•Militant group intimidated clerics, levied tax, flogged villagers playing music/dancing, attacked military base – Study
•From swearing to protect to becoming soldiers of fortune

By Dickson Omobola

Contrary to the claim in some quarters that Lakurawa is a new terror group operating in the North-West, a study has shown that militants belonging to the group first arrived at two local governments in Sokoto State in 2018, precisely six years ago, to begin their terror activities.

The study said they came from Mali.

Then they were dislodged by the Nigerian and Nigerien militaries.

However, the militants reemerged in Sokoto in 2021 and have since then conducted their terrorist activities and expanded their operations.

The killing of 15 locals in Kebbi State on the penultimate Saturday was linked to the group.
“The militants patronized local markets, preached in public squares, intimidated clerics, and flogged villagers for playing music or dancing”, the study says of Lakurawa before the militants were dislodged after the 2018 arrival.

The study, titled, ‘Northwestern Nigeria: A ‘Jihadization of Banditry, or a Banditization’ of Jihad?’, was conducted by James Barnett, Murtala Ahmed Rufa’i and Abdulaziz Abdulaziz.
It was published in January 2022.

Barnett is a research fellow at the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD), Abuja, and a non-resident research fellow at the Hudson Institute, Washington, D. C. He spent nine months in Nigeria in 2021 as a Fulbright researcher based at the University of Lagos.

Rufa’i teaches history at Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto, and was on sabbatical with CDD.

He had been researching banditry for over a decade. He had conducted studies in north-western Nigeria for organizations such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Search for Common Ground, and the United States Institute of Peace.
Abdulaziz, on his part, was Editor at Daily Trust.

The military has called them a relatively new terror group that infiltrated Sokoto and Kebbi states through the Niger Republic following the coup in Nigeria’s neighbour.

It said the situation exacerbated the insecurity in the North-West region.

“Troops are confronted with a new terrorist sect in the North-West,” Major General Edward Buba, a military spokesperson, said.

“This sect is known as Lakuwaras, the Lakuwaras are affiliated to terrorists in the Sahel, particularly from Mali and Niger Republic.”

Brief emergence

According to the study, the brief emergence of jihadis near the Nigerien border in Sokoto in 2018 helps highlight some of the challenges jihadi groups face in balancing their desire to be seen as a protector of Muslim civilians with the exigencies of operating within an ethnically divided region dominated by criminals.

“Around October 2018, approximately 200 jihadis arrived in Gudu and Tangaza Local Governments in Sokoto from across the border in Niger.

“According to eyewitnesses, the militants rejected the ‘Boko Haram’ label and alternatively referred to themselves as mujahideen, al-Qa`ida, or Ansaru, and spoke of connections to AQIM”, it says..
“Other eyewitnesses said the militants were a mix of Nigerians and foreigners, including ‘light-skinned’ or ‘Arab’ fighters believed to be from Mali.

”Locals referred to the militants as Lakurawa, which could be a Hausa-ization of the French word for ‘the recruits’ (les recrues).

“Based on the descriptions of the fighters, the authors assess that the militants were likely a mix of JNIM and Ansaru members.

“The militants patronized local markets, preached in public squares, intimidated clerics, and flogged villagers for playing music or dancing.

“The militants followed informal, roving Fulani settlements (ruga), forcing the herders to pay levies on their cattle under the guise of zakat (religiously obligatory almsgiving) and chastising them for ‘un-Islamic’ activities.

“The militants conducted several attacks on local security forces, ransacking at least one military base. This prompted the Nigerian and Nigerien militaries to conduct a joint offensive toward the end of 2018”.

However, the study says locals reported that they still saw Lakurawa members in the area after the military operations but that the jihadis refrained from conducting any attacks.

“All this time, the presence of jihadis in Sokoto only generated a few media reports, which officials quickly denied”, it continues.

District head

”Local sources say that Lakurawa first arrived in the Gudu and Tangaza Local Governments at the request of the Tangaza district head and local traditional rulers.

“At the time, Tangaza and Gudu were suffering from an influx of bandits fleeing military operations in Zamfara, which led community leaders to seek protection from Niger-based jihadis who promised to fight the bandits and impose order.

Approach backfires

”This likely explains the militants’ harassment of Fulani herders, who have become popularly associated with banditry. “This approach backfired, however: The herders acquired weapons to resist Lakurawa’s efforts to raise levies on cattle, with some herders, now armed, subsequently turning to banditry.

“Locals also say that Lakurawa’s attempts at ‘Islamizing’ villages were unpopular and that even the community leaders who first invited the jihadis soon sought to expel them.

“A dispute also erupted over an inheritance that resulted in Lakurawa killing the district head.

Reemergence

”Most interestingly, Lakurawa reemerged in Sokoto in September 2021 amid increased conflict between bandits and the vigilante groups known as Yan Sakai”, the study adds.

“This time, however, the jihadis have been called in by the bandits and local Fulani communities in an effort to defeat newly raised Yan Sakai militias that have been increasingly attacking Fulani herders.

“The Lakurawa offers a fascinating example in which jihadis fail to form genuine affinities with the communities they swear to protect and instead become something like soldiers of fortune.

“However, the fact that Lakurawa failed in building genuine popular support is no guarantee that Ansaru or JNIM will never succeed in expanding within northwestern Nigeria”.

Indeed, Tangaza community leaders, according to the study, worried that some of the radical ideas Lakurawa preached had taken hold among segments of the youth, portending trouble down the road.

Jihadi expansion

”But the experience of Lakurawa does underscore how jihadi expansion is not a straight-forward process”, it explains. “Consider the question of ethnicity: Fulani have been stigmatized as jihadis and radicals across West Africa in recent years, in part due to jihadis’ successful recruitment of Fulani in Mali and Burkina Faso.

“But as seen in the cases of Lakurawa and Ansaru, Fulani communities are just as likely to fight jihadism as they are to embrace it, and the intercommunal dynamics that exist in Sahelian countries are not necessarily analogous to those in Nigeria.

“Additionally, Lakurawa’s trajectory, like Ansaru’s, underscores that jihadis do not necessarily have any permanent allies or enemies.

“Reputational considerations and genuine religious conviction may mean that jihadis prefer to act as the defender of Muslim communities against criminals, but the exigencies of war can make partnering with criminals more attractive”.

Highly volatile, unpredictable

In its conclusion, the study believes the security situation in north-western Nigeria is highly volatile and unpredictable.

“The presence of jihadis in the north-west and the instances of tactical cooperation between bandits and jihadis, the authors have documented, constitute an unfortunate dynamic in an already complex region.

“For this reason, the jihadi presence in the north-west requires further study and continued monitoring.

“However, jihadism remains a minor dimension within the overall conflict in the northwest, and the authors predict this will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future for the reasons explained throughout this article.

“Most notably, the bandits are very powerful and have little to gain—and much to lose—by subordinating themselves to a jihadi organization and its rules.

“The bandits’ fractiousness also leads the authors to doubt that any significant portion will rally under one flag for a sustained period.

“If the bandits begin to reconsolidate under a smaller set of kingpins (as was the case in the early 2010s) and adopt more coherent political objectives, then avenues for a serious partnership with jihadis may grow. “But despite some increased inter-gang cooperation in response to recent military pressure, it is unlikely that the fractured and criminal nature of the bandits’ insurgency will fundamentally change anytime soon.

“With this in mind, analysts and stakeholders should beware overhyping the jihadi angle in the north-west, as this could have significant policy implications.

“Many of the standard counterterrorism and preventing/countering violent extremism (P/CVE) approaches developed over the past 20 years of the ‘War on Terror’ are unlikely to have much effect against bandits.

“Leadership decapitation, a tactic that has had mixed results against jihadis, is unlikely to meaningfully degrade loosely organized militants whose gangs already undergo high rates of fragmentation.

“While Nigeria has made progress in developing P/CVE approaches for jihadism in the north-east, any such strategic communications and deradicalization programing would need to be significantly retooled for a context in which most militants are not motivated by religious ideas.

“And in contrast to the jihadi insurgency in the north-east that pits rebels against the state, insecurity in the north-west is rooted to a large extent in conflict between communities in which the state is either absent or complicit.

“This has significant implications for any DDR (demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration) effort as bandits are unlikely to ‘repent’ en masse unless the militias that fight bandits and Fulani, namely the Yan Sakai, likewise stand down”.

The study says in addition to shedding light on Nigeria’s myriad security crises, the authors hope ,it will add nuance to analysts’ understanding of the oft-hyped “crime-terror nexus”.

It goes on: “As Stig Jarle Hansen has recently argued, analysts must be wary of assuming that criminality and jihadism naturally converge simply because both are ‘bad.’

“While Hansen argues that jihadis generally remain committed to their ideology and do not converge with criminals to the extent that much of the nexus literature suggests, the authors’ research shows the inverse is also true: Criminals can be a stubborn lot who do not necessarily turn to jihadism simply because they are Muslim and dislike their government.

“Similarly, the failures of jihadi efforts to expand into northwestern Nigeria are just as worthy of study as jihadi successes.

‘Ungoverned spaces’

”These failures are a reminder that the trajectories of jihadi insurgencies are contingent on unquantifiable and multivariate factors that cannot be reduced to a few buzzwords such as ‘ungoverned spaces.’

“With this in mind, the authors conclude with a call for analysts and policymakers to see the situation in northwestern Nigeria for what is: a massive and complex conflict in its own right, not simply a potential arena for jihadi expansion”.