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On Friday, 21 August 2026, gunmen believed to be linked to Lakurawa or the Mahmuda group struck four communities in Borgu Local Government Area of Niger State: Gbeji (Gidan-Zana), Kpenya, Giyan Gbasu and Dekara. In Dekara, the largest of the three, they moved into the central mosque as worshippers observed Jumu’at prayers and abducted more than sixty people, according to local officials and residents. Two days later, a video began circulating showing dozens of the captives seated together in an open field, the very old and the very young among them, while an unseen narrator addressed the camera, inviting relatives watching to come forward and identify their family members among those held. It was a chilling, one-minute-long piece of psychological theatre: a near-identical tactic was used after the February 2026 massacre at Woro in Kwara State, when the gunmen posted footage of its captives online, claiming to be holding more than 170 people. The Friday incident was the third time in recent memory that Dekara and its neighbours had come under attack; an earlier raid emptied the villages altogether, sending survivors into host communities elsewhere in Niger and Kwara State and across the border in the Benin Republic.
That this could happen again, barely three weeks after the country celebrated one of its largest rescue operations in years, is the real story. On 5 August, Nigerian security forces freed 308 people who had been held in the Kainji Lake National Park Forest: 163 abducted from Woro in Kaiama Local Government Area, of Kwara State, and 145 from communities in Borgu Local Government in Niger State, including Kasuwan Daji, Konkonso and Pissa in Niger State. President Bola Tinubu called it the largest same-day rescue in the country’s history. Sixteen days later, gunmen were back in the mosques of Borgu.
For almost two decades, Nigeria’s insurgency map has looked deceptively familiar: Borno as the epicentre, Sambisa Forest as the home of Boko Haram, and the North-East as the country’s principal theatre of terrorist violence. That geography is changing, if not already changed. Across the forests, waterways and borderlands surrounding Kainji Lake, in the old Borgu, a new frontier has been taking shape, running from Babanna and Wawa in Niger State to Kemanji, Nanu, Woro and Nuku in Kwara, and on to Papiri and Kasuwan Daji. The past eighteen months of violence suggest not a scatter of unconnected bandit raids, but an emerging insurgent ecosystem, reminiscent of Borno twenty years earlier, in which jihadist factions, criminal networks and cross-border traffickers share the same geographical space. The Borgu forest is large enough to accommodate them both, as it is bigger than most states in the country.
This is all in the old Borgu
The centre of gravity of this emerging theatre is the historical Borgu region, which today straddles three Nigerian states: Agwara and Borgu Local Governments in Niger State; Kaiama and Baruten in Kwara; and Illo in Kebbi, as well as a substantial portion of the Benin Republic across the border.
The Kainji Lake National Park and its surrounding forests offer everything an armed group needs to entrench itself: vast, thinly populated expanses, a weak state presence, poor roads, patchy communications and porous frontiers linking Niger, Kwara and Kebbi states to Benin and, more distantly, the Republic of Niger. For communities scattered across this landscape, government is often a distant rumour rather than a presence. Security deployments are hard to sustain over such distances; markets, schools, and farms sit isolated from any protective umbrella. The nearest police station is probably in the Local Headquarters, hundreds of Kilometres away.
The forest has become an economic asset for the men who control it. Armed groups are reported to issue their own logging permits to timber merchants and charge farmers for access to land inside the reserve, a shadow taxation system that rivals, in places, anything the state collects. In recent years that revenue base has expanded into solid minerals. Investigations into Nigeria’s illegal mining economy have identified Niger and Kwara among the states where armed groups have moved into gold and other mineral-rich sites, taxing artisanal miners, taking a cut of extracted ore, or mining directly themselves. This is the same pattern already well documented in the bandit economies of Zamfara and Shiroro further north. What is taking shape in Borgu, in other words, is not merely a security emergency but the slow construction of an insurgent political economy: timber, farmland, minerals and ransom all forming a revenue base sufficient to sustain fighters, buy weapons and outlast whatever pressure the state can currently bring to bear. The Kainji Lake Game Reserve and National Park is larger and denser than the Sambisa Forest that sheltered Boko Haram in its early years, and it sits beside one of Africa’s largest artificial lakes, Kainji Lake, which feeds the Kainji Dam and the Hydro station. Researchers and security officials have identified a crowded field of armed actors operating in and around it, among them Mahmuda (also known locally as Ansaru), Lakurawa, elements of Ansaru proper, factions of Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad (Boko Haram) associated with the commanders Sadiku and Umar Taraba, and a reported JNIM-linked cell. Several of these groups specialise in mass abductions aimed at extracting ransom from the state, rather than from individual families or communities, a pattern residents recognise from the missionary school abductions at Papiri and later Woro.
By 2025, the Nigerian Army was already running operations against Mahmuda around Kainji Lake National Park; in May of that year, troops said they had combed more than ninety kilometres of forest from Kemanji into the park, established an operational base, and arrested twelve suspected Mahmuda associates. Within weeks, fighters pushed out of the park were reported resurfacing in Baruten and nearby Kwara communities, burning farms and attacking Kemanji, Baabete, Nanu and Tenebo. A clash near Kemanji in April 2025 between suspected Mahmuda fighters and local vigilantes left casualties on both sides, and by June the wider Kaiama–Baruten corridor was still reporting attacks the military had not been able to contain.
Papiri was a warning that went unheeded.
Papiri was not where the crisis began. Villages across the region had already endured years of attacks and displacement before it happened; what set Papiri apart was scale: it was the first assault spectacular enough to command national and international attention. In November 2025, gunmen abducted more than 300 pupils, students and staff from St Mary’s Catholic School in Papiri, in Niger State’s Agwara Local Government Area, one of the largest mass school kidnappings in Nigeria’s history. Subsequent reporting placed some of the captives in a Lakurawa camp inside the Borgu forest belt, evidence that the area is not merely a hideout for opportunistic criminals but a logistical and operational territory for organised extremist networks. The students were eventually released weeks later, but the reprieve was brief.
Less than a month after that release, on 3 January 2026, gunmen stormed the Kasuwan Daji market in Demo village, near Papiri, opening fire on traders and residents, burning the market and homes, and abducting an unknown number of people. Police initially confirmed at least 30 dead; local clergy and residents put the toll nearer 40 to 50, with some bodies still unaccounted for weeks later. President Tinubu ordered a search and the deployment of reinforcements to vulnerable communities in Borgu. Less than 48 hours after that, a further 42 people were reported killed in follow-on raids on nearby villages in Agwara and Borgu Local Government areas.
Exactly a month after Kasuwan Daji, on the evening of 3 February 2026, hundreds of militants attacked the villages of Woro and Nuku in Kaiama Local Government Area of Kwara State. It became one of the deadliest single attacks recorded in Nigeria in years, with over 200 people killed. According to residents, the community had received a warning letter earlier, notifying the district head of the attackers’ intention to impose their version of Sharia. The warning had been passed to security authorities. It did not prevent the massacre.
The lesson of Woro was not only the scale of the killing. It was proof that an organised armed group, operating from forest sanctuaries around Borgu, could mobilise fighters, move across a wide stretch of rural areas, and mount a coordinated, hours-long assault on a community far from any recognised front line, while the state, forewarned, failed to intervene in time.
A geography Large Enough for several groups
A mistake worth avoiding is treating every armed actor in this corridor as a single organisation. Mahmuda and Lakurawa are not interchangeable. Mahmuda has been associated with the Borgu forest corridor since around 2020, combining coercive preaching with violence, and has in places postured as a protector against ordinary criminal bandits. This approach can buy a measure of local tolerance before authority is imposed outright. Lakurawa represents a more explicitly transnational jihadist current, with researchers debating possible links to Islamic State Sahel Province and the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM network, and a footprint that extends across the borderlands into the wider Sahel. Add to this the Boko Haram faction that relocated into the Kainji forest reserve in mid-2025, plus elements of Ansaru and smaller criminal syndicates. This is therefore a shared operating environment, a geography that several armed networks can occupy at once, with interests sometimes overlapping and fighters able to move through the same forest systems even where their chains of command do not connect.
None of this is unfolding on a blank slate. Borgu lies within three of Nigeria’s poorer states. The local governments and communities are among the poorest in their respective states. According to the National Bureau of Statistics’ 2022 Multidimensional Poverty Index, 69 per cent of people in Niger State and 48 per cent in Kwara State are multidimensionally poor, deprived across health, education, living standards, and work, not merely short of cash. These state-wide figures almost certainly understate the reality on the ground in the region. Borgu is a peasant society and economy that relies on farming, fishing, and small cross-border trade with the Republic of Benin, activities that depend entirely on people being able to reach their fields, boats, and markets safely.
This is how fragility and insurgency reinforce one another. Poverty and neglect do not by themselves produce jihadist violence, but they remove the buffers that would otherwise slow its spread: a functioning local economy that gives young men alternatives to a fighter’s wage; a state present enough to respond to the first warning letter rather than the tenth or spectacular attack; a social fabric intact enough to organise resistance rather than flight. Where those buffers are already thin, as they are across the old Borgu, each new attack degrades them further, and the region’s capacity to recover after the violence, not just to survive it, shrinks a little more each time.
The Danger of Normalisation
The greatest risk in Borgu is not that another Woro, Kasuwan Daji or Dekara will happen. It is that such attacks become routine, background noise and episodic outrage rather than national emergencies. Once communities grow accustomed to living under the authority or threat of armed groups, reclaiming that territory becomes exponentially harder. Once farmers abandon their land, markets collapse, and populations disperse, the state loses not just people but the social fabric it would need to resist an insurgency in the first place.
Left unchecked, this is a spiral rather than a series of isolated shocks: insecurity deepens poverty, poverty widens the space in which armed groups can recruit and tax, and each new attack further erodes the little state presence and infrastructure the region had. A theatre that is already among the poorest and least serviced in the country risks becoming one that is also the least governed, and the two conditions, once they combine, are far harder to reverse than either is alone.
That is why the lessons of Borno are worth remembering, not repeating. Boko Haram did not become a formidable insurgency overnight; it grew over years of weak governance, unaddressed grievances and social challenges, territorial sanctuary, poor intelligence and an inadequate response. These conditions, as in Borgu today, were compounded at every stage by the poverty and marginalisation of the communities caught in the middle. Borgu is at an earlier stage of that same trajectory, which is precisely why urgent action is needed. The August rescue of 308 hostages shows that a coordinated, intelligence-led response can work when the state commits to it. But soldiers cannot hold ground that the state has otherwise abandoned; a battalion can clear a forest camp, but it cannot rebuild a market or reopen a school. The task now is to treat roads, clinics, schools and livelihoods as part of the security response, and to ensure the crisis never becomes an excuse for the neglect that helped produce it.
Dr Hussaini Abdu is an International Development and Humanitarian Specialist; he writes from Abuja.
