Nigeria’s Counterterrorism Wins Are Not Protecting Its Children

The most revealing detail in Nigeria’s latest security crisis is not that a senior militant was killed. It is that children were still taken.

On Saturday, May 16, U.S. Africa Command said it had worked with Nigerian forces in northeastern Nigeria to kill Abu-Bilal al-Minuki and “multiple other ISIS leaders” in a coordinated operation, describing him as Islamic State’s number two figure and saying an initial assessment found no civilian casualties, according to AFRICOM’s statement¹. The Associated Press, using the name Abu Bakr al-Mainuki, reported that he was a Nigerian-born commander in Islamic State West Africa Province, or ISWAP, and that Nigerian officials tied him to media operations, finances and weapons development, while some analysts disputed the broader claim that he was the global Islamic State’s second-in-command, according to AP’s profile of the target².

That is a real counterterrorism success. I do not think it should be dismissed as theater. If a commander helps move money, shape propaganda, build weapons and link local fighters to a wider Islamic State network, removing him can disrupt operations. But the same week also produced a brutal reminder of what Nigeria’s security state still cannot do: make a school in Borno feel like a school rather than a target.

A day before the strike, suspected jihadi militants attacked a school in Askira-Uba, a local government area in Borno state near Sambisa Forest, long used by armed groups as a refuge, and police told AP that students were missing after an assault attributed to Boko Haram and its splinter, ISWAP, according to AP’s report from Maiduguri³. Teachers and parents later told the BBC, in reporting republished by MyJoyOnline⁴, that more than 50 children were kidnapped from three schools in Mussa, including toddlers, while witnesses said gunmen used children as human shields as they fled on motorbikes. Other reports gave lower figures: Borno senator Mohammed Ali Ndume said 42 children were abducted from schools and homes, according to Al Jazeera’s account citing AFP and Reuters⁵. The exact count matters for rescue operations. The wider point is already clear.

Nigeria has built, with American help, a better ability to find and kill some high-value militants. It has not built an equally convincing ability to deny armed men access to children.

The distinction matters because the threat is not one neat organization. Boko Haram is the older jihadist movement that began its insurgency in northeastern Nigeria around 2009; ISWAP is the Islamic State-aligned faction that emerged from Boko Haram’s fragmentation and became a major force around the Lake Chad Basin, according to AP’s explainer on the al-Mainuki strike². The International Crisis Group describes the conflict today as a war among Boko Haram splinters, chiefly Jama'tu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'awati wal-Jihad, often abbreviated JAS, and ISWAP, according to a 2024 Crisis Group report catalogued by ecoi.net⁶. In plain English: the militants are related, rivalrous and fragmented. Killing a senior ISWAP-linked figure may hurt one layer of the system, but school kidnapping can be carried out through local cells, informants, motorcycles, forest routes, ransom brokers and opportunistic armed groups.

That is why I think Nigeria’s strategy is still misweighted. A counterterrorism operation is a military and intelligence action against militants, usually aimed at killing, capturing or disrupting fighters and commanders. A joint operation means forces from more than one country coordinate on the mission. Those tools are useful. They are just not the same as civilian protection.

Civilian protection is duller and harder: fences, guards, radios, trusted local warning networks, patrol discipline, quick reaction forces, rescue planning, trauma care, school relocation when needed and honest reporting when something fails. UNICEF said in January 2024 that only 43 percent of Nigeria’s Minimum Standards for Safe Schools were being met across about 6,000 assessed schools, and that recent attacks in the North-East and North-West had disrupted learning for more than 1.3 million children, according to UNICEF Nigeria⁷. A separate UNICEF safe-schools monitoring report found deep gaps in basic infrastructure, including access control and safe facilities, according to UNICEF’s Minimum Standards for Safe Schools report page⁸.

This is where the school kidnapping becomes more than another atrocity. Witnesses in BBC reporting said the gunmen arrived shortly after a military patrol left Mussa, according to the BBC report republished by MyJoyOnline⁴. If that account holds, the tactical problem was painfully local: the attackers did not need to defeat the Nigerian state. They needed to wait it out. They needed a gap measured in minutes.

The ransom economy makes that gap profitable. Kidnapping-for-ransom means abducting people to extract payment or bargaining power from families, communities or government. In Nigeria, it has become a market, not merely a tactic. Premium Times, summarizing SBM Intelligence data, reported that kidnappers took 4,722 victims across 997 incidents from July 2024 to June 2025, with at least 762 deaths linked to abduction-related violence and at least ₦2.57 billion paid against ₦48 billion demanded, according to Premium Times⁹. The same report said Boko Haram received the largest share of ransom paid in that period, according to Premium Times⁹.

That data cuts against the comforting idea that leadership strikes will naturally translate into safety for children. A strike can interrupt a commander’s network. A ransom economy regenerates through incentives: one successful abduction funds the next weapon, the next bribe, the next bike, the next informer. If a school is lightly guarded and a community has learned that the state may arrive late, the business model survives the death of a leader.

The strongest counterargument is that this framing risks setting up a false choice. The United States has not only supplied firepower. In March, AP reported that MQ-9 Reaper drones had been deployed to Nigeria after 200 U.S. troops arrived to provide training and intelligence, and that AFRICOM described the mission as intelligence support, advisory assistance and targeted training for Nigerian forces, according to AP’s report on the deployment¹⁰. Drones that can loiter for long periods and intelligence teams that can track camps, routes and commanders could help locate hostage movements as well as militant leaders, according to AP¹⁰. On this view, leadership strikes are not a distraction from child protection. They are one layer of it.

I accept part of that. Nigeria should not stop hunting senior commanders. Al-Minuki’s reported role in finance, media and weapons development makes him more than a symbolic target, and analysts told AP that his death could disrupt ISWAP operations in the short term, according to AP². But “short term” is doing a lot of work. A child in Askira-Uba does not experience national security through the rank of a dead militant. She experiences it through whether the road is watched, whether the school has warning, whether the patrol stays, whether a rescue force can move before captors melt into forest.

So my verdict is simple: Nigeria’s counterterrorism apparatus is learning how to hit leaders faster than the Nigerian state is learning how to protect children. That is not a reason to abandon high-value-target operations. It is a reason to stop treating them as proof of security.

The next indicator to watch is not another triumphant announcement of a militant killed. Watch whether, over the next six months, Borno publishes school-by-school safety audits, keeps patrols around high-risk schools through the full school day, reports abduction numbers transparently and shows a fall in hostage movements and ransom collections in Askira-Uba, Chibok and other Sambisa-edge communities. If those numbers do not move, the al-Minuki strike will stand as what too many counterterrorism victories become: operationally impressive, strategically incomplete and morally inadequate.