Nigeria struggles to contain surge in militant violence

It was a massacre executed with mathematical precision. Within hours of having swept into two remote villages in western Nigeria, Islamist extremists had killed at least 170 people, kidnapped dozens and disappeared back into their forest redoubts.

It was not the first time that gunmen had come to Nuku and Woro, communities close to the border with Benin in the Nigerian state of Kwara. But the devastating violence that they unleashed as people made their way to evening prayers on Tuesday was unexpected.

They burned homes, executed men and kidnapped at least 38 women and children, making it one of the bloodiest and most brazen assaults that Nigeria, no stranger to suffering, has experienced in months.

“They burned everything,” said Ahmed Saidu Baba, a local politician who spoke to the FT over a crackling phone line. He had witnessed a burial on Wednesday for 78 people in Woro whose contorted corpses had been wrapped with white shrouds. There were many more bodies littering the bush.

“There is nobody in the village,” he said. “Everybody has run away.”

The senseless violence marked another gruesome chapter in a deteriorating security crisis that has left vast tracts of Nigeria beyond the reach of its exhausted soldiers at a time when President Bola Tinubu’s government is under intense pressure from Washington.

The US has been rapidly building up its security footprint in Nigeria since President Donald Trump, who has promoted a narrative that Christians are being targeted by rampaging Islamists, authorised air strikes in the country’s north-west over Christmas.

Reconnaissance missions are being flown over Nigeria, while weapons purchases long delayed because of human rights concerns are being expedited. A small team of US officers is also now based on the ground providing intelligence support.

But stabilising Nigeria will be a Sisyphean challenge that the violence in Woro and Nuku — where the dead were mainly Muslims — has underlined. Amnesty International and the Red Cross indicated that about 170 people may have been murdered.

“At the end of the day, it is the Nigerian government and the Nigerian army that will be responsible for securing Nigerian territory,” said Nnamdi Obasi, an analyst at the International Crisis Group.

Nobody has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks. Baba said that about 100 militants attacked the villages after their demands to come and preach their hardline interpretation of Islam were rebuffed by a local village leader.

The scale and brutality have shaken Nigerians. Photos shared with the FT, which could not be verified, showed dozens of corpses of people who appeared to have been lined up with their hands tied before being executed.

Tinubu, who declared a national security emergency in November, said on Thursday a battalion was being deployed to fight the militants.

Nigeria has in recent months scrambled to strengthen its security forces by recruiting thousands more soldiers and police and encouraging states to set up their own defensive groups.

But the soldiers manning vulnerable outposts across the country are overstretched, under-resourced and outgunned.

“They are spread too thin and are having to pull resources from one theatre to address problems in another,” said Obasi. “There is a need for the government to demonstrate greater urgency than it has done.” 

Ebenezer Obadare, an analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations think-tank, said that US pressure had begun to make Nigeria take long-overdue steps to strengthen its security establishment. But he added that it could create a delicate political balancing act.

“Tinubu has to be careful with the way he plays this,” Obadare said. “He has to collaborate with the US, while also locally signifying that he is in charge of the narrative.”

In the town of Kaiama the atmosphere was sullen. “We are afraid,” said one resident, a young man who asked that his name be withheld for fear of militant reprisals. He said soldiers could not stay forever. “They will be evacuated after a while, and the gunmen will come back.”

He added that militants had been wandering into villages to trade and stock up on supplies to take into their forest fortresses and had been preaching on the frontier between Niger and Kwara states.

The resident added that roads were so poor between Kaiama, from where he saw soldiers rushing to respond, that the insurgents were long gone by the time they arrived.

Nigeria has been fighting an Islamist insurgency in the north-east for well over a decade. But in the past few years a new hotspot has emerged in the north-west and jihadis, exploiting remote and porous borders, have since been pushing steadily southwards into states such as Kwara. 

“They are becoming increasingly influential in these areas and they are entrenching themselves,” said Héni Nsaibia, an analyst at conflict monitoring project ACLED.

He added the weak military footprint along the borderlands shared by Nigeria, Benin and Niger, along with the thick forest belt, created conditions that favoured the militants.

“It is an undergoverned space,” Nsaibia said, adding it was generating almost “perfect conditions for the expansion of militant activities”.

There is mounting evidence suggesting homegrown militants are intermingling and co-operating with fighters crossing into Nigeria from the battle-scarred states of the Sahel, the dry belt that runs south of the Sahara and cleaves through Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali.

JNIM, an al-Qaeda affiliate wreaking havoc in the region, in November claimed its first attack in Nigeria, at Nuku. Nsaibia said it might be working with a new group that has emerged and dubbed locally as Mahmuda.

Islamic State Sahel Province, known locally as Lakuwara, and JAS, a faction of Boko Haram, are also active in north-western and western Nigeria. Banditry, another chronic security challenge, is also flourishing.

There is growing resignation. Amnesty International said the attacks in Kwara marked a “stunning security failure” and also pointed to an unrelated attack in the northern state of Katsina on Tuesday that reportedly left more than 20 dead. “Authorities have left these communities at the mercy of rampaging gunmen,” it said. 

“We need prayers,” said Baba, the local politician, who said he was returning to Woro to help bury dozens more bodies that were being retrieved from the bush.

Mohammed Bio, the local MP whose constituents had been massacred, told the FT from Nigeria’s capital Abuja that he wanted Tinubu to declare a state of emergency. “It is getting worse in Kwara, and in Nigeria,” he said. “We need help.”

Cartography by Aditi Bhandari