Islamic State – West Africa Province

Boko Haram has a more terrifying perception.

Yeah, this terrorist group, JAS, Wansaru or ISWAP, they have a more terrifying perception.

I'll use the case of Oyo, for example.

If the people in Oyo were told that, okay, just regular bandits were responsible for their kidnap, I'm not sure how they would have responded.

I think the lesson about the political side to it was learned with the cheaper girls at the abduction in 2014.

But some of the things that are not financing the abortions, we've seen them, we've tracked incidents of them collecting what I call taxes now.

They are taxing, especially for the Boko Haram ISWAP guys, ISWAP Boko Haram guys.

They are taxing the traders, farmers, fishermen, petty traders, everyday citizens that are around the areas where they operate.

So those two IS branches working together to carry out an attack.

And ISWAP, meanwhile, has also been carrying out a high-tempo of attacks in the Lake Chad Basin.

So I think it's 174 attacks since January to May by ISWAP in the Lake Chad Basin.

So An intense intensity of the threat there, intense conflict.

and one which is growing and the groups are taking more territory and trying to consolidate with the territory they have and trying to reach out to other populations to boost recruitment.

Right.

The military is engaging the Islamic State West Africa province, or ISWAP, and Boko Haram in the northeast.

And now there is a fast-growing threat from a new militant group called Lakarawa operating in the northwest.

Right along that porous border with Niger we were just talking about.

In one of the reports we did in 2024, we referred to 13 trainers from a country in the Middle East from Daesh.

They were trainers who had experience on drones who traveled from the Middle East to ISWAP, Islamic State West Africa province, to train them on drone capability.

And within a few months, we saw the first armed attacks by armed drones from ISWAP.

So I think that's a good example of actually how the threat can appear in one part of the world and can manifest itself very quickly in another part of the world, unless you have that kind of global perspective on the threat, unless you have something like our report.

you might not see these issues that are developing in one part of the world that can very quickly manifest themselves in another.

They also received, um, foreign assistance.

But it was ultimately AI that gave them like, uh, specific answers that helped them to then actually master that capability, and that was not, that is not a genuinely new capability on the battlefield, right? But it was new to ISWAP.

So when we ask does AI enable new capabilities, the question is what our reference point is.

So chemical or biological weapons are not per se new, but it would be a new capability, uh, for most terrorist groups, um, fortunately.

So let's talk about the northeast Uh, ground zero is, uh, three states, and it's the home of the Boko Haram insurgency since 2009.

And then Boko Haram split, uh, into ISWAP, Islamic State West Africa Province, in 2016.

Estimated direct deaths have been 40,000, indirect deaths 310,000.

Displaced anywhere from two to three million.

Eric.

Um, actually, I know that, that there are people who say that there are a lot of Muslims who are killed, and there are some, okay? If you are considered a moderate, the more radical ones will attack you, but not in, uh, anywhere near the, the number of, that Christians are attacked.

And as, as Muslims told us when we were there on one of our visits, um, if you preach against what they do, what Boko Haram a- and, uh, Ansaru and the rest, uh, ISWAP do on Friday in the mosque, by Saturday you have a target on your back.

But again, they're not that many of them, and Christians certainly aren't going, uh, door to door killing people.

Driven by multiple factions.

Groups like Boko Haram and ISWAP, alongside heavily armed bandit networks, are driving mass violence and kidnapping in northwestern areas like Sokoto and Kebbi.

The mechanism of governance there is fragmented.

The state firmly holds the center and major economic hubs, but it struggles to project a monopoly on violence in the peripheral rural territories, leaving populations vulnerable to non-state actors.