Understanding Nigeria's compounding security crisis

Nigeria, a country of more than 220 million people, is enduring its worst security crisis in decades. Armed insurgents, herder-farmer clashes, and separatist violence are operating simultaneously across nearly every region of the country. While the violence is not new, its scale and intensity are accelerating in unprecedented ways that are alarming ordinary Nigerians and the international community alike.

Terror attacks in Nigeria increased by 43 percent in 2025, rising from 120 incidents in 2024 to 171, according to the 2026 Global Terrorism Index. The country saw a dramatic increase in activity by the Islamic State, with IS-attributed attacks jumping from 20 in 2024 to 92 in 2025. Nigeria also recorded 237 more terrorism-related fatalities in 2025 than in 2024, and was the only country in the region to experience an increase in both attack frequency and death toll.

Data from Nigeria's National Human Rights Commission indicated that at least 2,266 people were killed by bandits and insurgents in the first half of 2025 alone, a figure that exceeded the total number of similar deaths recorded throughout all of 2024. Nigeria's Vanguard newspaper calculated that 1,258 people were killed due to violence between January 1 and February 10, 2026. That is approximately 27 people per day, every day, for six weeks.

The violence is also stoking hunger on a massive scale. According to the World Food Programme, nearly 35 million people are projected to face severe food insecurity during the 2026 lean season from June to August, the highest number ever recorded in the country, with insurgent attacks identified as a key driver of the crisis.

How Nigeria became a country of many crises

Nigeria's insecurity crisis is not one conflict but many, layered on top of each other across a territory that spans over 923,000 square kilometres. Governance in West Africa’s largest economy has been volatile since the mid-60s, when cycles of military coups interrupted fitful democratic experiments, and a booming oil revenue fed corruption rather than development. Despite the eventual return of civilian rule in 1999, democracy brought elections but not always accountability. Overtime, public trust started waning, with the state being unable to effectively deliver on security and other basic services to its citizens. The social contract between the government and the people frayed to the point of invisibility in many parts of the country.

Into that governance vacuum poured every form of organised violence the modern state could produce. Boko Haram emerged in the northeast around 2002 and began launching its violent insurgency by 2009. The militant group weaponised poverty and religious grievance into an insurgency that would eventually pledge allegiance to the Islamic State by 2015. Banditry, which started in 2011, has now metastasised across the northwest and north central regions, where armed groups raid villages, kidnap for ransom, and displace entire communities. Farmer-herder clashes over land and water, intensified by climate change, have turned the Middle Belt into a corridor of recurring massacres, with Benue and Plateau States witnessing the worst attacks. In the southeast, separatist agitation has revived dormant tensions with new urgency, as groups like the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and its militant wing, the Eastern Security Network (ESN) coordinate attacks and enforce sit-at-home orders.

It is within this sprawling, compounding crisis of insecurity that Nigeria now finds itself, and it is this crisis that demands the most urgent, unflinching examination.

In the Northeast, the states of Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa have been the epicentre of the Boko Haram insurgency for close to two decades. The group, whose name loosely translates as “Western education is forbidden,” launched a campaign of bombings, massacres, and mass kidnappings that drew global attention in 2014 when it abducted 276 schoolgirls from Chibok. The movement has since fractured, with a splinter group called the Islamic State West Africa Province, or ISWAP, becoming the more militarily capable faction. In 2025, deadly attacks in Borno State signalled a resurgence of a separate faction of Boko Haram commonly known as JAS, suggesting that even as ISWAP consolidates, older threats are not gone.

In the Northwest, the crisis looks different. Here, the primary actors are loosely organised criminal gangs, locally referred to as bandits, who emerged partly from longstanding conflicts between farming and herding communities competing over land and water. Over time, these groups grew bolder, better armed, and more organised. A 2025 report by geopolitical research firm SBM Intelligence found that 2,938 people were kidnapped in the Northwest region between July 2024 and June 2025, over 60 percent of all kidnapping incidents reported nationwide. Zamfara State recorded the highest number at 1,203 abductions, followed by Kaduna with 629, Katsina with 566, and Sokoto with 358.

In the Middle Belt, the central band of states where Nigeria's predominantly Muslim north meets its predominantly Christian south, intercommunal violence between farming and herding communities has claimed thousands of lives and generated one of the world's less-reported displacement crises. Populations in north-central Plateau and Benue states are facing increased risks amid a sharp rise in intercommunal violence since 2025. The Yelwata Massacre in June 2025 saw the killing of at least 150 people in Benue, where years of violence over land, religion, and ethnicity have destabilised communities. Kwara State has also emerged as a new venue for such clashes, especially after the Woro village massacre in February, which resulted in over 170 deaths and the abduction of countless people, marking one of Nigeria's most violent incidents in recent years.

In the Southeast, the separatist movement known as the Indigenous People of Biafra, or IPOB, continues to wage a low-level insurgency, with gunmen linked to the group attacking security forces and enforcing “sit-at-home” orders that have paralysed commerce across multiple states for years. In the Niger Delta, pipeline sabotage and armed criminal groups remain entrenched.

The Geography of ungoverned spaces

Perhaps the most structurally important factor in Nigeria's security crisis is the vast swathes of territory where the presence of the Nigerian state is barely felt. The pervasiveness of banditry, insurgency, mass kidnapping, and cattle rustling in northern Nigeria has been attributed to numerous unguarded locations, including the infamous Sambisa Forest in Borno State, the Gwoza mountain region in the same Borno, the Kwiambana forest of Zamfara, and Dajin Rugu, a forest that stretches from Kaduna State through Katsina into the forests of Zamfara.

As many of these forest belts extend across multiple states, they have become something close to autonomous zones, due to years of state neglect. The forests and ungoverned spaces that once sheltered cattle rustlers and small criminal groups have become sanctuaries for extremist cells who move seamlessly between regions. The primordial neglect of ungoverned areas with limited state surveillance creates an enabling environment for warlordism, religious fanaticism, and tribal self-defence forces, and facilitates the illegal movement of arms, ammunition, drugs, and other illicit substances.

The consequences of this abandonment are visible in real time. In February 2026, the governor of Bauchi State declared after an emergency meeting with President Bola Tinubu that bandits had taken over several ungoverned spaces in his state, warning that the situation could degenerate into a humanitarian crisis if urgent action was not taken. The governor's candour was particularly striking, as Nigeria's political leaders rarely speak so plainly about the limits of state authority within their own borders.

Nigeria's most volatile border zones also form a crescent of contested territory stretching from the Lake Chad Basin in the Northeast, through the Sahel corridor in the Northwest, down to the forested margins of the Niger Delta in the South. In the Northeast, the porous frontiers shared with Niger, Chad, and Cameroon have long served as operational lifelines for Boko Haram and its splinter faction, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), allowing fighters, weapons, and financing to move across boundaries that state security forces can barely monitor, let alone control.

The northwest borderlands with Niger and Benin Republic have also become the new staging grounds for bandit confederacies that raid Nigerian communities and retreat into terrain where neither government maintains a credible presence. These border areas constitute spaces that are undergoverned or alternatively governed, where the Nigerian state's authority is either intermittent, contested, or simply unimpactful to daily life. The state's effective reach across these border zones is thin enough to allow armed groups to recruit, regroup, and resupply with a degree of impunity that would be impossible in areas of stronger institutional presence. Beyond a security crisis, this impunity reflects a governance failure with roots in decades of neglect, corruption, and the deliberate underfunding of border management infrastructure across successive administrations.

The rising scale of kidnapping

One of the most disturbing developments in Nigeria's security landscape is the industrialisation of kidnapping. What began largely as an ideological tool of Boko Haram, aimed at spreading terror and destroying education, has evolved into a thriving criminal economy with its own market logic.

In November 2025, at least 402 people, mostly schoolchildren, were kidnapped across four states in the north-central region, surpassing the scale of the 2014 Chibok kidnapping that shocked the world. While the Chibok abduction was treated at the time as an almost unthinkable act, it was exceeded in a single month more than a decade later.

The sophistication of these operations has also grown in recent years. In November 2025, gunmen forced their way into the dormitories of Government Girls' Comprehensive Secondary School in Maga, Kebbi State, killed the school's vice-principal, and fled with 25 girls. Just days later, 215 schoolgirls and 12 teachers were kidnapped in a secondary school in Papiri, Niger State. Only days earlier, suspected bandits abducted six senior directors of the Federal Ministry of Defence on the Kabba-Lokoja highway in Kogi State and demanded a large ransom. While four of the victims were rescued later that month by the Nigerian military, two still remain in captivity. The attack, which was audacious enough to target senior defence ministry officials on a major highway, demonstrated that the problem is no longer confined to civilians in remote rural areas.

US involvement and the danger of a false narrative

On December 25, 2025, the United States launched more than a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles from a Navy ship operating in the Gulf of Guinea, striking two alleged terrorist enclaves in Bauni forest in Sokoto State. The U.S. military firing cruise missiles into a West African country not formally at war reflects how seriously Washington has come to view the jihadist threat in Nigeria's northwest. To understand how the United States went from a distant observer of Nigeria's crisis to launching cruise missiles into its territory, it helps to follow the thread of a narrative that travelled from church pulpits and conservative media studios into the Oval Office, and eventually into the skies above Nigeria’s Sokoto State.

The phrase “Christian genocide” arrived in mainstream American political discourse over the years, through the work of advocacy organisations, religious lobbying groups, and a transatlantic network of evangelical institutions with deep financial and theological ties to Nigeria. Groups like Open Doors USA, the Family Research Council, and the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law have for years circulated statistics claiming that Nigeria is the deadliest country in the world for Christians, with some reports attributing as many as 7,000 Christian deaths to religiously motivated violence in 2025 alone. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a Washington-based advisory body, has recommended that Nigeria be designated a “Country of Particular Concern” for religious freedom violations every year since 2009.

The statistical foundations of these claims, however, have been challenged by independent researchers. A BBC investigation showed that much of the data used to promote the claim cannot be independently verified. Political scientist Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos, a specialist in armed conflicts in Africa, has also questioned the methodology behind the studies that advocacy groups rely on, pointing to the absence of systematic field research, the difficulty of distinguishing Christian from Muslim victims in a country without a functioning civil registry, and the tendency to classify all Fulani herder-related violence as religiously motivated regardless of its actual drivers. In a country nearly evenly divided between Christians and Muslims, such methodological choices produce very different numbers depending on who is doing the counting.

The ties between Nigerian Pentecostal churches and American evangelical networks, built up since the 1980s through a shared culture of megachurch ministry and televangelist theology, gave the “Christian genocide” narrative a powerful emotional infrastructure. When violence spiked in the Middle Belt and the north, Nigerian Christian leaders with connections to American counterparts amplified specific incidents in terms that resonated with a U.S. audience already primed by decades of religious liberty advocacy.

By October 2025, the narrative had reached the top of American politics, with President Donald Trump posting on Truth Social that Christianity faced an “existential threat” in Nigeria, claiming that 3,100 Christians had been killed there, without citing a source. He redesignated Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” under the International Religious Freedom Act. The following day, he went further by stating:

“I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians!”

He simultaneously threatened to cut off all U.S. aid to Nigeria if the government did not act to protect Christians. The declaration triggered a diplomatic crisis between the two countries that had historically maintained a pragmatic partnership rooted in oil investment and counterterrorism cooperation.

The backlash from experts, foreign governments, and Nigeria itself was swift and pointed. Bulama Bukarti, a Nigerian humanitarian lawyer and conflict analyst, speaking to Al Jazeera, noted that claims of a Christian genocide came from a far-right narrative that has been simmering for a long time, which was eventually amplified by President Trump, and could further increase instability in Nigeria.

Nigerian President Bola Tinubu rejected the genocide framing firmly but carefully, knowing he needed to preserve the bilateral relationship. His government, he said, was committed to protecting all Nigerians regardless of faith. He signalled openness to counterterrorism cooperation, while insisting that any U.S. action must respect Nigerian sovereignty.

Then, on Christmas Day 2025, the United States acted militarily. Trump announced that U.S. forces had struck Islamic State militants in northwest Nigeria. U.S. Africa Command and Nigerian officials confirmed that sixteen precision strikes were conducted in Sokoto State, a Muslim-majority state of four million people bordering Niger. Nigerian Information Minister Mohammed Idris confirmed that the strikes were carried out with the “full involvement of the Armed Forces of Nigeria” and the “explicit approval” of President Tinubu. The United States conducting the first airstrikes inside Nigeria was an extraordinary moment, especially as it was justified in part by a narrative that independent experts had largely rejected as a distortion of a far more complex conflict. The number of casualties, including how many terrorists were neutralised, remains unconfirmed at the time of this report.

What is confirmed, however, is the fact that the strikes did not stop the violence, as attacks continued to intensify across northern states in the weeks that followed. The U.S. military has since deployed 200 troops to provide training and intelligence support to the Nigerian military, which is fighting militants across the North. Yet despite these interventions, attacks have continued to intensify.

And then, on 08 April 2026, the U.S. Department of State authorised the voluntary departure of non-emergency government employees and their family members from the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, citing the deteriorating security situation. Abuja, Nigeria's purpose-built federal capital, was meant to be the country's safe centre. The embassy remained open, but in reduced capacity, with routine visa appointments suspended and emergency services available only by appointment. Five additional states, including Plateau, Jigawa, Kwara, Niger, and Taraba, were elevated to the highest “Do Not Travel” category, bringing the total number of heavily restricted states to 23 out of Nigeria's 36.

The arc of U.S. involvement in Nigeria's crisis over the preceding six months was a study in contradictions. Washington had framed the violence as a religious crusade against Christians, launched military strikes premised on that framing, imposed diplomatic and financial pressure on Abuja, and then quietly began pulling its own people out of the capital. U.S. travel advisories often shape how investors, international organisations, and airlines assess country risk. The partial drawdown sent a signal that the airstrikes, rhetoric, and pressure had not fixed, and may have complicated, a crisis that experts had been warning all along was never simply what it had been called.

What this means?

What makes this web of interactions so damaging to Nigeria's security architecture is precisely its fluidity. Conventional counterinsurgency doctrine is built around identifiable hierarchies and predictable enemy behaviour. Nigeria's armed landscape offers neither. A bandit group negotiating a ceasefire with a state government in one season may be absorbing fighters in the next. Separatist agitators in the southeast operate through a diffuse network of local enforcement groups whose command structures are deliberately obscured, making negotiation and targeted operations equally difficult. Security forces designed and trained to confront conventional threats are routinely outmaneuvered by actors who move with ease across ideological and political registers. The result is a security landscape in which each armed group, by interacting with others, multiplies the complexity facing the Nigerian state far beyond what any single group could produce alone, and in which tactical victories against one node of violence frequently displace rather than eliminate the threat.

The Nigerian government has announced plans to surge troops to affected areas and reinforce its counterterror operation, but structural problems remain. The country’s security forces are stretched thin across an enormous country, and years of underfunding, corruption allegations, and human rights concerns have complicated both their effectiveness and their legitimacy. Nigerian security forces have themselves been implicated in abuses, including airstrikes that have killed civilians. On 11 April, a Nigerian Air Force strike targeting jihadist rebels hit a market in north-east Nigeria, reportedly killing more than 100 people and injuring many others.

Despite pledges by the government to protect civilians from attacks, public safety has failed to materialise. In 2015, the Nigerian government endorsed the Safe Schools Declaration (SSD), which pledges to protect students, teachers, and educational facilities from attacks in the conflict-affected regions. The SSD commitment was ratified in December 2019, leading to the development of the National Policy on Safety, Security and Violence-Free Schools. By 2021, however, the Nigerian government had admitted that over 12 million children faced education disruptions due to banditry and insurgency, specifically targeting schools for kidnapping.

Nigeria is currently a state under profound stress, one where the gap between the government's formal authority and its practical reach has been allowed to grow for decades, with consequences that are now very difficult to contain. The country stands at a crossroads, where statistics tell a grim story of loss, displacement, and persistent insecurity, while political narratives threaten to further polarise an already fragile landscape. For the millions of Nigerians living inside that story, the crossroads is in fact the road they take to the market in the morning, the school they send their children to, the farm they wonder whether they will still find standing when they return. For them, the crisis has been a reality for a long time, yet the end seems distant.