Nigeria’s military has now killed Abu-Bilal al-Minuki twice.
Authorities first declared him dead in 2024. In May 2026 a joint Nigerian–US operation struck his compound at Metele, in Borno, and both governments announced the death of the Islamic State’s global second-in-command. Both announcements were sold as turning points. Neither was.
That is the whole story of this war in miniature. Everything below explains why.
I. The Wrong Question
Nigerians have spent seventeen years asking when the insurgency will be defeated. It is the wrong question, and the wrongness is instructive.
By UNDP’s estimate, the Boko Haram war had indirectly cost some 350,000 lives by the end of 2020 alone, most of them through hunger and disease rather than bullets. Since then:
The state killed Mohammed Yusuf in custody. Abubakar Shekau killed himself in 2021 during an ISWAP assault. Abuja has announced the deaths of ISWAP commanders more than once, only for some to resurface.
It accepted the surrender of well over 100,000 fighters and family members.
In 2023 it heard a Joint Task Force commander say the crisis would end very soon.
In September 2024, militants killed around 130 villagers in Mafa, in Yobe’s Tarmuwa area. Police blamed Boko Haram’s JAS faction; a note left at the scene carried ISWAP’s name.
In September 2025, JAS fighters killed at least 60 people in Darul Jamal, in Bama, a community resettled only two months earlier.
In March 2026, three suicide bombings in Maiduguri killed at least 23 and wounded more than 100, in a city that had begun to believe the war was over.
Each decapitation is real. None of them is decisive. That pattern is not a failure of tactics. It is evidence that the thing being fought is not the kind of thing that can be killed.
Nigeria will not defeat violent jihadism because doing so would require building a functioning state in the north, and the Nigerian elite bargain depends on not building one. The war is not an interruption of Nigerian politics. It has become one of its mechanisms.
One detail matters more than it seems. Borno was never conquered by Sokoto. El-Kanemi repelled dan Fodio by out-arguing him on Islamic grounds: Kanem-Borno had been Muslim since the eleventh century and did not accept a Fulani cleric’s authority to judge its faith. Borno therefore holds an older, independent claim to Islamic legitimacy. It is no coincidence that the movement which eventually declared Nigeria’s entire Islamic establishment corrupt emerged from Maiduguri rather than Sokoto, drawing on centuries of northeastern Islamic learning and empire.
1978: the rupture that matters most. Abubakar Gumi, former Grand Kadi of the Northern Region, launched a sustained doctrinal assault on the Sufi brotherhoods, the Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya, that had underpinned emirate religious authority for centuries. His followers founded Izala, and Saudi petro-money from the 1970s boom gave Salafi teaching an institutional reach it had never had in West Africa.
Look at what this did structurally, independent of theology. For centuries, religious authority in the north was hierarchical, hereditary, and attached to political power. Gumi broke that. He established that a scholar with a text could delegitimise the entire inherited establishment. Once that door was open, no one could close it. Every subsequent radical could do to Izala what Izala did to the Sufis.
That is the mechanism of Nigerian jihadism: not the arrival of a foreign ideology, but the serial collapse of any authority capable of saying no with credibility.
That is the mechanism of Nigerian jihadism: not the arrival of a foreign ideology, but the serial collapse of any authority capable of saying no with credibility.
1980. Muhammadu Marwa’s Maitatsine revolt in Kano, fuelled by almajiri boys and migrant youth, killed thousands and needed the army to crush it. It prefigured Boko Haram almost exactly: millenarian preaching, marginal urban youth, state overkill, and no reckoning with underlying conditions afterward. Nigeria has run this experiment before and learned nothing from it.
1999–2001. Twelve northern states adopted criminal Sharia after the return to democracy, beginning with Zamfara. Mohammed Yusuf’s founding critique was not that Nigeria was insufficiently Islamic in the abstract. It was that the Sharia states were a fraud: the same men who amputated a goat thief’s hand were stealing budgets. He was not wrong about that, which is why he was persuasive. The next section takes this up in full, because it is the hinge of the entire argument.
2009. Yusuf’s urban insurrection was crushed within days, and he was extrajudicially killed in police custody in Maiduguri. That killing was the most consequential strategic error in the history of the conflict. It converted a sect with a grievance into an insurgency with a martyr, and it confirmed to a generation of young northern men the movement’s central claim: that the Nigerian state does not operate by law.
The line runs unbroken: 1804 → indirect rule → Gumi → Maitatsine → the Sharia states → Yusuf → Shekau → ISWAP. Each stage destroyed the authority that might have contained the next. The Nigerian state has no capacity to manufacture religious legitimacy, and every kinetic operation it runs confirms the delegitimising narrative it needs to defeat.
III. The Constitutional Surrender
Nigeria’s deepest vulnerability to political Islamism is not theological. It is a legal question the country has spent sixty years refusing to answer.
Start with what the 1999 Constitution actually says, because the popular shorthand is wrong. Nigeria is not declared a secular state. The word does not appear. Section 10 says only that no government shall adopt a State Religion: a non-establishment clause, not a doctrine of separation. Section 38 guarantees freedom of religion. And Sections 275 to 279 expressly provide for Sharia Courts of Appeal in states that want them, with jurisdiction over Islamic personal law: marriage, divorce, inheritance, guardianship, waqf.
That was the independence settlement, and it was a genuine compromise rather than a usurpation. Northern Muslims had never consented to a purely secular order, had lived under Islamic law through the emirates and indirect rule, and entered the federation on the understanding that their personal law would survive. The question convulsed the Constituent Assembly in 1977–78 and returned in 1988. Each time it was deferred rather than decided. Anyone who tells you the north imposed something alien on a settled secular republic is describing a republic that never existed.
What happened from October 1999 was different in kind, and that distinction is the whole argument. Zamfara, under Ahmad Sani Yerima, extended Sharia from personal status to criminal law, and eleven other northern states followed within two years. The constitutional basis was thin but not frivolous: criminal law is not on the Exclusive Legislative List, so states may legislate on it. The objections were serious and never resolved. Amputation and flogging sit uneasily with Section 34’s prohibition on inhuman and degrading treatment. Applying a criminal code to citizens by religion strains Section 42’s freedom from discrimination. And a legal order in which the same act carries different consequences depending on the accused’s faith is hard to reconcile with the idea of a single national criminal jurisdiction at all.
Then came the decision that mattered more than any legislation: Abuja declined to test it. Obasanjo dismissed the expansion as political Sharia and predicted it would fizzle out. No administration since has referred the question to the Supreme Court. Twenty-seven years on, Nigeria has two criminal legal orders operating on its territory and no authoritative ruling on which is supreme.
That non-adjudication has four consequences, and each one feeds the insurgency.
The counterargument deserves a hearing, and it is stronger than secularists usually admit. Criminal Sharia has substantially atrophied: amputations are rare, no stoning sentence has ever been carried out, and appellate courts have quietly defanged the harshest provisions. The 1999 wave was demand-driven, a response to a secular justice system that was genuinely corrupt, glacial and inaccessible to the poor. Sharia courts were faster, cheaper and closer. Forcibly abolishing them in 2000 would likely have produced a worse conflict than the one Nigeria got. And the causal chain to jihadism is indirect: the jihadists were the Sharia states’ loudest critics.
All of that is true, and none of it rescues the position. The problem was never that some Nigerians want to live under Islamic law. Plural legal orders function elsewhere, in India, Israel, Indonesia and Malaysia, precisely because each of those states settled, however imperfectly, the question of supremacy and the boundary of jurisdiction. Nigeria’s failure is not Sharia. It is the refusal to decide, which lets every faction claim the state is properly theirs and none of them be wrong.
That ambiguity is convenient for the political class, which is why it persists. It costs nothing to leave unresolved, and resolving it would cost votes in one half of the country or the other. So the question stays open, and into an open question walks anyone with a rifle and a coherent answer.
The recruitment pool grows faster than the army. Northern Nigeria combines some of the world’s highest fertility with the country’s deepest multidimensional poverty and its largest out-of-school population. The almajiri system delivers millions of unaccompanied boys into cities, dependent on alms, with religious instruction and no economic pathway. Tinubu has promised 30,000 new recruits and four additional divisions to provide the “teeth” to defeat terrorism and banditry, an initiative tied to elections in early 2027 in which public safety is a central issue. But 30,000 soldiers against an annual cohort of hundreds of thousands of unemployed, unschooled young men is not a counterinsurgency. It is a rounding error with a uniform.
ISWAP is not a gang. It is a competing state. It taxes, adjudicates disputes, regulates fishing and farming, and bans the plunder of civilians that its rival practises. Boko Haram’s JAS survives on looting and extortion known as fey’u, which ISWAP prohibits. Its revenue base exceeds what Borno State itself collects. It is centralised, bureaucratic, well-funded and tactically adaptable, and its combat successes have attracted experienced fighters and instructors from across the Sahel and the Maghreb. Farmers live under its administration and travel to Maiduguri to buy equipment. One such farmer described ISWAP’s only real anxiety as air force bombing, and noted that every house has a shelter.
You cannot bomb a tax administration out of existence. Where the Nigerian state offers absence, ISWAP offers predictable, brutal, functioning governance. In rural Borno, that is not a close contest.
The geography is unconquerable with current means. ISWAP’s core bases sit on the islands of Lake Chad, in a shifting ecology of swamps and channels. The Nigerian navy has never mounted a meaningful lake offensive. Until it does, the insurgency has a sanctuary, and sanctuaries are the most reliable predictor of insurgent survival in the modern record.
And the war has become an economy. Nigerian defence procurement is among the country’s most notorious rent centres. The Dasuki affair established, in the public mind, that the insurgency’s budget flows more reliably than its battles are won. Add ransom. The New Humanitarian reports that the June release of 360 civilians abducted from Ngoshe was accompanied by a government payment of 5 billion naira, roughly $3.7 million, which Abuja denies, amid controversy over the alleged misappropriation of part of it. As an Abuja security official put it to the same publication, any arrangement involves payment, since otherwise the fighters would have no income absent fey’u.
Buying off armed opponents is the traditional method of the Nigerian political establishment, from the Niger Delta amnesty of 2009 to the ongoing attempts to contain banditry in the northwest. A former hostage negotiator named the problem plainly: money does not guarantee peace, it generates demand for more. When violence is a revenue stream for the perpetrators and a skimmable flow for parts of the apparatus meant to stop it, you do not have a war with two sides. You have a market with several participants, some of whom wear uniforms.
So the state does what it can do, which is negotiate quietly while denying it. A ceasefire with Boko Haram has reportedly held for three months and is expected to be extended, according to The New Humanitarian, and Abuja has not acknowledged it. Its public position remains emphatic rejection of talks with a proscribed organisation. The talks are run by the Office of the National Security Adviser and the DSS. They have repeatedly collapsed before, typically scuppered, in participants’ words, by spoilers within the government and military. The last hudna fell apart in 2022–23.
That detail is the whole thesis in miniature. The Nigerian state cannot make peace because it is not one actor. It cannot deliver on an agreement its own security services will sabotage, and it cannot fight a war its own procurement class profits from prolonging.
The strategy the security establishment reportedly finds most attractive is a deal with Bakura Doro’s Boko Haram faction in order to fight ISWAP: one jihadist group dealt with to fight the other. That is how you formalise a jihadist faction as a state proxy, and anyone who has watched the Sahel over the past decade knows what that produces. Note, too, that Bakura’s animus toward ISWAP is personal rather than ideological. He stayed loyal to Shekau, whom ISWAP destroyed, and former fighters report he prefers attacking ISWAP to attacking the army, raiding military bases mainly to get weapons for that fight. An ally whose loyalty is a grudge is not an ally.
VI. The Regional Arithmetic Has Turned Against Nigeria
Nigeria’s insurgency is no longer primarily Nigerian.
The AES states’ departure from ECOWAS and the rupture of intelligence cooperation with Niger removed the cross-border architecture on which the Multinational Joint Task Force depended. The Sahel has become the fastest-growing theatre of violent extremism on earth, and its groups are moving south. The emergence of Lakurawa in Sokoto and Kebbi is a Sahelian import, not a local mutation. Tinubu himself said the December 2025 strikes targeted ISIS, Lakurawa and bandits, that the Islamic State supplies and trains Lakurawa and bandit groups through the Sahel, and that US intelligence had detected an influx of IS fighters into the area.
Meanwhile the region has become a competitive arena for external powers, with Russian influence across the AES states and Turkish forces and Syrian mercenaries reportedly deployed in Niger. More sponsors means more options for armed groups and less leverage for any single government. Nigeria now faces a networked, externally resourced, technologically improving adversary across borders it does not control, with regional partners it has alienated.
VII. The American Complication
In late October 2025 the United States designated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern. Days later Trump threatened to halt all aid and told the Pentagon to prepare for possible action, warning the US might go in “guns-a-blazing.” Tinubu replied that portraying Nigeria as religiously intolerant did not reflect national reality. A delegation led by NSA Nuhu Ribadu went to Washington and met Hegseth and others.
The outcome was not confrontation but absorption. On Christmas Day 2025, US strikes hit two IS-linked enclaves in the Bauni forest of Tangaza, Sokoto, with Tinubu’s explicit approval. Foreign Minister Tuggar, who had spoken to Rubio beforehand, insisted the operation was not about religion, pointing out that the Sahel’s victims are overwhelmingly Muslim. In January a Nigeria–US Joint Working Group on counterterrorism was inaugurated in Abuja. On 16 May 2026, a joint operation at Metele killed al-Minuki, described by Washington and Abuja as the Islamic State’s global second-in-command. Trump has said further strikes will follow if the killing of Christians continues.
Three observations.
First, the framing dispute is not cosmetic. Whether this is anti-Christian persecution or generalised state failure determines what counts as success, who gets protected, and what Nigerian domestic politics does with it. Both descriptions capture something real: Christian communities in the Middle Belt and southern Borno have suffered targeted atrocities, and Muslims are the overwhelming majority of those killed by ISWAP and JAS. As Control Risks analyst Joachim MacEbong argued, the religious frame obscures something worse: the Nigerian state as presently constituted cannot secure anyone but the elite. The measure of that was Tinubu’s own November 2025 security emergency, when the Inspector General reported pulling 11,000 officers off VIP protection duty. It was an admission, in a single statistic, of where Nigerian policing had actually been deployed.
Second, precision has limits. The New Humanitarian’s January analysis reported that some US missiles missed their targets, with damage in Ofa, Kwara State, and raised questions about whether the Sokoto target area had an established Islamic State presence at all, notwithstanding Nigerian military intelligence assessments. Villagers near the strikes told AFP the area had never been a Lakurawa stronghold.
Third, and most important: decapitation strikes accelerate leadership turnover. They do not touch recruitment, taxation, or legitimacy. ISWAP replaced its leadership repeatedly between 2019 and 2021 and emerged stronger. Al-Minuki’s death will be absorbed the same way. What external strikes reliably deliver is a way for Abuja to look decisive without doing any of the hard things. They are a substitute for state-building dressed up as a supplement to it.
VIII. Two Honest Qualifications
“Never” is too strong as a literal claim. Insurgencies do end. They end by annihilation when a state is willing to be ruthless and unified, as in Sri Lanka. They end by political settlement when a state can credibly commit, as in Northern Ireland. They end by exhaustion and co-optation, as in Algeria. What every successful termination shares is a state that could act as a single agent. Nigeria’s deficit is not firepower, money, or even will. It is stateness: the capacity to make a decision and have it executed all the way down. Until that changes, the realistic ceiling is management, reducing jihadism to endemic banditry and living with it, as Nigeria already lives with oil theft and kidnapping. That is not defeat. It is also not victory, and the country should stop being promised one.
The partition answer does not work. A sovereign northern Nigeria would inherit the insurgency with no oil revenue, a longer Sahelian frontier, a weaker army, and the same demography. A sovereign south would face an impoverished, radicalising neighbour of a hundred million people across a thousand-kilometre border, with no ability to influence it and no buffer. Secession does not relocate the almajiri cohort or drain Lake Chad’s swamps.
What the honest version of that argument supports is stronger: devolution, not dissolution. State policing, genuine fiscal federalism, resource control, an adjudicated answer to the Sharia question, and the dismantling of the population-weighted allocation formula that rewards elites for governing badly and counting generously. Those reforms are federalism’s repair, not its abolition, and they address the real mechanism: a centre too distant to police and too generous to hold accountable.
On the “Fulanisation” thesis. There is a real phenomenon underneath it: pastoralist expansion southward under climate pressure, the RUGA controversy, the ethnic concentration of security appointments under Buhari, and armed groups in the northwest that are substantially Fulani in composition. Those are documented grievances, and dismissing them is condescension. But the evidence does not support a single coordinated project. Northwestern bandits routinely kill Fulani communities. ISWAP and JAS kill Muslims in far greater numbers than Christians. Much of the violence is decentralised criminal enterprise responding to the collapse of pastoral economies. Treating a class-and-climate catastrophe as an ethnic conspiracy has one practical cost: it produces policy aimed at the wrong target, and it makes the cross-regional coalitions needed for the reforms above impossible to build. The grievance is real. The theory is too tidy for the violence it describes.
Conclusion
Nigeria has been fighting an insurgency for seventeen years with an army it underpays, a procurement system that profits from continuation, a police force recently discovered to have been guarding politicians, a northern education system generating recruits faster than casualties, a rival administration on Lake Chad collecting more tax than the state it displaced, a religious landscape in which no authority can excommunicate anyone, a constitutional question about religious law that no government has dared put to a court, a neighbourhood it has alienated, and a foreign patron whose strikes provide relief from the appearance of failure but not from failure.
The insurgency is not the disease. It is the fever chart of a state that never completed itself: a colonial administrative arrangement, inherited in 1960, never converted into a polity its citizens have reason to prefer to the alternatives on offer.
Jihadism in northern Nigeria will end when the Nigerian state becomes more useful to a poor young man in Damaturu than ISWAP is. Not before. Every strategy that does not begin from that sentence is theatre with a body count.
Geopolitics with Oladimeji Bolarinwa is published by The Thought Builders Institute. If this argument moved you, share it, and subscribe for the next instalment.