In 2006-2007 when al-Qaeda formally launched its first two African affiliates, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and al-Shabaab, Nigeria was seemingly the next country ripe for al-Qaeda expansion. Yet, more than 15 years later, al-Qaeda has still not succeeded in Nigeria, despite several start-and-stop attempts by its franchise, Ansaru, to gain ground in the country. Meanwhile, Nigeria—and especially northeastern Borno State and its borderlands with Niger, Chad, and Cameroon—has become host to the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP). As the most prominent “province” (wilaya) of Islamic State (IS) outside the Middle East, ISWAP’s persistence ensures IS’s vision of a global “caliphate” endures despite IS’s setbacks in the Middle East and elsewhere. These setbacks include the loss of the “territorial caliphate” in Iraq and Syria, diminishing operational presence in Europe and the United States, and waning effectiveness of other provinces in Yemen, Southeast Asia, and the Caucasus, if not also Afghanistan.
More broadly, although both al-Qaeda and IS have lacked a known leader since Aymen al-Zawahiri’s and the third IS caliph’s deaths last year, neither group is on the downturn in Africa. Al-Qaeda is powered by AQIM’s subsidiary, Group for Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM), and al-Shabaab. Both JNIM and al-Shabaab are controlling and operating in wide swathes of territory—in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and near the borders of littoral West Africa in the case of the former, and in Somalia in the case of the latter. The groups are dominating the rival IS factions nearby, Islamic State in Sahel Province (better known as Islamic State in Greater Sahara (ISGS)) and Islamic State in Somalia Province (IS-Somalia).
And while IS also has provinces in Congo and Mozambique, they lack an al-Qaeda rival. These IS factions have conducted several spectacular prison breaks and attacks on energy infrastructure in Congo and Mozambique, respectively, and have focused on brutalizing Christians, but they both are fairly restricted in their areas of operations. ISWAP is, therefore, the only IS province in Africa that is both outperforming an al-Qaeda rival while also expanding its areas of operations, including into southern Nigeria this past year.
Despite al-Qaeda’s struggles in Nigeria, the organization initially was well-primed to expand in the country. It could, for example, easily exploit Nigeria’s fertile terrain for recruitment with Africa’s largest Muslim population, which throughout the 1980s had been embroiled in vitriolic conflicts over land use and political power with the country’s Christian population. Indeed, the earliest predecessors of ISWAP followed a fairly typical trajectory towards aligning with al-Qaeda only to be interrupted by the actions of a lone individual—Abubakar Shekau.
During the 1980s, when Shekau was only a teenager, Nigerian Muslims became influenced by Khomeinism from Iran on the one end and by Wahhabism from Saudi Arabia on the other end. To counter the Iranians, the Saudis rapidly increased funding for Nigerian mosques and Islamic schools as well as for scholarships for Nigerian scholars to study in Saudi Islamic universities. Eventually, young Nigerian Muslim scholars tended to “realize” that only Sunni Islam was “true” Islam and they embraced Salafism, or more specifically, Wahhabism, and turned away from Shiism.
In the 1990s, Saudi donors and charities were supporting Islamic movements, including militant ones, globally from Algeria to the Philippines and, perhaps more importantly, Saudis themselves were traveling abroad to fight in “Islamic” conflicts. Consequently, the first Nigerians to join al-Qaeda in 1994-1995 were those living in the diaspora in Saudi Arabia itself. These “Saudi-Nigerians” abroad then interacted with young Salafis locally in Nigeria or with Nigerians who were fighting alongside Islamists in Algeria before and in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and then together they launched a small jihadi movement known as the “Nigerian Taliban.”
The “Nigerian Taliban” was initially popular among Nigerian Muslims after 9/11, who saw al-Qaeda as part of the same struggle against secularism, post-colonialism, and Westernization as their own. However, prominent Nigerian Wahhabi scholars eventually backed away from the “Nigerian Taliban” once they noticed the group was actually planning to carry out jihad in Nigeria, which could endanger the country’s Muslims. The Nigerian government, with backing from these Wahhabis as well as the U.S’s and other nations’ intelligence agencies, then cracked down on the group in late 2003, killed the leader Muhammed Ali, who himself was part of the Nigerian diaspora in Saudi Arabia, and extinguished the movement—or so they thought.
In 2004, the “Nigerian Taliban” was revived under new leadership—the late Ali’s deputy Muhammed Yusuf and Yusuf’s own deputy, Shekau. They sang the praises of al-Qaeda and the Taliban and the establishment of an Islamic state based on Wahhabi principles. However, they did not declare a jihad until days before the Nigerian security forces, in a repeat of the late 2003 crackdown, conducted an even larger crackdown on them in 2009. This crackdown again had the backing of the Nigerian Wahhabi scholars and led to the extrajudicial killing of Yusuf and several hundred of his followers.
After lying low for a year and training in AQIM camps in the Sahel, Shekau relaunched the group explicitly as a pro-al-Qaeda jihadist movement. The group’s attacks included sophisticated suicide bombings in volatile central Nigeria, where the Muslims and Christian populations overlap, and hit-and-runs and arson in northeastern Borno. The former attacks, which largely targeted Christian churches or federal government institutions, reflected AQIM’s explicit advice to Shekau, while the latter attacks, which often targeted Shekau’s Muslim opponents, such as Wahhabi scholars, reflected Shekau’s own desire for vengeance against the Nigerian government and its “government scholars.”
This was where al-Qaeda’s hopes in Nigeria were lost. Although the vast majority of Shekau’s sub-commanders wanted to win Muslim support by following AQIM’s advice and targeting “Christian proselytizers,” the “infidel” government,” and foreigners, Shekau kept on targeting the Muslim opposition to his group. Ultimately, these sub-commanders were almost all killed by Shekau for opposing him, while those who survived founded Ansaru. Despite conducting several kidnappings of foreign engineers, Ansaru proved short-lived. The group promised a more “moderate” path than Shekau, but ultimately could not withstand his retribution and the intelligence operations against its cells in response to the kidnappings. In addition, AQIM was itself dispersed and degraded by the French intervention in Mali in early 2013 and could no longer support or advise Ansaru.
With AQIM out of the picture, IS was well-positioned to court Shekau. Although IS disapproved of some of Shekau’s “ruthless” tactics, including the Chibok kidnapping, which involved the “enslavement” of mostly Christian—but also some Muslim—girls and Shekau’s histrionics in his videos, such as crotch-scratching and jumping up and down wildly while shooting a gun and ululating “Sheka-ka-ka-ka-kau”, IS still welcomed him and his fighters into its ranks in 2015. Thus Shekau’s fighters were reconfigured as ISWAP and the territories ISWAP controlled in northeastern Nigeria became part of IS’s global caliphate.
While Shekau obeyed IS by not appearing in any ISWAP videos, he continued ignoring IS orders regarding not harming Muslims excessively. IS, therefore, dropped Shekau and named Muhammed Yusuf’s son as ISWAP’s leader in 2016. Muhammed Yusuf had no issue with killing Muslim “collaborators” with the Nigerian government and Christians in jihad, but argued against antagonizing “ordinary” Muslims. Yusuf’s son, however, viewed not only his father’s vision of establishing an Islamic state, but also the pre-colonial West Africa Islamic states, as finally having reached a culmination by joining IS’s caliphate and forming ISWAP.
Since Yusuf’s son’s emergence as leader, ISWAP has remained unflinchingly loyal to IS. Even with all of ISWAP’s historical fissures, there have been no signs of dissent against IS’s legitimacy or its caliphs, including from Shekau loyalists who still followed him after he left ISWAP and subsequently self-detonated an explosive to kill himself in an IS-ordered ISWAP offensive to capture him. In fact, ISWAP has, if anything, poached Ansaru members, who themselves sympathized with IS. This partly explains why Ansaru has continually failed to gain a foothold even in northwestern Nigeria where it escaped after suffering from both ISWAP and Shekau loyalists’ attacks in northeastern Nigeria.
ISWAP, therefore, has solidified its presence in northeastern Nigeria and elsewhere in the country, and, as a result of Shekau’s history, AQIM and JNIM have shown little desire to expand further south from the Sahel into Nigeria again. ISWAP faces relatively little pressure from the Nigerian army in the rural hinterlands in northeastern Nigeria that it controls, nor do any al-Qaeda affiliates or other loyalists of the late Shekau pose a threat to it. The long-term sustainability of ISWAP, however, does mean the group will continually pose a threat to Nigeria, while also providing IS with the legitimacy it needs amongst its global sympathizers to validate the seemingly defunct “caliphate” and prove that it is, in fact, still “remaining and expanding” (baqiya wa-tatamaddad).
The problem for Nigeria is that it can easily be lulled into complacency. ISWAP’s forays into southern Nigeria, where it has sporadically conducted attacks on Christians and soldiers at checkpoints since 2022, exemplifies how ISWAP will unlikely be content to permanently remain “only” in control of parts of northeastern Nigeria. The group also continues to show signs of tactical evolution from developing IS-style suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDS) to “tandem-VBIEDS” against the Chadian troops on Lake Chad as recently as May 2023. When this tactical learning is combined with the swelling of ISWAP ranks not only from the recruitment of youths in its territories, but also from the thousands of children born into the group’s ranks over the past 15 years, it indicates the group’s expansion and empowerment has hardly reached its apex.
The Nigerian government has developed some strategies to deal with ISWAP, including programs targeting defectors, such as the “Safe Corridor” program. The Borno State governor has also ardently pushed for internally displaced persons (IDPs) to return to their homes as much as possible to restore a sense of normalcy to the state. Nigeria also underwent turbulent, albeit peaceful, presidential elections in February 2023 that brought into the presidency Bola Tinubu, whose record indicates he may be able to boost the Nigerian economy during his term.
Nevertheless, the military does not appear to have developed any new counter-insurgency strategy but seems to have opted to accept a “stalemate” with ISWAP. The long-term balance of power between the army and ISWAP, however, may very well favor ISWAP in terms of its ability to innovate and recruit and, ultimately, expand its operations. The military would be well advised to begin to prepare a new “ground game” to take back territories from ISWAP, perhaps based on a regionally familiar model, such as that of Chad, whose highly mobile “non-conventional”-style brigades have largely succeeded in removing ISWAP and Shekau loyalists as well as other insurgents from much of the country’s territory.
Jacob Zenn is the author of the book Unmasking Boko Haram: Exploring Global Jihad in Nigeria, which was published in April 2020 by Lynne Rienner Publishers in association with the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV), University of St. Andrews in 2020. In addition, Zenn is the editor of The Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor and Militant Leadership Monitor publications and is an adjunct associate professor on African Armed Movements at Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program. He tweets at @BokoWatch.
