Abuja – Nigeria’s military has launched a campaign against members of the Lakurawa, a group of Islamic State-affiliated terrorists attacking communities in the northwest of the country near the border with Niger.
Lakurawa is made up of herders whom local leaders in Sokoto State hired in 2016 to help residents of remote rural communities fight bandits.
“When they came, the community considered them a savior,” analyst John Sunday Ojo recently told the BBC.
However, after getting rid of the bandits in 2017, Lakurawa soon took their place, turning on the communities the group had been hired to protect. The group offered substantial signing bonuses to young men in the community to recruit them to its cause.
“Even as the Lakurawa reduced this threat of armed banditry, however, they became a security threat in their own right, intimidating local residents and pushing an extremist radical Islamic ideology against the wishes of many citizens and authorities,” Murtala Ahmed Rufa’i, an associate professor at Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto, wrote in an article documenting the rise of the group.
The goal, according to analyst Aliyu Dahiru, was to make Lakurawa the only source of authority in a region that has few modern amenities and receives little attention from the federal government.
“By mixing economic incentives with ideological enforcement, Lakurawa has implemented Sharia law in the territories it occupies, often under the guise of providing protection,” Dahiru wrote recently for HumAngle.
Analysts Ojo and Ezenwa E. Olumba say the growth of the Lakurawa is a result of inability of the government to provide security in the area.
The Lakurawa, who speak language used by Fulani herders, originated in Mali as much as 25 years ago. After migrating to the border area with Niger and Nigeria, they married into local communities, Rufa’i, wrote.
The Lakurawa’s attempt to impose their beliefs on residents of Sokoto State has met resistance.
“They tried to convince us to join their religious sect, which we found strange,” Basiru Isiya, a resident of the community of Tsauna, told Al Jazeera. “We refused.”
When residents of border communities began accusing Lakurawa fighters of stealing their cattle — something the group originally stopped other people from doing — the fighters retreated across the border. Since then, they have made occasional forays into Nigeria. In November 2024, a group of armed men believed to be Lakurawa killed 15 people in the northwestern Kebbi State community of Mera. Around the same time, Lakurawa terrorists also attacked nearby communities in the Dosso district of Niger. The Nigerian military responded to the Mera attack by launching ground and air assaults on Lakurawa camps in Kebbi and Sokoto states. Lakurawa fighters retreated to Borgu near the border with Benin.
In December, Nigeria’s Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Christopher Musa announced a special operations mission in Kebbi and Sokoto states to drive out Lakurawa fighters. Security forces reported that they destroyed 22 Lakurawa camps in Sokoto State.
Meanwhile, security experts with Zagazola Makama report that Lakurawa fighters are trying to recruit bandits in Zamfara State to their cause of building an Islamic state in northwest Nigeria.
“The brewing conflict between the notorious bandit leaders and a formidable militant group threatens to plunge the region into further chaos,” Zagazola Makama security analysts wrote.
Ojo and Olumba wrote that the Nigerian government’s approach to Lakurawa activity will not be enough to subdue the group. They urged Nigerian authorities to work more with their counterparts across the border in Niger, but also to shift some policing powers to the state level as a way to provide communities with quicker and more effective response to crime.
“The reliance of communities on groups like the Lakurawa for protection made it possible for a band of armed herders in Mali to become a powerful terror group in Nigeria,” Ojo and Olumba wrote.
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