By Abubakar M. Kareto
For over two decades, the security discourse surrounding the Lake Chad Basin has been dominated by a singular, exhausting lexicon consisting of casualty counts, territorial control, and military offensives. Yet, a deeply unsettling investigative report published by HumAngle on June 18, 2026, reminds us that the longest-running war in West Africa is not merely being fought with AK-47s and improvised explosive devices. It is, at its core, a war over semantic capture. This is a brutal, armed campaign to decide who is allowed to call themselves a Muslim, and consequently, who is allowed to live.
To the untrained ear, the language echoing from the forest enclaves of Jama’atu Ahlis-Sunna Lidda’Awati Wal-Jihad (JAS) and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) sounds like radical theology. They fill their airwaves with heavy concepts such as tawheed (monotheism), hijrah (migration), and takfir (excommunication). But as public affairs analysts, we must look past the religious veneer. Beneath this vocabulary lies a cold, totalitarian political claim. A handful of armed vanguard commanders in the bush hold the exclusive franchise to certify a human being’s faith.
The Nihilistic Calculus of Takfir
At the center of this tragedy is the weaponization of takfir, which is the act of declaring a professed Muslim an unbeliever. Mainstream Islamic scholarship has historically treated takfir as a legal radioactive zone that requires rigorous due process, context, and intent. In the hands of the late Abubakar Shekau, however, it became a tool of total nihilism.
Shekau’s doctrine was a black hole of extremist logic. If you lived under the Nigerian state, carried a national identity card, voted, or sent your child to a secular school, you were deemed an apostate. Crucially, Shekau demanded that everyone else excommunicate you too. If ISWAP refused to declare an ordinary civilian in Maiduguri an infidel, ISWAP itself became the enemy.
This ideological cannibalism explains why JAS could routinely bomb mosques, slaughter Muslim farmers, and attack displaced persons’ camps while bizarrely claiming to defend Islam. In Shekau’s universe, the circle of faith narrowed until only his immediate loyalists stood inside it. Everyone else was marked for death.
Out-Governing the State: The Cold Bureaucracy
The internal civil war that split the insurgency gave rise to ISWAP, bringing a distinct shift from chaotic terror to institutionalized coercion. This is a vital distinction that policymakers often dangerously blur.
As religious historian Professor Abdulbasit Kassim points out, ISWAP rejected Shekau’s blanket condemnation of ordinary citizens. In ISWAP’s cold bureaucracy, society is meticulously categorized. If you are an elderly farmer or a vulnerable civilian living under government control, you are labeled a sinner for failing to migrate to their territory, but your blood is not immediately lawful to spill. If, however, you join the civil service, teach in a state school, or pick up arms with the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF), you cross into absolute apostasy.
We must stop mistaking ISWAP’s theological nuance for moderation, and start recognizing it for what it truly is: a symptom of our own governance failure. Where JAS burns the village, ISWAP taxes it. ISWAP is not just fighting the Nigerian military. Instead, they are actively out-governing the state in remote areas. By providing crude but swift dispute resolution, basic market security, and predictable, albeit brutal taxation, they fill a massive vacuum left by missing local governments. They have built a parasitic state precisely because the real state is absent.
Demoting the Pillars of Faith
Nothing exposes the political opportunism of these groups more than their recent doctrinal shifts regarding Saudi Arabia and the Hajj. For over a billion Muslims, the holy pilgrimage is an unshakeable pillar of faith. Yet, inside the insurgent echo chamber, the custodians of Mecca and Medina are dismissed as Ahl Salul (hypocrites) due to their geopolitical alignments.
According to internal accounts, ISWAP and its global networks have practically demoted the pilgrimage, dictating that a wealthy fighter must not spend money on Hajj, but must instead redirect those funds to buy weapons. They have successfully inverted a 1,400-year-old faith built on spiritual testimony, prayer, and charity, re-ordering it entirely around blind obedience to local commanders and perpetual war.
The Dangerous Rise of the Third Generation
Perhaps the most urgent warning for the Nigerian state is that this conflict is mutating into its third generation, what the militants call Jiyalit-Tamkin, or the reinforcement generation.
The early founders, like Mohammed Yusuf, had formal Islamic training and attempted to anchor their rebellion in historical texts. The current generation of fighters, however, was born into the forest. They did not sit through theological debates because they grew up inside a violent camp economy.
For these young men, jihad is no longer an ideological conviction. It is a livelihood. It is the only economy they know, and the only path to securing food, weapons, wives, social status, and protection. Recent intelligence reveals a severe dearth of actual religious scholars within these factions. The theology has become a mere corporate branding exercise to keep a lucrative, violent enterprise feeding itself.
The Amnesty Dilemma: Can You Deradicalize a Cartel?
This generational shift forces us to confront a highly provocative question regarding Nigeria’s current counter-insurgency strategy. Does deradicalization even make sense anymore?
Programs like Operation Safe Corridor were built on the assumption that we are fighting religious zealots who need to be re-educated. But if the third generation of combatants is driven entirely by the economy of war rather than deep scriptural conviction, conventional deradicalization is an obsolete tool.
By treating these young men as misguided ideological converts rather than economic combatants, the state risks running a massive, taxpayer-funded amnesty program for what has essentially morphed into an organized crime syndicate. We are offering free passes and integration packages to members of a violent cartel, even as their victims remain neglected in squalid displaced persons’ camps.
Moving Beyond the Security Paradigm
The bitter irony of the Lake Chad war is best summarized by a line from Professor Kassim’s research: “Those who kill know why they kill, but the majority of those about to be killed will hardly understand why they are being targeted.” A displaced woman or a local trader has no grasp of the abstract geopolitical and doctrinal debates raging between forest commanders, yet their lives are cut short because of them.
If the Nigerian government and its regional allies hope to end this endless cycle, the counter-insurgency strategy must drastically evolve. We cannot defeat a third-generation insurgency using tools designed for the first.
Since the conflict is increasingly driven by power, profit, and survival rather than deep scriptural conviction, pure ideological counter-messaging is no longer enough. The state must aggressively dismantle the illicit economic networks, including the fishing, farming, and smuggling cartels, that fund these forest fiefdoms. More importantly, we must replace the governance vacuum with tangible state authority, justice, and economic viability. As long as the forest remains a more reliable employer and a more predictable administrator than the government, the theology of terror will always find a willing audience.
Abubakar M. Kareto is a Public Affairs Analyst, Communication Strategist interested in governance, security, and development in Nigeria and beyond. He can be reached via amkareto@gmail.com
