Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, was a Shia organisation with roots deep in Zaria’s social fabric. It ran schools and clinics. It was also an organisation that had long attracted the suspicion of the Nigerian state – not because it was violent, but because it was organised, independent, and loyal to a leadership structure that fell outside the state’s system of control.

On Dec. 12, 2015, an IMN procession blocked a road, delaying a military convoy carrying the then Chief of Army Staff. What followed, as documented in meticulous detail by both Amnesty International and the Kaduna State Government’s own commission of inquiry, was a massacre. Soldiers attacked IMN members across multiple locations. The Hussainiyya Islamic Centre was demolished. El-Zakzaky’s residence was destroyed. Three of his sons were killed. El-Zakzaky himself, elderly and partially blind – the parallel to the blind Saybu Dan Makafo feels almost too pointed – was arrested. He and his wife would remain in detention for years, their release ordered repeatedly by courts and resisted repeatedly by the government.

The Kaduna State commission produced a report of unusual honesty. It confirmed that at least 347 IMN members had been buried in a mass grave at Mando. It found the military’s response disproportionate. It recommended the prosecution of specific officers, and it named the mass grave by location. But not one recommendation was implemented.

The IMN was formally proscribed in 2019, an organisation that had existed for four decades and operated schools and hospitals, banned by the government that had killed hundreds of its members, as though the banning were the logical conclusion of the killing rather than an additional punishment for surviving it.

The grammar of impunity

There is a grammar to this. Lovejoy and Hogendorn identified it in the colonial records of 1906 in three steps: a community marked as dangerous, the deployment of force that is “excessive by design,” and the systematic management of the record. 

At Satiru, the British made the decision consciously – the marginal note that said “better say nothing of slaves” was an administrative instruction to suppress an inconvenient truth. The communities targeted after them have had to live inside the silence that administrative instruction created.

But this never worked permanently. What the scholars Godwin Odeh and Williams Efe argue, in their analysis of the Satiru uprising’s historiography, is that the episode was not merely a military or religious event but a demonstration of “the impossibility of subjugating a group permanently without facing a crisis of cultural relevance.” They invoke Amilcar Cabral’s formulation: that culture “is a means by which people assert their opposition to domination… one of the fundamental tools of struggle for emancipation.” The argument is that Satiru never fully ended – that its logic persisted, became available, got taken up again in different forms by different communities facing different versions of the same problem.

The circumstances were different, the enemies differently named, and the legal justifications modernised, but the underlying grammar remained recognisable.

This is not a metaphor. What the British established in 1906 and what successive Nigerian governments have absorbed so completely is a particular relationship between the state and the communities it finds inconvenient. The relationship has a fixed sequence: a community is marked; disproportionate force arrives; the record is managed; and then, reliably, comes the silence. The silence is not passive. It is constructed and maintained by the same institutions that produced the violence –  maintained through the denial of accountability, the obstruction of independent investigation, and the prosecution of those who speak too loudly about what they witnessed.

The families of Kajen Shuwa could not grieve publicly because grief, in that context, was dangerous. The IMN, after Zaria, could not even gather to mourn without risk of further confrontation with the same security forces that had killed their members.

But the cycle continues. 

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.