ISWAP overran Kukawa two times. The second time, they killed the commander who survived the first

Lt Col Umar Farouq died on the road to Maiduguri yesterday. His base in Kukawa was overrun around 12:30am Monday. Insurgents stormed from multiple directions, burned the armoured vehicles, seized the ammunition, and left. He was wounded holding them off. He didn't make it to hospital.

Weeks ago, Kukawa was a success story. An earlier attack had been repelled. The local lawmaker visited to thank the troops. Farouq received public commendations. He's now one of at least three commanding officers killed in Borno in three weeks.

The same night Kukawa fell, ISWAP simultaneously hit Dalwa, Goniri, Mainok, and a harbour position deep inside Sambisa. Five targets. One night. That's not raiding. That's a coordinated offensive designed to overwhelm.

The military's official statement says all attacks were "successfully repelled." Farouq's death tells a different story about what repelled means in practice.

At least 65 soldiers have died across multiple Borno attacks in three weeks. The CO of the 222 Battalion in Konduga, Lt Col S.I. Iliyasu, was also killed in that period. A senior Borno government official noted publicly that four or five bases had been overrun and three senior officers killed within weeks, and asked what went wrong — adding that with foreign military trainers already on Nigerian soil, you'd expect precision, intelligence-led operations.

That question — what went wrong — is the one the official statements don't answer.

What the pattern does reveal: ISWAP is hitting harder, faster, and in more places at once. The communities resettled under government post-conflict recovery programmes — like Dalwa, resettled in December 2025 — are being displaced again. The army is absorbing losses it isn't fully acknowledging.

For anyone with family in Borno, this isn't background security noise. It's a war the government says is winding down, getting louder.