Nigeria has killed more than 13,000 “terrorists” in the past year, President Bola Tinubu said Friday, adding that the death toll from the country’s jihadist insurgency is down 81% since he took power in 2023.
Africa’s most populous country is fighting the long-running conflict across its northern regions, complicated by inroads made by militants from the Sahel, and non-ideological “bandit” gangs.
President Bola Tinubu, up for re-election in January, declared a nationwide security emergency last November as his administration scrambled to respond to a wave of mass kidnappings and violence.
Tinubu, speaking during a televised address to mark the country’s democracy day celebrations, said: “Over 13,000 terrorists have been neutralized in the past year.”
He did not specify if he meant in 2025 or in the previous 12 months.
The president also said that over “124,000 fighters and dependents have laid down their arms since 2023 through Operation Safe Corridor.”
Tinubu’s first term in office has also overseen the deployment of US troops to the country as major bouts of violence attracted international scrutiny.
The insurgency, which has spawned multiple armed groups, has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions since it began in 2009 with an uprising by the jihadist group Boko Haram.
The crisis has also been compounded by violent farmer-herder clashes in parts of the northeast and central regions, while secessionist agitation rumbles on in the southeast, and rampant kidnappings for ransom plague the country’s northwest and central regions.
The unrest is inching closer to the relatively safer southwest, where more than 40 students and teachers were seized from their schools in the state of Oyo in May.
The International Monetary Fund warned on Tuesday that the widespread insecurity from armed groups -- especially in the north, where the bulk of the country’s food is grown -- is a “risk to people and economic activity.”
In one of the latest attempts to tackle the security crisis, the government launched a recruitment drive for 50,000 police personnel and has this year allocated a ($4 billion) budget to the military -- which Tinubu said was the biggest for defense in the country’s history.
Military collaborations with the United States, France, and “other European countries” he did not name, have progressed from training to “precision targeting” leading to the degradation of the command center of the Islamic State-affiliated Boko Haram in northeastern Borno state.
US and Nigerian forces last month killed Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, an Islamic State commander described as the “most active terrorist” in the world, at a remote village in the northeast of Africa’s most populous country.
The US Africa Command this week said its joint operations with Nigeria had killed more than 200 IS-linked fighters.