Lakurawa, the not-so-new sheriffs in town

Suspected gunmen killed 10 people in Wayam, Niger State, and brutally murdered two women who resisted sexual assault. They set homes and food supplies ablaze, forcing residents to flee. This violence highlights heightened insecurity in Nigeria’s Northwest, where the Defense Headquarters officially confirmed a new terrorist group, “Lukarawas,” emerging from the Niger Republic following its recent coup. The group has infiltrated Sokoto and Kebbi states, exploiting cross-border security gaps and initially gaining local support due to limited knowledge of their motives. Recently, Lukarawas’ terrorists killed 15 people and rustled at least one hundred cattle in Mera town, Augie LGA, Kebbi State.

From SBM’s standpoint, the Lakurawa sect is not new. It is a caliphate-seeking jihadist group that has been on the fringes of Northern Sokoto since 2018 when they came in from Niger and Burkina Faso. The sect settled in Gudu and its environs at the onset of the bandit crisis in the state, promising locals protection from bandits while also proselytising. They significantly reduced attacks on residents by taking the fight to the bandits. This was enough to win hearts and minds, entrenching them deeply into the communities they occupy.

A major reason for the current hoopla is that the group’s recent activities have become too difficult to ignore. They have become widely known for their strict application of Sharia law, which has become too heavy for residents under their rule. These residents have begun to mount pressure on the political leaders who have deflected that pressure to the military. In the past year, they have crossed the Sokoto-Kebbi boundary and have moved to the Augie Local Government Area of Kebbi where 15 people were killed in a clash between Lakurawa and locals in a quarrel over cattle rustling.

The growth of the sect made up primarily of foreign fighters from Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger on account of their physical appearance and language, brings in focus warnings from the US-Africa Command of the US Military in 2020 that Jihadists are increasingly making a play for coastal West Africa. At the time this warning was made, the most significant development that would have made it a self-fulfilling prophecy was the journeying of a contingent of JNIM fighters who stopped at the W National Park in Benin, a few kilometres from the border in Nigeria to ask for directions from a park ranger. They were said to be on their way to North Western Nigeria to provide support to Ansaru, Boko Haram’s first splinter faction and now the local Nigeria Al-Qaeda affiliate which had taken a huge beating from the Nigeria Police Force in Kuduru area of Kaduna in February of that year.

Additionally, the fact that the Lakurawa sect is affiliated with the Islamic State Africa franchise adds another layer not only to the security challenges in the North West but in Nigeria generally where the Islamic State West African Province’s hold has grown past its publicly known confined cluster on the Lake Chad’s fringes to the point of attacking a Catholic Church in Owo, Ondo State in South West Nigeria in 2022.

As of mid-2024, Africa accounted for more than 60% of the group’s operations having lost its territories in the Middle East. In the 445th issue of Al-Naba, a weekly propaganda newsletter, detailing its activities from 23 May to 30 May, the group claimed that 23 of its 37 operations took place in Africa – 62 percent. This underscores the terror group’s increasing capacity to exploit the region’s vulnerabilities. Of the attacks, 14 occurred in Central Africa, seven in West Africa, one in Libya, and one in Mozambique. Although its efficiency in Nigeria dwindled a bit in 2024 due to an increase in the frequency of the fratricidal clashes with the resurgent JAS faction under Bakura Doro’s leadership, it has remained a potent force, establishing a presence in Dutse, Jigawa, the Gummi-Gusau area of Zamfara and a significant presence in Shiroro, Niger State.

The emergence of the Lakurawa, thus complicates Nigeria’s long-running and faltering counter-terrorism operations which have tended to target specific places beginning with a bang and ending on a whimper. Currently, the military’s work is cut out for it not only because of the kind of sophisticated weaponry the group possesses but also because of how widely dispersed they now are. However, the military appears feckless despite the group’s attacks and possession of some military educational facilities in Kaduna in recent weeks. Therefore, publicly acknowledging a problem is one thing, rising to tackle the problem is another.

This challenge cannot be solved by simply patrolling the border for a short time. The fact that displaced residents of Northern Sokoto report that the group has been in operation since 2018 contradicts the defence headquarters’ assertion that the group came into Nigeria following the hiatus in joint border patrols between the Niger Republic and Nigeria as a fallout from the Niger coup. To begin with, there was hardly any border patrol before the coup happened because if there had been, the security situation in border communities in places like Jibia would not have been this terrible. Nigeria’s political elites’ refusal to delineate the country’s border lines and take its border security has brought home more chickens to roost than the state is equipped for.