Boko Haram's Shadow: Resurgence in the Northeast

In March 2025, ISWAP overran Marte town—the site of Borno's largest military base. For the first time in years, the governor admitted what civilians already knew: the authorities were losing ground. I was in Maiduguri when the news reached the Monday Market. Nobody stopped bargaining. A fish seller simply wrapped his catch tighter and said, "Marte again." He did not look up. That is what fifteen years of war does to a people. The horror does not disappear. It becomes familiar, like the dust that coats every surface in the dry season, like the checkpoints that multiply after every attack and never seem to catch anyone.

Maiduguri in the dry season is a city of dust and diesel. Military convoys rumble down Airport Road at dawn, their gunners scanning the roadside with a boredom that betrays routine. Generators roar through the night in neighbourhoods where the grid has not worked for years. The city breathes, but it breathes shallowly, always waiting for the next explosion, the next abduction, the next announcement that a town once considered safe has fallen again. The soldiers at Marte had new rifles and old rations. The insurgents had old rifles and new tactics. That arithmetic explains more than any defence budget ever could. Nigeria does not have a security problem. It has a protection problem. Every armed group in the Northeast—from ISWAP commanders to the vigilantes meant to stop them—is speaking the same sentence to the same deaf state, in the only language the state has taught them to use: force.

The Resurgence Nobody Wanted to Name

For three years after Abubakar Shekau died in May 2021, the analysts in Abuja spoke of "degraded capacity" and "final defeat." The headlines shrank. The donor conferences moved on. In Maiduguri, the generators at government houses hummed a little louder, and the international NGOs downsized their compound security. The war, we were told, was winding down.

The illusion of winding down was built on a statistical trick. When the military consolidated into super camps, it stopped patrolling large swathes of Borno. Fewer patrols meant fewer contacts with insurgents. Fewer contacts meant fewer reported attacks. Fewer reported attacks meant the war was "de-escalating." The metrics improved because the military stopped looking. The insurgents, meanwhile, were not de-escalating. They were organizing.

Between 2022 and 2024, while Nigerian officials celebrated the death of Shekau as a turning point, ISWAP was rebuilding. The group recruited from displaced communities, from criminal networks, and from the ranks of frustrated youth who saw no future in a region where schools had been burned and markets had been abandoned. It trained new commanders. It tested tactics in small raids that barely made the local news. It mapped the terrain around the super camps, learning the patrol schedules, the resupply routes, the hours when the sentries were least alert. By the time the first quarter of 2025 arrived, ISWAP was not merely resurgent. It was prepared.

SBM Intelligence, in its June 2025 assessment, recorded the numbers that contradicted the official optimism. Boko Haram and ISWAP attacks rose from 147 in 2023 to 191 in 2024. Bombing tactics that once belonged to the insurgency alone had diffused to bandits and separatist groups across the country. The violence was not ending. It was metastasizing.

Then came the first quarter of 2025. The Ujasusi Blog Terrorism Monitor, published on 22 July 2025, documented more than 300 ISWAP attacks in Nigeria alone during those three months, resulting in over 500 deaths. The group had reorganized into four semi-autonomous Wilayat, or provinces, each capable of independent planning and execution. This was not the same insurgency that Nigerian commanders had studied in PowerPoint briefings. ISWAP had evolved.

The evolution was technical and terrifying. Foreign fighters, drawn from the collapsing states of the central Sahel, began appearing in interrogation reports. Weaponized drones, once the preserve of state armies, were spotted over military positions in Borno's northern axis. Coordinated night assaults—multiple targets hit simultaneously, communication networks jammed, reinforcement routes ambushed—suggested a command structure that had learned from its enemies. In February 2025, an attack on a military outpost in Kukawa LGA lasted six hours. The base commander radioed for air support that arrived three hours too late. By then, the ammunition depot had been looted and the barracks burned.

I drove to Konduga in April 2025 to speak with families who had fled Marte. A woman named Hauwa M., forty-three years old, sat under a neem tree with her four children and a bundle of beans she had carried for twenty kilometres. "They came at two in the morning," she said. "First the drones, then the motorcycles. The soldiers ran toward the bush. We ran toward the road. Everyone ran." She had been running, on and off, since 2014. Her youngest child was born in an IDP camp in 2016. He has never slept in the village his grandfather built. When I asked her what she wanted from the government, she looked at me as if I had asked a question in a language she no longer understood. "I want to stop running," she said. "That is all."

The macroeconomic crisis of 2024-2025 has made her village even harder to reclaim. Inflation hit 33.95% in May 2024, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Food inflation reached 40.53%. The naira depreciated over 90% year-on-year. Fuel subsidy removal in June 2023 raised transport costs to levels that make agricultural recovery impossible. A bag of fertilizer that cost N8,000 in 2022 cost N35,000 by early 2025. Farmers who might have returned to Marte cannot afford to plant. The insurgents do not need to occupy every village permanently. They only need to ensure that no one else can live there. Economic collapse and military retreat have become allies of the enemy.

The insurgency's economic adaptation is as sophisticated as its military evolution. In areas under its influence, ISWAP operates a parallel taxation system. Farmers pay zakat, a religious levy, on their harvests. Fishermen on Lake Chad pay tolls to access the water. Traders moving between Monguno and Maiduguri pay passage fees at checkpoints that shift location weekly to avoid air strikes. The rates are lower than official government taxes in some cases, and the collectors do not steal. That is the grim competence that has allowed the insurgency to outlast three Nigerian administrations. It provides a semblance of order where the state provides none. The insurgents do not need to love the people they rule. They only need to be more predictable than the government that abandoned them.

The recruitment pipeline has also evolved. Where Boko Haram once relied on ideological indoctrination and coercion, ISWAP now offers something more tangible: wages. Young men in the camps, with no education and no prospects, are approached by recruiters who promise N20,000 per month, a motorcycle, and a gun. The money is paid. The motorcycle is delivered. The gun is real. For a generation that has watched the Nigerian state fail to provide even the basics, the offer is not hard to refuse. The insurgency is not winning hearts. It is winning stomachs.

The Super Camp Retreat

The Nigerian military's response to this resurgence has been, by its own internal assessments, a strategic retreat dressed in operational language. The "super camp" strategy—consolidating forces into large, fortified bases rather than dispersing them across rural outposts—was sold as a way to protect soldiers from ambush. To civilians in Borno's hinterland, it looked like something else: a withdrawal.

The European Union Asylum Agency, in its June 2025 security assessment for Borno State, confirmed what market traders and farmers already knew. Between late April and mid-May 2025, ISWAP and Boko Haram conducted at least twelve coordinated attacks. Sixteen Nigerian military bases had been overrun. Marte town, with its supposedly impregnable garrison, fell in March. By late May 2025, all but one of Marte LGA's three hundred-plus towns and villages were outside government control.

The scale of the Marte collapse deserves attention. This was not a remote border post. It was Borno's largest military base, housing hundreds of soldiers, armour, and artillery. Its fall in March 2025 sent shockwaves through the military command structure in Maiduguri. Officers who had briefed journalists on "improved situational awareness" in January were redeployed or retired by April. The base commander was reportedly detained, though no official statement confirmed this. In Borno, silence about military failure is the loudest signal of disgrace.

Marte sits on the shores of Lake Chad, in terrain that has always favoured mobile attackers over static defenders. The land is flat, the vegetation sparse, and the dry season turns the earth to powder that betrays every footprint. In the rainy season, the roads become mud traps that immobilize armour. The insurgents know this terrain intimately. They grew up on it. The soldiers sent to defend Marte often did not. A lance corporal from Ogun State, posted to Marte in 2024, told me before the fall that he had never seen Lake Chad before his deployment. "I thought it would be bigger," he said. It is not bigger. It has been shrinking for decades, and the land it leaves behind becomes new battleground.

Governor Babagana Zulum of Borno State broke the official silence in early June 2025 with a candour that stunned the capital. He told journalists in Maiduguri that the authorities were "losing ground." For a governor who had built his reputation on visibility—visiting villages under fire, sleeping in forward operating bases, challenging the military's complacency—this admission carried weight. It also carried risk. Zulum has survived multiple assassination attempts. His dissent from federal strategy is not academic. It is personal, and it is dangerous.

Zulum's critique centres on the super camp model. He has argued publicly that concentrating soldiers in fortified positions leaves rural communities defenceless, destroys intelligence networks, and cedes territory by default. "You cannot protect people from behind concrete walls," he told a security forum in Abuja in 2024. The military's reply—that dispersed forces were too vulnerable to attack—does not convince the farmers of Abadam, Guzamala, or Bama, who have seen their villages become no-go areas while the army sits in garrison towns.

Maiduguri residents I spoke with in March 2025 described the super camps as "fortresses of fear." A civil servant who asked not to be named—his brother is an army captain—put it plainly: "The generals in Abuja can draw circles on maps and call them operational zones. The people inside those circles are safe. The people outside are on their own. And the circles get smaller every year."

The EUAA report noted that ISWAP had adapted its tactics specifically to exploit this consolidation. With the military bottled up in large bases, insurgents now move freely along secondary roads, tax farmers at improvised checkpoints, and impose levies on fishermen around Lake Chad. The state is not absent. It is present in the towns and invisible in the bush. That is worse than absence. It is abandonment with a headquarters.

The farmers who try to return to their land face an impossible choice. If they stay near the super camps, they compete for scarce land with thousands of other displaced families and face extortion from both insurgents and vigilantes. If they move farther out, beyond the perimeter of military protection, they become easy prey. In March 2025, a group of farmers from Guzamala who had returned to plant sorghum were attacked at dawn. Twelve were killed. The survivors fled back to Maiduguri. The sorghum was left to rot. The military did not arrive until the following day.

The human cost of this strategy is counted in closed schools, abandoned clinics, and fields that have returned to scrub. In Bama LGA, which was "liberated" in 2016, most schools remain shuttered in 2025. Teachers who were posted there by the Borno State Universal Basic Education Board refuse to leave Maiduguri. They collect their salaries and pay rent in the capital, while children in Bama learn Arabic from insurgent instructors or learn nothing at all. The military calls this stabilization. The parents call it surrender. In a clinic outside Bama, the only medical supplies available in March 2025 were paracetamol and chloroquine tablets left by an NGO that evacuated six months earlier. The nurse had not been paid since October 2024. She stayed because there was nowhere else to go.

The Unthinkable Alliance

For five years after Shekau's death, Boko Haram and ISWAP fought each other with a ferocity that sometimes exceeded their attacks on the Nigerian state. Shekau's faction, loyal to his erratic leadership and brutal tactics, clashed repeatedly with ISWAP's more disciplined commanders. The split was ideological, tactical, and personal. Shekau authorized the mass abduction of schoolgirls, the use of child suicide bombers, and indiscriminate killings of Muslim civilians. ISWAP's leadership, drawn from the Islamic State's central command, favoured taxation, governance, and selective violence designed to win civilian compliance rather than terrorize it into submission.

That internecine war is now ending. According to DefenceWeb reporting from 23 April 2026, Boko Haram and ISWAP have begun collaborating on attacks in the Northeast. Fighters from both groups have been observed operating in mixed units. Intelligence intercepts suggest shared planning for assaults on military convoys. The collaboration extends beyond Borno. Boko Haram advisors have reportedly been sent to work with Lakurawa fighters in northwest Nigeria, while ISWAP cells have launched cross-border operations into Niger and Cameroon.

This is not a merger. It is a tactical accommodation driven by shared enemies and shared opportunities. The groups still compete for recruits and territory. But the days when Nigerian commanders could rely on insurgent infighting to degrade their opponents are over. The insurgency has learned something the Nigerian state has not: how to adapt.

The implications are regional and alarming. What began as a Nigerian domestic crisis has become a node in a transnational network that stretches from the Atlantic coast to the Sahara's southern rim. The Lake Chad Basin—never easy to police, with its porous borders and seasonal islands—has become a highway rather than a barrier. The insurgents do not recognize the borders drawn in colonial map rooms. They recognize only the terrain: where to hide, where to move, where to strike.

The Border That Became a Door

In 2015, the Multinational Joint Task Force was revived with fanfare. Troops from Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon would coordinate operations, share intelligence, and squeeze the insurgency from all sides. For a few years, it worked well enough. Chadian armour punched deep into insurgent territory. Cameroonian troops sealed eastern escape routes. Nigerien forces patrolled the northern flank.

Then came the Sahelian coups. Niger's military government, installed in July 2023, withdrew from the MNJTF between 2023 and 2024. The withdrawal was not merely symbolic. It removed a critical northern blocking force and severed intelligence-sharing pipelines that had taken years to build. Nigeria now faces ISWAP alone on its northern frontier. The border that was meant to be a wall has become a door.

The ECOWAS fragmentation of 2024 compounded the damage. As Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso withdrew from the regional bloc, cross-border security cooperation became a diplomatic minefield. Nigerian officers who once called their Nigerien counterparts on encrypted lines now hesitate, unsure whether the call will be answered or recorded. The insurgents do not wait for diplomatic clearance to move across borders.

Regional counterterrorism was never easy. The MNJTF struggled with inconsistent funding, equipment disparities, and competing national priorities even at its peak. Chad's late President Idriss Deby was the most aggressive of the regional leaders, personally leading troops into battle. His death in April 2021 removed the MNJTF's most effective field commander. His son, Mahamat Idriss Deby, has focused on consolidating power at home rather than projecting force abroad. Cameroonian troops, meanwhile, have been accused of human rights abuses in their own counterinsurgency campaign that rival those of the Nigerian military. Trust was thin even when the architecture existed. Now the architecture is crumbling.

The intelligence vacuum left by Niger's withdrawal has been particularly damaging. Nigerian military intelligence had relied on Nigerien sources for information about insurgent movements in the Diffa region and the northern Lake Chad islands. Without that flow, Nigerian commanders are operating with maps that are months out of date. Air strikes are called in on coordinates that no longer hold targets. Ground patrols walk into ambushes that Nigerien informants might have warned against. The insurgents have noticed. Their northern Wilayat have become more aggressive, knowing that the pincer movement from Niger is no longer a threat.

The group's Wilayat in the Lake Chad Basin now operate with something close to strategic depth—safe havens, supply lines, and recruitment pools that span national boundaries the insurgents do not recognize. No updated Lake Chad Basin Commission security assessment has been published since 2022. That silence is itself a measure of institutional opacity, and of the diplomatic paralysis that has gripped the region.

The Civilian Ledger

The war is fought with bullets, but it is measured in displacement. OCHA and IOM, in their 2024 humanitarian assessments, recorded over 3 million internally displaced persons in Nigeria. More than 2.5 million of them are in the Northeast. These are not abstract figures. They are people who once grew millet, herded cattle, taught school, traded across borders, and buried their dead in ancestral ground. Now they live in camps, in host communities, in abandoned buildings, in the limbo of perpetual temporary existence.

I have watched a mother in Dalori camp identify her son's body by the sandals she knitted for him. That was in 2016. In 2025, she is still in the same camp, and the sandals are still being made by the same women, for the same sons, who still disappear. The camp has become a city. It has markets, churches, mosques, schools that teach children who have never seen a classroom wall that was not made of tarpaulin. It has politics, crime, marriages, births, and deaths. What it does not have is an exit.

FEWS NET, in its food security outlook for 2024-2025, projected that Crisis and Emergency outcomes would persist across the Northeast, Northwest, and North Central states through early 2025. In Borno's inaccessible LGAs—Abadam, Bama, Guzamala, and Marte—populations faced Emergency outcomes, the most severe classification short of famine. Over 8 million Nigerians faced acute food insecurity in 2025. The insurgency did not create this hunger alone. Climate stress, macroeconomic collapse, and the displacement of farmers from their land all contributed. But the violence is what makes the other factors lethal.

The humanitarian response has become a permanent feature of the landscape, and permanence has bred a dangerous complacency. The World Food Programme and its partners distribute food to millions, but the distributions are irregular, the rations have shrunk as funding contracts, and the logistics of reaching inaccessible areas have grown more dangerous. In 2024, an aid convoy was ambushed on the Maiduguri-Monguno road. Six humanitarian workers were killed. The road was closed for three weeks. During those three weeks, camps that depended on that route went hungry.

Health care in the affected LGAs has effectively collapsed. The few clinics that remain open operate without electricity, without drugs, and without staff who have been paid in months. Malaria, cholera, and malnutrition are the primary killers now, more than bullets. A doctor working with an international NGO in Monguno told me in March 2025 that acute malnutrition rates among children under five in Marte LGA were above emergency thresholds. "We are not treating a war," she said. "We are treating the absence of everything a society needs to survive."

Women bear a disproportionate share of this absence. In the camps, female-headed households are the majority, because men have been killed, abducted, or displaced to separate locations. Water must be fetched from distant points, exposing women and girls to assault. Fuel must be gathered from ever-dwindling supplies. Food must be stretched across more mouths than it can feed. The gendered architecture of displacement is visible in every queue, every clinic, every school. The war did not create these inequalities, but it has amplified them to a degree that will take generations to reverse.

The educational catastrophe will outlast the war itself. UNICEF estimates that over a million children in the Northeast have missed years of schooling. Some have never enrolled. The insurgency targeted schools deliberately, burning thousands and killing hundreds of teachers. The government's response has been inadequate. The few schools that reopen in "liberated" areas often lack teachers, textbooks, and roofs. Children who should be learning mathematics are learning to recognise the sound of approaching motorcycles. That is a curriculum no examination board can assess, and a loss no recovery programme can easily repair.

The psychological weaponry of the insurgency has been every bit as devastating as its military operations. UNICEF's 2021 report, Beyond Bullets and Bombs, documented the systematic use of child suicide bombers in the Lake Chad Basin. Children—some abducted, some coerced, some radicalized in captivity—were deployed to markets, mosques, and checkpoints. The tactic was not merely murderous. It was corrosive. It destroyed the social trust that allows communities to function. A neighbour's child became a potential weapon. A crowded market became a death trap. The space between people, which is where society lives, became a zone of suspicion.

That suspicion has not faded. In 2025, mothers in Maiduguri still search their children's bags before they leave for school. Teachers still eye new pupils with caution. The bombers have grown fewer—suicide attacks dropped after Shekau's death—but the fear has become architecture. It shapes how people move, where they gather, whom they trust. A war fought with children cannot be won with soldiers alone. It requires something the Nigerian state has never built: a systematic programme of deradicalization, psychosocial support, and community reconciliation that operates at scale.

The Vigilantes Who Became Predators

In 2013, as Boko Haram overran Borno's rural areas and the military retreated to Maiduguri, young men in the city's neighbourhoods picked up machetes, sticks, and the occasional captured rifle. They called themselves the Civilian Joint Task Force. The CJTF was born of desperation. Its fighters knew the terrain, spoke the languages, and could distinguish a local farmer from an infiltrator in ways that soldiers from Enugu or Port Harcourt never could. They became the eyes and ears of a military that had gone blind.

For two years, the CJTF was celebrated as a model of community-led security. International observers praised its local knowledge. The military relied on its intelligence. Politicians posed for photographs with young vigilantes at checkpoints. The narrative was seductive: when the state fails, the community saves itself.

That narrative needs revision. By 2024, CJTF members had been implicated in extrajudicial killings, extortion at checkpoints, sexual exploitation of displaced women, and the recruitment of former insurgents into protection rackets. HumAngle and Premium Times documented cases in which CJTF commanders ran parallel taxation systems in camps and markets, extracting money from the same civilians they were meant to protect. In some areas, the distinction between a CJTF checkpoint and an insurgent levy point became invisible to the people passing through.

The Nigerian state has never adequately supervised, paid, or demobilized the CJTF. Many fighters have gone years without salaries promised by the Borno State government. Some have turned to extortion to survive. Others have used their positions to settle personal scores, exploit vulnerable displaced persons, or build local power bases. The result is a community security force that has become, in some localities, another armed group in a landscape already crowded with them.

In 2023, a CJTF commander in Monguno was arrested after allegedly organising the execution of three men accused of insurgent sympathies. The men were never tried. Their bodies were found in a drainage ditch. The commander was released after two weeks. No trial was held. The case did not make the national news. In Borno, such stories are common enough to be unremarkable.

The recruitment pipeline into the CJTF has also become a pipeline for abuse. Young men join expecting salaries, status, and eventually a path to formal employment. Most never receive more than intermittent payments. Some are given weapons without training. Others are sent on dangerous missions without backup. When the promised opportunities fail to materialize, the trained and armed young men do not simply go home. They find other ways to monetize their skills. Some drift into criminal networks. Others leverage their CJTF connections for political influence. A few have been caught selling intelligence to the insurgents they were meant to fight.

This is the critical complication that the celebratory accounts of community policing ignore. Decentralized security without accountability, training, or oversight does not produce protection. It produces predation with a local accent. The CJTF is not uniformly abusive. Many of its members serve with courage and discipline. But the absence of institutional controls means that the worst actors operate with impunity, and the best actors burn out or quit. A force that began as a community's shield has, in places, become its second assailant.

The implications extend beyond Borno. In Chapter 10, when this book examines the debate over state police and community policing, the CJTF must stand as a caution. Decentralization is not a magic word. Without professionalism, oversight, and a clear chain of accountability, it simply moves the violence closer to home.

Fifteen Years and No Peace

The war began in 2009, when Nigerian security forces executed Mohammed Yusuf in custody and transformed a radical preaching movement into an armed insurgency that would outlast them all. Fifteen years later, the conflict has outlasted three presidents, dozens of military commanders, billions of naira in security spending, and the patience of a generation. It has killed hundreds of thousands—no official death toll exists, and the absence of one is itself a lasting scandal. It has displaced millions. It has created an economy of violence in which farmers pay taxes to insurgents, soldiers sell fuel on the black market, vigilantes extort traders, and aid workers navigate a landscape of militarized humanitarianism.

I have covered this war from Maiduguri marketplaces to military briefing rooms to displacement camps that smell of diesel and despair. I have watched the language of counterinsurgency become a vocabulary of self-deception. "Cleared" means the insurgents left temporarily. "Liberated" means the army raised a flag and left. "Stabilized" means the NGOs have set up an office. The words have lost their meaning, but they are still spoken, because to stop speaking them would be to admit that the war is not being won.

The defence budget grows every year, but the money does not reach the front line in forms that matter. Soldiers complain of outdated equipment, expired rations, and allowances that arrive months late. Procurement contracts enrich suppliers in Abuja while troops in Marte sleep in tents that leak during the rains. The insurgents do not need to outspend the Nigerian military. They only need to outlast it. And they are succeeding. The military rotates commanders faster than it rotates tactics. Each new operation—Lafiya Dole, Hadin Kai, and now whatever name will replace the last—promises a fresh approach. The fresh approach always looks remarkably like the old one, with more checkpoints and fewer patrols.

What would peace look like? Not the absence of gunfire, which is what the military calls peace. Real peace would mean teachers returning to Bama, doctors reopening clinics in Marte, farmers planting sorghum in Guzamala without fear of dawn raids. It would mean a government that counts its dead instead of hiding the numbers. It would mean prosecuting the CJTF commanders who execute civilians, and the soldiers who sell fuel to insurgents, and the politicians who divert reconstruction funds. It would mean acknowledging that the war is not a foreign invasion to be repelled but a domestic failure to be repaired. None of this is happening. What is happening is more budgets, more bases, more bodies.

The macroeconomic crisis has turned the war economy into a survival economy for everyone involved. Soldiers on the front line complain that their allowances are delayed. Families in Maiduguri complain that the cost of rice has doubled. Farmers in Konduga complain that they cannot reach their fields. Insurgents complain about nothing, because complaining is a privilege of those who expect better. They have adapted to scarcity. They tax what moves. They seize what sits unguarded. They recruit boys who have no school to attend and no farm to work. The Nigerian state, meanwhile, still operates as if the solution is a bigger budget and a new operation name.

In the Middle Belt, the violence wears different clothes. There is no caliphate, no foreign fighter, no drone. There is only cattle and corn competing for the same shrinking earth, and armed men who have learned that the state will not protect them so they must protect themselves. But the grammar is identical. The state is present but paralyzed in Jos. It is absent in Zamfara. It is predatory in the Delta. And in Borno, it is walled inside super camps, fighting a war of position against an enemy that has already moved on to a war of movement. The fault lines are different, but the fracture is the same.

Hauwa M. is still running. Her son, born in the camp in 2016, is nine years old now. He has never seen a classroom with a proper roof. He has never played in a field without fear. He has never met his grandfather, who died in the first attack on their village in 2014. When I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said, "A soldier." Not because he wants to fight, but because soldiers have boots and guns and do not run. That is the lesson the war has taught him. That is the peace we have built.

The Northeast is not a problem to be solved. It is a warning of what happens when a state fights a war for fifteen years without ever building a peace.

Sources

1. SBM Intelligence, Nigeria Security Report, June 2025. (Boko Haram/ISWAP attacks: 147 in 2023, 191 in 2024.)
2. Ujasusi Blog, Terrorism Monitor: Strategic Intelligence Assessment of ISWAP's Resurgence, 22 July 2025. (300+ ISWAP attacks in Q1 2025; 500+ deaths; 16 military bases overrun; reorganisation into 4+ Wilayat.)
3. European Union Asylum Agency (EUAA), Nigeria Security Situation: Borno State, June 2025. (16 bases overrun; Marte town captured March 2025; all but one of Marte LGA's 300+ towns/villages outside government control as of late May 2025; Governor Zulum statement.)
4. DefenceWeb, "Terror group collaboration: Boko Haram advisors to Lakurawa," 23 April 2026. (Boko Haram-ISWAP collaboration; cross-border operations.)
5. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) / International Organization for Migration (IOM), 2024 humanitarian assessments. (3 million+ IDPs in Nigeria; 2.5 million+ in Northeast.)
6. UNICEF, Beyond Bullets and Bombs: Examining the Child Suicide Bomber Phenomenon in the Lake Chad Basin, 2021.
7. FEWS NET, Nigeria Food Security Outlook, June 2024 – January 2025. (Crisis and Emergency outcomes in Northeast; inaccessible LGAs: Abadam, Bama, Guzamala, Marte.)
8. HumAngle and Premium Times investigative reporting on CJTF abuses, 2023–2024. (Extortion, extrajudicial killings, recruitment of former insurgents.)
9. National Bureau of Statistics, Consumer Price Index, May 2024. (Inflation 33.95%; food inflation 40.53%; naira depreciation.)
10. Lake Chad Basin Commission. No updated security assessment published since 2022.