The killing of Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, the second-in-command of ISIL in West Africa Province, by United States and Nigerian forces in May 2026 was presented by Washington and Abuja as a decisive counterterrorism blow. Yet for analysts monitoring the Lake Chad Basin, the strike underscored a grimmer reality: the region’s two dominant armed groups are not being defeated — they are adapting, regrouping, and expanding their territorial footprint at a pace that regional militaries are struggling to match.
ISWAP and its rival faction Boko Haram have launched a renewed surge of violence across northeastern Nigeria, northern Cameroon, western Chad, and southeastern Niger. The dynamics driving this escalation are deeply structural — rooted in decades of poverty, state neglect, porous borders, and a governance vacuum that military operations alone have failed to fill. Far from representing a residual threat, the two groups have become embedded in the region’s political economy, exploiting theakit gaps in state authority to entrench themselves in communities that have little else to turn to.
The Dual Resurgence
ISWAP, which pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in 2015, has historically been the more sophisticated of the two factions, deploying drone technology and maintaining a structured command-and-control apparatus. Boko Haram, led by Abu Musab al-Barnawi, spent years operating in the shadow of its more prominent rival. But regional security analysts note a significant shift: as multinational forces concentrated their attention on ISWAP’s capabilities, Boko Haram used the relative reprieve to rebuild its operational capacity, tapping into disaffected youth in Borno and Yobe states with a combination of ideological appeal and criminal enterprise.
“Boko Haram appears to have taken advantage of the relative attention on its rival to regroup,” Nimi Princewill, a Sahel security expert, told Al Jazeera. “This, in turn, seems to have enabled both factions to rebuild strength and carry out further attacks simultaneously.”
The pattern of simultaneous resurgence has complicated the regional response. Nigeria, which heads the Multi-National Joint Task Force (MNJTF) alongside Cameroon, Chad, and Niger, has found that addressing one threat often frees the other to operate with less interference. Cross-border raids conducted by both groups in the weeks following the al-Minuki strike demonstrated how quickly retaliatory capacity can be mobilised when a leadership target is removed.
A Region Without Governance
The Lake Chad Basin Commission, the intergovernmental body meant to coordinate security and humanitarian responses across the four affected states, has repeatedly struggled to harmonise military operations. Differing command structures, uneven resource allocation, and periodic political tensions between Nigeria and its neighbours — particularly over the presence of foreign military advisers — have hindered operational coherence.
“Although Mali and Nigeria do not share a common border, the large expanse of the Sahel that straddles them has several porous borders that allow the movement of jihadi elements and their weapons,” Kabir Amadu, managing director of Beacon Security and Intelligence Limited in Nigeria, told Al Jazeera. “The situation in Mali has made the Sahel a more permissive environment for armed groups, amplifying risks for Nigeria through spillover dynamics.”
Beyond state-to-state coordination, local governance in the basin remains threadbare. Remote communities on the islands and shorelines of Lake Chad — historically some of the most neglected areas in the region — face inconsistent law enforcement, limited state services, and weak administrative oversight. These conditions have created spaces where armed groups operate with relative impunity. In some areas, fear, mistrust, and eroded traditional authority structures have made communities more vulnerable to coercion or recruitment by both ISWAP and Boko Haram.
The Economics of Violence
A dimension that has received insufficient attention in counterterrorism policy is the degree to which both groups have developed criminal revenue streams that insulate them from disruption. Control of Lake Chad islands provides access to taxation routes, smuggling corridors, and in some cases, informal resource extraction. ISWAP’s governance apparatus in areas it controls collects taxes, administers rudimentary courts, and provides services that the Nigerian state does not — a dynamic that has allowed it to build social legitimacy in some communities even as it conducts violent operations.
Boko Haram’s model is more opportunistic, relying on a mix of robbery, kidnapping for ransom, and the looting of humanitarian convoys. Former combatants who pass through reintegration programmes frequently rejoin the group after facing limited economic prospects upon their return. Research by the International Institute for Strategic Studies found that former ISWAP members — who would face execution for desertion — were joining Boko Haram’s Ghazwah wing in Borno, which conducts robbery and ransom operations, providing a criminal infrastructure that sustains the broader movement.
Humanitarian Crisis Deepens
The operational resurgence of both groups occurs against a backdrop of acute humanitarian distress. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates that 2.9 million people remain internally displaced across the Lake Chad Basin, including 2.3 million inside Nigeria alone. Violence has forced the closure of 1,827 schools across the region, and humanitarian agencies received just 19 percent of the funding required for their 2025 operations — a shortfall that has curtailed both protection work and basic assistance.
Civilians caught between armed groups and under-resourced state forces face compounding pressures. Displacement has disrupted livelihoods, severed social networks, and heightened vulnerability to forced recruitment. Informal community protection mechanisms — which in some cases have provided survival networks for displaced populations — can inadvertently create concealment and mobility corridors for armed actors.
“ISWAP and Boko Haram’s recent resurgence reflects not simply a military setback, but a deepening governance vacuum across the Lake Chad Basin,” Abiola Sadiq, a security consultant, told Al Jazeera. “Until the underlying conditions of poverty, exclusion, and state absence are addressed with the same urgency as kinetic operations, the cycles of violence will continue.”
Regional Implications and External Dimensions
The implications of the Lake Chad Basin’s instability extend well beyond Nigeria’s borders. The region’s proximity to the Sahel corridor — through which extremist groups have expanded southward into coastal West African states — means that a consolidated ISWAP or Boko Haram presence near the lake represents a strategic concern for European and American policymakers who have invested in regional counterterrorism architecture.
The United States has maintained a modest but consistent counterterrorism presence in the region, including intelligence sharing and targeted strike support for Nigerian forces. That cooperation has produced results — the elimination of al-Minuki being the most recent example — but has not altered the structural conditions that sustain armed group recruitment. France, which retains military assets in the Sahel despite its gradual withdrawal from Mali, has watched the Lake Chad situation with increasing alarm, understanding that the collapse of Nigerian security capacity in the northeast would create a vacuum with regional consequences.
For the African Union and the Lake Chad Basin Commission, the May 2026 surge has renewed calls for a more integrated political roadmap alongside military operations. Calls for increased investment in education, livelihoods, and local governance — long-promised in international donor communiqués — are now being demanded with greater urgency by humanitarian organisations operating in the region. Whether those demands translate into policy changes before the next cycle of violence further erodes the region’s social fabric remains the central question for policymakers in Abuja, N’Djamena, Yaoundé, and Niamey. The Basin has survived decades of underdevelopment and neglect. What it cannot survive is another decade of the same.
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*Fatima Al-Rashid is a regional affairs correspondent for Media Hook covering the Middle East, Africa, and Europe.*