July 21, 2025: The oil-rich west coast African nation of Nigeria continues to have problems with Islamic terrorist groups Boko Haram and especially the local Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant/ISIL faction known as Islamic State West Africa Province/ISWAP. The latest disaster was a May 4, 2025, ISWAP attack on an army supercamp in northeastern Yobe State. This attack featured the ISWAP use of motorbikes instead of 4x4 vehicles. Yobe State terrain is flat with little cover. ISWAP found motorbikes more effective than larger vehicles. The attack on the supercamp left four soldiers dead and many more wounded. ISWAP gunmen vandalized part of the camp for several hours. They got away with weapons, ammunition and other supplies.

ISWAP has stuck with its strategy of concentrating on the security forces and doing so by assembling a large enough number of gunmen to ensure, most of the time, a quick victory. The continued prevalence of corruption and incompetent officers in the army has contributed to continued chaos and lawlessness in northern Borno State, where most of the population was displaced by Boko Haram violence in 2014-15 and when Boko Haram control was broken by 2017. After that government programs to revive the economy and restore law and order collapsed under the usual corruption and incompetence of local officials and security forces. Even a reform-minded president who was a former general and Moslem was unable to push military reforms far enough and fast enough. Boko Haram is not winning; but the government is failing to finish off a defeated Boko Haram and take advantage of an opportunity to regain the trust and loyalty of the local population. ISIL took advantage of similar conditions to quickly overrun more than a third of Iraq in 2014. Many Nigerian leaders are well aware of how that worked but the corruption is so entrenched and widespread that reform moves slowly and that left the army and government officials vulnerable to a well-organized Boko Haram comeback.

ISWAP is also known as the Barnawi or AL Barnawi faction of Boko Haram. ISWAP has apparently received a lot of useful technical and tactical advice from ISIL veterans of fighting in Iraq, Syria and Libya. Boko Haram persists in the northeast in large part because of its willingness to experiment, innovate and take advice from foreign ISIL veterans. The Barnawi faction follows the current ISIL doctrine of concentrating attacks on security forces and government officials, preferably the corrupt ones. That makes it easier to extort more cash and other goods from the local population.

In 2019 the Barnawi faction had over 3,000 active gunmen and operated mainly in the far north of Borno state near Lake Chad and the borders of Niger and Chad. The smaller Shekau faction has about half as many armed men and operates further south near the Borno State capital of Maiduguri and the Sambisa Forest. Both factions rely on the fact that the years of Boko Haram violence in Borno State, where Boko Haram originated in 2004, has increased the poverty and corruption the Islamic terrorist organization was founded to eliminate. Many potential recruits are discouraged by stricter standards and a more fanatic approach of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Compared to the original Boko Haram, the most hard core Islamic radicals are drawn to the more extreme groups and that way Boko Haram persists.

Current ISWAP strength is closer to 4,000 fighters. Boko Haram is still around, with fewer gunmen than ISWAP. Both of these Islamic terrorist organizations have been fighting each other since 2021. The army has taken advantage of this, but corruption and frequent incompetence have enabled the Islamic terrorist groups to continue surviving. The government has tried to exploit the Islamic terrorists’ civil war.

Back in 2020 some army commanders in the northeastern Borno State tried to blame foreign Non-Government Organizations/NGOs for providing a steady flow of reports, documented with pictures and videos showing army misbehavior and mistreatment of civilians. The foreigners were also accused of spying for Boko Haram and deliberately spreading false reports of army misbehavior to hurt the morale of troops and loyalty of local civilians. These accusations tended to be quickly withdrawn when senior officers back in the national capital hear of it. The generals in the high command knew the NGO reports were true because these reports were often quietly double-checked by high command investigators. Such retractions were just another reminder of the problems the military faced and were unable to fix, in the northeast.

Another aspect of the Boko Haram violence in the northeast is the continuing battles between farmers and herders in northern and central Nigeria, and the fact that most of the victims are Christians killed deliberately. In 2018 about 2,400 Christians were killed in northern and central Nigeria. Since 2015 over 20,000 Christians have been killed, most of them deliberately sought out and murdered by Boko Haram. There is growing pressure from Nigerian Christians, largely in the south as well as foreign nations with Christian majorities, for Nigeria to put an end to this religious persecution. It is definitely persecution when Boko Haram does it as seeking out and killing non-Moslems is an acknowledged goal of Boko Haram. The farmer versus herder violence in northern and central Nigeria is mainly about land and who controls it. While the herders are often militant Fulani Moslems, most of the farmers they battle within the north are also Moslem. But many Fulani agree with (and often join) Boko Haram about how killing non-Moslems is what devout Moslems should do as often as possible. Most of the farmers killed by Fulani are Christians and in 2018 the Fulani herders killed more Christians in Nigeria than did Boko Haram.

President Buhari recently went to Borno state and met with the governor, who pleaded for Buhari to persuade the army to allow expanded use of local defense volunteers. With the decline in Boko Haram activity in the last year, about a third of the force has been disbanded (or at least no longer recognized and supported by the military). About two percent of those who joined CJTF have been killed and many more have been wounded or injured while on duty. In effect, about ten percent of the CJTF men have been injured. But the soldiers respect them and the local civilians depend on and support them, while Boko Haram has come to fear them. The more senior army commanders do not support the CJTF because these civilians often confront misbehaving soldiers and embarrass the army by exposing the bad behavior.

Volunteers initially received little material support from the government. But in early 2013 Boko Haram began to notice that in Borno and Yobe states thousands of Moslem and Christian young men were enthusiastically joining the CJTF to provide security from Boko Haram violence and provide information to the security forces about who Boko Haram members were and where they were living. That trend continued and eventually, the CJTF and self-defense groups, in general, became the greatest threat to Boko Haram in rural areas as well as the cities. The CJTF frequently patrol remote areas and operate a growing network of trusted informants who can quickly phone in details on local Boko Haram activity.

By the end of 2013, Boko Haram had openly declared war on CJTF and threatened to kill any of them they could find. That state of war continued for several years until 2016 when Boko Haram was no longer controlling large territories and was less of a threat to CJTF members and their families. The army came to depend less on the CJTF, which preferred to operate with heavily armed police or soldiers nearby (ready to move in arrest Boko Haram suspects the vigilantes identify or help fight back if Boko Haram attacked). By 2014 the army was regularly using the volunteers to replace troops at checkpoints. This policy enabled more checkpoints to be set up and more thorough searches of vehicles to be conducted. This made it more difficult for Boko Haram to move around, plan and carry out attacks or to resupply the few men they still had in the cities. Boko Haram responded by attacking checkpoints more frequently and that led to many volunteers getting weapons, officially or otherwise (sometimes with the help of soldiers or police). The checkpoints became a major problem for Boko Haram and the growing use of CJTF patrols and informants are even more of a problem. By 2017 CJTF spent a lot of their time on checkpoint duty, mainly because they know the locals and are better at spotting Islamic terrorists, especially suicide bombers. But as Boko Haram activity declined after 2016 the army maintained fewer checkpoints and supported fewer and fewer CJTF groups.

As early as 2014 some CJTF groups were launching attacks on Boko Haram and usually winning because they knew the area and people better, and often were even able to launch surprise attacks at night. A major factor in this was that in the more remote areas, like near the Sambisa Forest, the CJTF groups contained a lot of local hunters. These men are professional hunters who thrive in rural areas where there is a lot more game than people. CJTF first demonstrated to the army the skills of local hunters who tracked game for a living. The army noted that the success of CJTF attack units was largely because of local hunters. Soon the army began to hire some of the hunters who were exceptional trackers as well as offering bounties if they could track down certain Boko Haram men or groups. At first, Boko Haram fought back and attacked trackers or their families. That backfired because the CJTF had better information about their home areas which made it difficult for Boko Haram to make revenge attacks. The attacks were made anyway and failed so often that most Boko Haram were advised by their leaders to stay away from CJTF, especially those groups with professional hunters. There were still parts of the Sambisa Forest where Boko Haram could establish bases and avoid the CJTF but these were areas where there was less game and less of everything. That meant fewer Islamic terrorists and their captives could survive there and had to leave their sanctuaries more frequently to raid villages for supplies. That’s when the Boko Haram were most vulnerable and many of their losses were to desertion (because of hunger and frustration) rather than combat casualties. The CJTF groups with a lot of hunters have remained useful for the army but only because there is no alternative when you have to track the enemy on the ground. The military never has enough helicopters or UAVs to provide overhead views and that is less useful in forest areas where trackers on the ground are still the best solution.

CJTF (Civilian Joint Task Force) strength peaked at about 30,000 volunteers in 2017. The military never liked to publicize how important the CJTF, and civilian support in general, was to the defeat of Boko Haram but the truth got out anyway and the civilian volunteers eventually received more credit for their contributions. This media attention also revealed that the military had recruited over a hundred of the most effective CJTF informants into a special unit where these men work full time for the military as plainclothes agents who are sent to an area where Boko Haram is believed to be active (or trying to be) and collect information. In some areas of Borno State, the CJTF was not all that useful and that was in the many towns and villages were everyone, or nearly everyone, fled the Boko Haram violence and there were few people left. Many of these refugees have yet to return and parts of northeast and eastern Borno State are depopulated battlefields for the remaining Boko Haram and the army. These depopulated areas are now a sanctuary for many Boko Haram groups.

The Borno governor wants the army to expand the CJTF from its current 20,000 members. That might happen. The governor also wants more competent officers for the troops in Borno but that is still a work in progress.

And then there is the oil. That’s because what is even more important to most Nigerians is the economy. The biggest problems there are the oil and natural gas sector. A 2018 World Bank study detailed how Nigerian governments wasted opportunities from 1970 through 2014 to invest a trillion dollars of oil income into development. Instead, most was stolen or squandered. For 44 years, there were five spikes in oil prices and demand. These oil booms brought in extraordinary amounts of income, most of which made a few corrupt politicians fabulously rich and did nothing for Nigeria.

Oil has been a curse, not a blessing, for Nigeria and one thing nearly all Nigerians can agree on is reducing corruption and theft of oil income. Since 1972 the government has earned over $1,300 billion in oil revenue. Between 1960 and 2005 billions of dollars were stolen by corrupt politicians. This was the cause of much unrest. Most Nigerians live on less than a dollar a day. Since the 1980s the oil money has been going to less than twenty percent of the population, leaving everyone else worse off than before the oil exports began. People in the Niger Delta are angry because most of them did not benefit and suffered from the oil spills and oil extraction ills. Infrastructure is ruined.

Oil exports still matter, despite the price falling by more than half and never really recovering. Oil still accounts for most of exports and the federal budget. The government tried to count the losses in the oil industry. Losses from corruption through 2005 were $20 trillion. Annual theft and pipeline damage was over $10 billion a year. Annual GDP was $447 billion, 199 million people who must live on $2,300 a year. Oil accounts for 40 percent of GDP.