Ask someone outside Nigeria to name the country’s security threat, and the answer, nearly every time, is Boko Haram. That shorthand has held for fifteen years, ever since the group’s insurgency in the north-east made international headlines. But the map it describes largely froze in the mid-2010s, and the country has kept moving. A far more fragmented picture has formed quietly behind the old story, one that most outside coverage, and a fair amount of coverage inside Nigeria too, hasn’t caught up with. In the north-west, a group calling itself Lakurawa has planted a Sahelian jihadist flag inside Nigerian territory for the first time. In the forests around Kainji Lake in the country’s centre, a group known as Mahmuda built a parallel administration so quietly that the local police spent months denying it existed, right up until two of its alleged leaders were convicted in a federal court. This is the part of Nigeria’s present where I think the gloomier outside accounts are, largely, borne out by the evidence. So here is what is actually known about both groups, and where the record honestly runs out.
”Boko Haram” Was Never the Only Name
The name itself stopped describing a single group years ago. Boko Haram split in 2016, a year after its leader Abubakar Shekau pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, into two rival factions that still operate today. Shekau’s own faction, usually referred to by its Arabic name, Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad (JAS), kept its founder’s willingness to kill and rob Muslim civilians it judged insufficiently devout; Shekau died in 2021, but JAS survived him and has, if anything, leaned harder into targeting ordinary people it suspects of informing on it. The breakaway faction, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), built something closer to a shadow government in parts of Borno State, taxing farmers and fishermen and generally trying to keep the civilians it rules onside, while reserving its violence mostly for soldiers and rival militants. The distinction matters because the two factions now compete for territory around Lake Chad as much as they fight the Nigerian state.
Those two groups are still, by a wide margin, the deadliest actors in the country. The Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a US Department of Defense research institution, found in its 2025 lethality assessment that Boko Haram and ISWAP were responsible for 66% of all violent deaths recorded in Nigeria in 2024, concentrated overwhelmingly in the north-east. What that figure doesn’t capture is scale elsewhere: banditry, the loosely organised kidnapping-for-ransom and cattle-rustling gangs of the north-west and north-central states, produced more individual violent incidents that year than jihadist attacks did, even if each incident killed fewer people on average. Boko Haram and ISWAP remain the deadliest single actors. They are no longer the only story.
Lakurawa: The Sahel Crosses the Border
Lakurawa is the newest name in that story, and the one that marks an actual change in Nigeria’s security map rather than a reshuffling of familiar threats. Accounts of its origins differ, but the clearest version, drawn from Reuters reporting and a 2025 assessment by the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, traces the group to herders from Mali, Niger, Chad and Burkina Faso who began settling in Nigeria’s Sokoto and Kebbi states around 2018, initially helping local communities fight the bandit gangs already active there. Over time, residents began accusing the group of cattle theft and of trying to impose its own version of Islamic law, and by 2023 it had turned into a predatory armed group in its own right, no longer a community defence force.
What changed its trajectory was a coup next door. Nigeria’s defence spokesman, Edward Buba, has said Lakurawa’s presence grew sharply after the July 2023 military takeover in Niger ended the joint cross-border patrols that had previously kept the group in check; officials now describe it as the first serious attempt by Sahelian jihadist networks, generally understood to be linked to the Islamic State Sahel Province, to establish a permanent foothold inside Nigeria itself. The record since has been grim and intermittent. Attacks in Kebbi State in November 2024 killed at least fifteen people. A HumAngle analysis counted fifty-nine deaths across Sokoto and Kebbi in the first half of 2025 alone, and by February 2026 police were attributing thirty-three deaths in a single cross-border cattle raid directly to Lakurawa fighters. The United States carried out air strikes against Islamic State and Lakurawa positions in north-west Nigeria in December 2025, and Nigerian officials said the group had been weakened, though neither side has said how many fighters were killed, or from which organisation. By June 2026, after what local reporting called a lull of several months, a raid on the Fesken Rafi community in Kebbi left more than twenty people dead, a reminder that “weakened” and “gone” are not the same thing.
Mahmuda: The Group the Police Said Didn’t Exist
Several hundred kilometres south-east, a different and initially even murkier group took root around Kainji Lake National Park, which straddles Kwara and Niger states. Reporting generally describes Mahmuda as a splinter that broke from Boko Haram in late 2024, though some accounts suggest an armed presence in the park going back around five years before that split became public knowledge. Unlike Lakurawa, Mahmuda appears to have built its following through persuasion as much as force: recruiters pitched a comparatively moderate message in Hausa and other local languages, and the group reportedly took over administering parts of the forest itself, levying its own taxes and settling disputes in place of the Nigerian state.
For a while, the state simply refused to confirm any of this was happening. When reports surfaced in early 2025 of a vigilante massacre at Kemanji village, the Kwara State Police Command denied that any group called Mahmuda existed at all. The denial did not age well. Through April 2025, further attacks followed: fifteen vigilantes were killed at Kemanji, gunmen hit a local market, and a Nigerian Army position in Niger State’s Mariga area was raided, reportedly leaving twenty soldiers dead. In August 2025, the Niger State government confirmed the arrest of a man it identified as Mahmuda in Wawa community. The clearest official acknowledgement that the group had been real all along came almost a year later. In July 2026, two men named in court as Abubakar Abba, said to be the figure known as Mahmuda, and Mahmuda Usman, known as Abu Bara’a, pleaded guilty before a Federal High Court in Abuja and were sentenced to life imprisonment. A group the authorities once wouldn’t name had, by then, put two of its alleged leaders behind bars for good.
Who Actually Took the Kebbi and Niger State Schoolgirls?
The clearest test of how much we really know about any of this came in late November 2025, when two mass abductions hit schools within days of each other. On 17 or 18 November, armed men attacked a girls’ secondary school in Maga, Kebbi State, killing the vice principal and abducting twenty-five students; a security operation led by the Minister of State for Defence secured their release roughly a week later, a result President Bola Tinubu announced publicly. On 21 November, a far larger raid hit St Mary’s Catholic school in Papiri, Niger State, where gunmen took 303 students and twelve teachers; around fifty escaped in the days that followed, though a confirmed figure for the rest was not available as of this writing.
Here is the honest answer on who was behind either attack: nobody has established it with confidence. No armed group claimed responsibility for either raid. Nigerian officials pointed to Boko Haram and ISWAP as the likely culprits, a line several security analysts quoted by the BBC and others pushed back on, arguing that the attacks bore the hallmarks of ordinary criminal bandit gangs operating for ransom rather than any ideological group. I am not going to pretend to settle that dispute here, because the public record genuinely doesn’t settle it either. What the episode does show plainly is how thoroughly banditry, jihadist insurgency and simple opportunism have blurred into each other across the north-west and north-central states; from the outside, and often from the inside too, it can be close to impossible to tell which one just walked into a school.
When the Law Can’t Tell Bandit From Jihadist
That blurring has a legal history worth getting right, because it is often misdescribed. In November 2021, a Federal High Court in Abuja granted the Nigerian government’s request to formally proscribe bandit groups as terrorist organisations; the government published the resulting gazette notice in January 2022, declaring groups it named “Yan Bindiga” and “Yan Ta’adda”, along with similar outfits across the north-west and north-central regions, to be terrorist organisations under the existing Terrorism (Prevention) Act of 2011. It was not, as some reporting since has implied, an entirely new piece of 2022 legislation; it was a court-sanctioned proscription under a law already a decade old. The practical effect was real regardless of the label’s precise legal pedigree: it opened the door to heavier military deployment against groups the state had previously treated as a policing problem, not an insurgency.
The line the proscription tried to draw has kept eroding since. Reporting from Africa Defense Forum in 2026 describes Ansaru, a smaller Al-Qaeda-aligned faction, and elements of ISWAP building working alliances with bandit networks in the north-west, trading weapons and training for ideological legitimacy and local manpower. Lakurawa itself sits somewhere inside that same grey zone: part cross-border jihadist franchise, part cattle-rustling outfit, depending on which attack you are looking at. Whatever a court order says on paper, the groups themselves increasingly don’t observe the distinction the law tries to enforce.
Final Thoughts
None of this fits neatly into a single insurgency with a single name, and I don’t think it is honest to pretend otherwise for the sake of a tidier story. What the evidence actually shows is a security map that has fragmented faster than most reporting, Nigerian or foreign, has kept pace with: an established jihadist rivalry in the north-east, a new Sahelian group crossing the border in the north-west, a once-denied insurgent cell convicted in the centre of the country, and a growing number of attacks that defy confident attribution altogether. The names will keep changing. Lakurawa and Mahmuda may themselves be splinter names for whatever comes after them, the way JAS and ISWAP were for what came before. What looks durable is the pattern underneath the names: more of the map slipping from clear state control, and less certainty, not more, about who is actually responsible when the violence arrives.