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Who Are Nigeria’s “Newest” Jihadist Militants?

By James Barnett and Vincent Foucher

In November 2024, Nigerian military officials declared with some alarm that a “new” terrorist group known as “Lakurawa” was operating in rural corners of the country’s northwest. Several months later, in January 2025, the Nigerian government took the step to legally designate Lakurawa as terrorists. Soon after, the military junta in Niger alleged (without evidence) that the group had been sponsored by Nigeria in the latest iteration of a now two-year-long spat between the neighboring countries.

The emergence of a supposedly new militant group on Nigerian soil is particularly worrying against a backdrop of jihadist violence once again escalating in the country’s northeast and spreading to other regions of Nigeria. Yet the identity of these militants has been difficult to parse, with significantly divergent views being presented in different media reports, official statements, and publications by analysts. As with many things related to jihadism in Nigeria, there is much analysis that relies on limited hard data, resulting in significant speculation.

Having researched the Lakurawa phenomenon before it made international headlines, we aim to offer some essential context as well as a discussion of the evidence in support of two competing theories regarding Lakurawa’s affiliation. We propose that Lakurawa, while it initially applied to a specific group of jihadist fighters recruited from the Sahel-Saharian zone to fight bandits in Sokoto state, has now become a generic exo-descriptor which civilians in northern Nigeria (and, by extension, many officials, journalists, and analysts) use to describe a variety of jihadist militants originating from the Sahel-Saharian zone (and their associates) now in different parts of Northwest Nigeria. Thus, our evidence suggests that the term is being used to describe both members of the Islamic State Sahel Province (ISSP, formerly known as the Islamic State in Greater Sahara or ISGS), who are particularly active in Sokoto state and parts of neighboring Kebbi state, as well as members of Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal-Muslimeen (JNIM, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Sahelian network) that are active along the Benin-Nigeria border. Each group’s area of operations within Nigeria is somewhat vague at this stage, which leads to confusion in parts of the northwest where they might overlap, a confusion which benefits the jihadists. The media’s fixation on Lakurawa seems to have reinforced perceptions within the northwest that they are a single group and the principal cause of regional instability, resulting in local media and analysts likely misattributing bandit attacks to Lakurawa on several occasions since late last year, as a forthcoming study by the first author shows.

Much of the analysis of Lakurawa published to date has utilized media reports and statements from officials, which are often conflicting and have a limited empirical basis. We rely instead primarily on interviews with key sources, including jihadist defectors in Nigeria and members of communities in the northwest who have interacted with Lakurawa, in some cases quite extensively over the course of several years. These interviews are drawn from different research projects that the authors have been conducting examining the history and evolution of the Boko Haram conflict and its intersection with other forms of insecurity in Nigeria. Our methodology is imperfect, but we nonetheless believe that it can help shed light on aspects of the “Lakurawa” phenomenon that have heretofore been a source of confusion.

A brief history of Lakurawa from 2017

Traditional authorities in the northernmost parts of Sokoto state first invited the militants to offer protection to their communities in late 2017. Gudu and Tangaza LGAs of the state, which border Niger Republic, were suffering at the time an onslaught of bandits from Zamfara, who themselves were relocating to neighboring Sokoto in response to military operations against their bases. As our colleague Murtala Ahmed Rufa’i has detailed, with the Nigerian government unable to provide security to such isolated rural communities afflicted by banditry, the traditional rulers of Balle district in Gudu and Gongono district in Tangaza met with a local chairman of Miyetti Allah, a prominent pastoralist civil society group, and decided to use the latter’s connections to the Malian pastoralists to hire armed fighters from the latter to protect their communities. As explained further below, the militants who eventually came to Sokoto were a mixture of Malians and Nigeriens, however, with the latter belonging principally to the Tolobe (a Fulani clan with historical ties to Sokoto).

The district heads might not have known that these militants had some association with jihadist groups operating in Niger Republic and Mali. The militants were initially known as Lakuruje, a Hausa-ization of the French word for “recruits,” likely in reference to their being recruited from Mali and Niger to combat banditry in Nigeria. During the 1990s and 2000s, various ethnic militias had formed in Niger, including among the Tolobe, initially to fight against Touareg rebels, with some of these militias then conducting anti-banditry activities. From 2012 onward, some of these Tolobe joined the jihadist group Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (known by its French acronym, MUJAO), a splinter group of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb that eventually joined JNIM in 2017. As explained below, some of these Tolobe affiliated with MUJAO likely constituted at least a share of the early membership of Lakuruje (who soon became known instead as Lakurawa, the exact etymology of which is unclear).

The militants, for their part, invoked their kinship and historical connections to the region, including their clan’s role in the jihad led in the region by Usman Danfodio in the early 19th century. (Gudu holds significance in the history of the Sokoto Caliphate; while members of Lakurawa have attempted to exploit that history, religious leaders in Sokoto today have pushed back against the militants’ appropriation of this legacy.) In the first few months of operations in Sokoto in 2018, the militants were welcomed in the communities because of their efforts to rescue victims under bandit attack. By the end of 2018, however, the Lakurawa had shifted from merely fighting bandits and were engaging in an aggressive campaign of sharia enforcement in local villages. As residents of those communities recalled, the Lakurawa “preached in public squares, intimidated clerics, and flogged villagers for playing music or dancing,” while also “follow[ing] informal, roving Fulani settlements (ruga), forcing the herders to pay levies on their cattle under the guise of zakat (religiously obligatory almsgiving) and chastising them for ‘un-Islamic’ activities.”

This led some community members to seek help from the Sokoto state government in expelling the group. A set of indirect negotiations ensued between the government and the armed group via local traditional rulers. The challenge, however, was that Lakurawa at this stage was not a homogenous group: According to participants in the dialogue, what they describe as the leadership of the group was Malian. These Malians introduced themselves as associates of Amadou Koufa (founder of the Katiba Macina, which merged with other jihadist groups to form JNIM in March 2017). However, a number of the militants among these Lakurawa who were Fulani from Niger specifically the aforementioned members of the Tolobe clan (Unfortunately, our sources were not specific as to the exact number of fighters in Lakurawa at this time and the relative proportion of Malians and Nigeriens). There appear to have been some divisions or between the Malian and Nigeriens at this time, even as, in the eyes of the local Sokoto communities, they were all part of the same Lakurawa: 2017-2018 was a time of flux for jihadists in the Sahel, with some Fulani members of the al-Qaeda-linked groups such as Katiba Macina/al Mourabitoune beginning to defect to the nascent Islamic State Sahel group (which had only formed in 2015).

While the Malian members of Lakurawa apparently agreed to leave Sokoto at the request of the local communities, the Nigerien members of the group were reportedly less amenable to dialogue and insisted on maintaining their presence in Nigeria. They subsequently clashed with Nigerian troops, who chased them across the border into Niger in late 2018. The Nigerien militants may have made a greater effort to stay in Sokoto in part due to military pressure that the Islamic State Sahel group was facing in Mali at the time, which would have created pressure for them to establish new bases deeper southwards in Nigeria.

In 2019, the Nigerien members of Lakurawa returned and killed the district head of Balle in a dispute over 63 million Naira (equivalent to approximately 210,00 USD at the time) in