Tuesday 14 April, 2026

Two senior officers dead in five days. ISWAP has learned how the army responds. It planned for it.

Last Sunday night, insurgents attacked a military position in Monguno, Borno State. The troops at the location repelled them. The attackers retreated.

Then Colonel I.A. Muhammad drove toward the fighting.

He was the commanding officer. His troops had been under fire. He went to assess the situation himself. That is what the army calls leading from the front. On the road, his vehicle hit an improvised explosive device. He was killed alongside six of his soldiers.

This is the second senior officer Nigeria has lost in five days. On April 9, Brigadier-General Oseni Braimah was killed when ISWAP fighters stormed the 29 Task Force Brigade base in Benisheikh. He tried to escape in an armoured vehicle. The vehicle wouldn't start.

Two commanding officers. Five days.

The military's language in both cases is the same. Gallant sacrifice. Courage. Professionalism. The terrorists were repelled. Operations are continuing. But those formulations hide the more precise story about what ISWAP is doing.

ISWAP didn't just attack two bases. At Monguno, they attacked and then waited. They knew the commanding officer would come forward. They knew the route. They placed a bomb. The tactic of drawing military leadership into kill zones is not new. It is what increasingly sophisticated insurgent operations look like after seventeen years of observation and patience. They have studied Nigerian Army response protocols long enough to predict who goes where when the shooting starts.

This is the third commanding officer-level death in a month. On March 9, Lieutenant Colonel Umar Farouq was killed when insurgents overran a military base in Kukawa Local Government Area of Borno. What looked like an isolated incident in March now looks like the beginning of a pattern. ISWAP is not attacking randomly. It is targeting the command structure.

The government approved N5.41 trillion for defence in the 2026 budget. The president flew to Borno and vowed the insurgency would be defeated. And ISWAP's answer to all of that has been to place a bomb on the road that the next commanding officer will drive down when his troops call for help.

Since January 2026, Amnesty International says at least 1,100 Nigerians have been abducted across the north. A 17-year insurgency is not ending. It is adapting.

And the commanding officer at Monguno drove toward the sound of the shooting, as commanding officers do, and an IED was already there waiting for him.