March 01, (THEWILL) — The villages of Woro and Nuku in Kwara State’s Kaiama Local Government Area no longer look the way they did before dusk on 3 February 2026. What the attackers left behind, after more than 10 hours of shooting, burning and binding of victims, were mass graves, charred homesteads and a community so shattered that many of its surviving residents have not returned. At least 162 people were killed, according to the Nigerian Red Cross, though some estimates place the toll above 200. More than 50 were wounded and 38 abducted. The assault, attributed to the Lakurawa group, an affiliate of Islamic State, stands as one of the deadliest jihadist strikes outside Nigeria’s north-east in living memory. It is also something else: A signal, visible to anyone willing to read it, that the country’s security crisis has crossed a threshold from which there may be no easy retreat.
Umar Bio Salihu, the 53-year-old chief of Woro, described gunmen arriving around 5 pm in the evening and moving systematically from house to house, executing residents after prayers and setting others on fire. Two of his sons were killed; his wife and three daughters were taken. A woman named Ramatu Muhamed fled into the surrounding bush at the sound of gunfire, only to return and find members of her family among the dead. Rather than being incidental to the story, these accounts are the story and they carry within them the logic of the assault: Residents of Woro, a predominantly Muslim village, had refused to join the extremists or submit to their interpretation of Islamic law and they were made to pay for that refusal.
What makes the Kaiama massacre so alarming is not that it came without warning but that warnings were ignored. Prior intelligence existed, regarding militant preaching and written warnings delivered to communities in the area. The Nigerian army battalion that President Bola Tinubu ordered to the district arrived on 4 February, the day after the killings. Operation Savanna Shield, the joint military response that followed, was announced with the language of decisiveness. Vice President Kashim Shettima led a delegation to condole with survivors on 7 February. These gestures mattered to grieving families, but they could not change the sequence of events that had already unfolded.
The data compiled by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project tell their own story. Between January and November 2025, at least 207 people were killed and 177 abducted in Kwara State, largely in its northern districts. By February 2026, total fatalities in the state had surpassed 300, representing a 921 per cent increase on the previous year and roughly 16 times the state’s average annual death toll. Violent incidents rose by 78 per cent across the same period. From 1 January to 10 February 2026 alone, violence claimed 1,258 lives across Nigeria, with north-central regions now accounting for a disproportionate share of that toll.
The groups responsible have not appeared from nowhere. Jama’at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-Da’wah wa’l-Jihad factions, the Mahmuda network and Lakurawa have established bases in the forested zones around Kainji National Park, exploiting porous borders with West African neighbours, Benin and Niger to launch operations and retreat with impunity. Militant incidents in the tri-border area of Niger, Benin and Nigeria increased by 90 per cent between 2024 and 2025. The geography is not incidental here, either. Armed groups under military pressure in the north-west have found in Kwara’s under-policed forest reserves exactly the operational space they needed.
The economic logic of this southward migration, as some analysts have noted, is brutal in its clarity. The Nigerian south remains comparatively untouched, its rural populations less hardened by years of insecurity, its forests less contested. Farmers in Asa, Moro and Isin local government areas of Kwara have reported being levied unofficial “taxes” by armed men before being permitted to harvest their own crops. Those who cannot or will not pay face violence. Kwara is a significant producer of grains, tubers and livestock; when its agricultural communities are paralysed by fear, the consequences ripple outward to markets in Lagos and Ibadan. The inflation squeezing urban Nigerians is, in part, a security premium extracted at gunpoint in the Middle Belt.
The structural failures enabling this crisis have accumulated over years. The constitutional arrangement that places the police under exclusive federal control means that state governors, nominally the chief security officers of their states, cannot direct policing operations on their own authority. They fund security from state coffers without possessing meaningful command. The debate over creating state police forces has dragged on while the space between federal authority and local reality has been colonised by criminal gangs who understand that terrain far better than any officer dispatched from Abuja. The argument that state police could be weaponised by governors for political purposes retains some validity, but it has to be set against the current arithmetic: communities are being massacred under an arrangement that demonstrably is not working.
On 15 February, 12 days after the Kaiama attack, gunmen killed at least 30 people in three villages in neighbouring Niger State, close to the Kwara border. Youth groups in northern Kwara staged protests and the Take It Back Movement planned demonstrations for 26 February, by which point over 200 lives had been lost and some 170 people abducted in the state that year. In Oyo and Osun, advocacy organisations and traditional rulers have begun warning that the forests contiguous with Kwara’s are not a natural barrier but a corridor. The Olukoro of Koro and other traditional figures have already been kidnapped and killed in calculated acts designed to strip communities of local authority and leave them rudderless.
In Owo, Ondo State in 2022, St Francis Xavier Catholic Church recorded a mass shooting and bombing incident during morning Mass which killed scores and left several wounded. Though no significant terror incident has been recorded in the state since then, there have been alarming incidents like the recent kidnapping of multiple worshipers in a church during a night vigil and the killing of a traditional ruler, Oba Kehinde Jacob Falodun in Agamo community in Akure North Local Government Area by about 10 gunmen, who are yet to be arrested as at the time of writing this piece.
Nigeria’s southern political class has been conspicuously quiet over the Kwara State problem. The assumption that Kwara is distant, that its problems belong to the north, misreads both the map and the momentum of events. The crisis has its roots in weak governance, economic marginalisation, arms proliferation and the exploitation of under-governed border zones and none of those conditions stop at a state boundary. What the grief and fury of Kwara’s communities are telling the rest of the country is that the buffer has gone. Without sustained investment in intelligence, inter-state coordination, judicial accountability and the economic life of affected communities, the violence will not be contained by hope or rhetoric. It never is.
