So ISWAP Released A 15 Mins Long Video Pt I
And the relevant information you need to understand
The Relevant Information No #7
Five days ago, the Islamic State Organisation published a new video documentary from its West African Province (ISWAP), titled “Fight Them, Allah Will Punish Them Through Your Hands”, a title picked from a well-known verse in the Glorious Qur’an.
There has been a lot of analysis of the content of the video itself, especially on Twitter (including my personal by the great Hugo Kaaman here), so this is not going to be focused on the video itself and the visuals of it, but rather on what can be learnt from it on a bigger picture level.
Why Now?
The first thing to understand is that this video- which was essentially a montage of combat footage- was not just propaganda production to demoralise their enemy and attract new recruits, it was also a statement of confidence in how far along the current iteration of ISWAP is.
For years the Islamic State Organisation refrained from publishing combat footage documentaries from ISWAP, partly because several bets it had staked its West African subsidiary on, nearly crippled the group, and it needed less attention and not more to help it recover.
Chief amongst these ill-advised bets was the killing of Shekau. Then came cannibalising ISWAP to properly standup IS-Sahel Province(ISSP) and open a second front, then a third front in Northwest and Southwest/North Central Nigeria respectively. This, right in the middle of a fierce counteroffensive campaign by the Lake Chad basin countries, against the group.
The last two years have been a period of regeneration after the previous three years of securing survival, and over the last six months, ISWAP has begun to see the fruits of that regeneration play out in the field, in their current campaign.
The confidence derived from believing - with reason - that ISWAP is now dominant in the battlespace, is one key reason why this video was published; and why it contained so many teases, and yet did not show one fifth of what the group has been doing on the ground. It barely featured the extensive use of IEDs to harass and choke the Nigerian and Cameroonian armies, for example, and does not include footage from ISWAP’s defeat of last year’s Chadian offensive into the Lake Chad islands, Operation Haskanite.
Tactical/Operational Level Improvements
ISWAP today is less of the DIY combined arms force majoring in conventional combat that it was in 2018-2019, when it had lots of armoured vehicles to support assault operations and could mass light artillery in the form of gun-trucks and mortars to provide fire support.
Today, ISWAP is more of an infantry focused insurgency that nonetheless, is able to bring some gun trucks for fire support, while utilising quadcopter drones for battlefield reconnaissance support, and to drop bombs (literally, although this is a still emerging capability).
ISWAP’s mastery of infantry tactics, especially when weighed against the trinity of “shoot, move, communicate”, is still rudimentary, but when the Nigerian Army units it is facing are operating at the same level of rudimentary mastery of small unit tactics, then the gaps become irrelevant, and it is able to effectively leverage its operational art and rack up wins.
One major tactical improvement that I believe will profoundly shift the trajectory of this conflict, especially if the Nigerian Army cannot find an antidote to it, is ISWAP’s ongoing investment in nightfighting capabilities.
A majority of assaults by ISWAP in recent months have occured in lowlight conditions, late evening and just before dawn, but also in the deep of the night. This has been made possible by the acquisition of night vision goggles and sights(NVGs), which have not yet proliferated as much as peak Islamic State times in Iraq/Syria, but it seems that direction is where the Islamic State Organisation now wants ISWAP to head to.
Anecdotal evidence I have come across in real life, indicates that ISWAP is currently trying to put NVGs in the hands of all its small unit leaders, and in the long run put them in the hands of assault units. The recent documentary, and previous A’maq News Agency (for the uninitiated, Islamic State’s news agency) videos, confirm that ISWAP with the help of the wider Islamic State Organisation is really trying to do just that.
Already the Nigerian Army units in Southern Borno are struggling to get a handle on the current level of ISWAP’s night time assaults, however should NVGs become more commonplace in the group’s employ, it is hard to see how that struggle doesn’t become a rout.
This is because, combined with ISWAP’s current tactical doctrine of quickly massing infantry against weaker Army Forward Operations Bases (FOBs), NVGs become a near superweapon - an actual working wunderwaffe if you will- especially as the Nigerian Army’s night fighting capability in the battlespace, is nonexistent.
As the Assadist regime’s military and auxiliary militias learnt in Syria, there’s really not much you can do at rifle range, against an enemy that can see well at night, while you lack that capability.
On the operational level side of the things, the last six months has seen ISWAP implement a campaign of overstretching the Nigerian Army, by forcing it to respond to atrocities against Christian communities in the north of Adamawa State, which creates the space for it to collapse weakened Army strongholds in Southern Borno and Southern Yobe.
The goal for this plan has been to deplete the Army in Northern Borno/Northern Yobe, which would make it easy for ISWAP to clear out those areas and consolidate territorial control.
Approximately six months in, and the jury is still out on this plan, as while it has weakened the Nigerian Army units in both the southern and northern parts of the theatre, ISWAP is not anywhere close to fully pushing the Army out of Northern Borno, and consolidating territorial control there.
Nigeria Has A Weird Case, ISWAP Is Still Around?
In the boom-bust cycle that has dominated the timeline of the insurgency in the Lake Chad region since 2011, the Nigerian side has always been able to bust Boko Haram and ISWAP’s boom cycles, by throwing everything including the kitchen sink at them.
However, it has never been able to degrade ISWAP, especially when compared to Boko Haram, , to the point where it is no longer a serious threat.
The Nigerian Army’s longterm solution to the challenge posed by ISWAP, has been to contain it and try to deny it access to concentrations of resources, by creating forts/garrison towns that it named- Super camps.
That solution ossified the Army’s initiative from the jump, as rather than do a strategy of ‘deny, contain, then degrade’, the supercamps initiative stopped at the contain part of the process. This meant that the resources to actively degrade ISWAP’s military and administrative capabilities, were never put together and ultimately never deployed.
This strategy was never going to contain a group such as ISWAP, not with its functioning and expanding pipeline to the wider Islamic State Organisation, so it only succeeded in helping the group buy time as pressure on it slackened off over the years.
There has not been a greater enabler of ISWAP’s regeneration and current capability advances, than the Nigerian Army and the wider Nigerian security sector. This is as a result of the frankly bewildering way the Nigerian national security establishment continues to engage ISWAP, a whole decade after the establishment of an Islamic State “province” in the Lake Chad region.
ISWAP’s logistics and people moving pipelines north to Libya, west to IS-Sahel Province (ISSP), and east to Sudan, are still very intact and have not been seriously threatened at any point, by the Nigerian security services.
In previous years, the US drone and intelligence presence in Agadez and Dirkou (in northern Republic of Niger), placed constraints on the ability of the Islamic State Organisation to transfer men and resources to its ISWAP.
However, with the US withdrawal after the 2023 coup in Niger, the primary burden has fallen on Nigeria to track and interdict IS-ISWAP ratlines connecting Libya/Sudan with the Lake Chad region. Nigeria’s security services and military have proven unable to cut these logistics and communication lines.
In fact the IS-ISWAP ratlines have now expanded so much in scope, that IS - since early 2024 - is said to feel comfortable transferring fresh recruits from North Africa who do not yet possess trust for security work, or who are in theatres where IS is strategically avoiding open confrontation, to the Lake Chad area.
Logistics networks are now being built to expand ISWAP’s access to components for its fledging drone programme, to increase the access to night vision sights, and to deepen the bank of components for the kind of military industrial complex IS was building in Iraq and Syria before its khilafah project was defeated in those areas.
ISWAP does not currently suffer a scarcity of recruits, as the local populations under its control and in adjoining areas, are very willing to volunteer to serve in its standing military and the general reserve militia. A lot of the security work associated with IED emplacements in the Damboa to Biu axis, have been carried out by volunteers in the civilian communities adjoining ingress and egress routes for local army bases.
The main challenge has been the lack of a deep bench of educated enough human capital to replace losses in technical roles, but a concerted and focused technical education effort with IS help has been helping reduce this gap.
Intelligence collection wise, ISWAP’s human intelligence networks in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa , even in the heart of military formations are quite extensive. They spare no effort in recruiting civilians associated with military formations, including bartenders and prostitutes working establishments soldiers and airmen frequent in Maiduguri.
Going Forward
The outlook going forward is bleak, specifically because even if the current ISWAP boom gets pushed into the bust phase of the boom-bust cycle, ISWAP continues to iterate faster than the Nigerian Armed Forces, even as the military’s containment policy fails.
Currently, and unless it overplays its hands, ISWAP does not need to win, it just needs to not lose too much, and preserve its capacity and ability to regenerate. The Nigerian side does not want to lose, but it is incapable of creating the conditions to win either(for political reasons), which establishes a dynamic that over the long run favours ISWAP and disadvantages the Nigerian military.
The last iteration of this boom-bust cycle, that is 2018-2019, provides a good framework to analyse what today and the coming months can look like.
In 2018-2019, ISWAP did not lose, because ISWAP at a fundamental level could not have won as it did not have the manpower and resources to take on the Nigerian Armed Forces in a head-on conventional campaign and defeat it, in Borno. This still holds true today.
That being said, the Nigerian Armed Forces did not end up losing Borno and Yobe completely, only because ISWAP did not win. They did not break the back of that campaign through some careful application of improved tactics, although the Air Force’s sortie rates were impressive, but rather the campaign came to a halt because ISWAP ran out of runway to continue it.
But in the almost six years since that time, ISWAP has iterated through learning across iterations, constantly reshaping its force structure to better fit the tactical challenges it needed to confront at particular times. The Nigerian Army on the other hand, confident in its strategy of containment and denial, and constrained by ostensibly political chains from developing a programme to capitalise on the success of said strategy of containment and denial, ossified behind the trenches of its supercamps.
Over the period since 2019, ISWAP has learnt how to better evade airstrikes, from when the Nigerian Air Force became the lead offensive force in Borno. It has conducted and learnt the limits of an IED focused campaign. It has taken company sized units, split them into smaller squad/section sized units and conducted a campaign of ambushes on Army and CJTF patrols. It has built platoon sized units out of the smaller squad/section sized units and iterated through a campaign of raids on CJTF militia outposts and civilian communities.
Today, ISWAP is able to mass an battalion sized infantry force for an assault on a major base like Rann or Damboa, by moving that force across terrain in small units able to use concealment and evade the Air Force’s sporadic aerial reconnaissance .
The current doctrine of utilising infantry-centric assaults with fighters utilising motorcycles for mobility, and only the barest minimum of heavy equipment in the form of guntrucks, works as intended, because the Nigerian Air Force component of Operation Hadin Kai does not possess enough aerial recon platforms to maintain persistent coverage of the battlespace, and thus be able to detect the insurgent units as they move in small detachments across the terrain.
It also works because the Nigerian Air Force component can only generate a limited amount of combat sorties for planned strikes, and usually is only able to show up in support of Army units under attack, after ISWAP fighters have pushed into close quarters battle with the defending soldiers, which in turn prevents the Air Force from being able to drop bombs, so as not to kill the soldiers along with the insurgents,.
A third reason it works, is that Army units in FOBs and so-called Supercamps, do not conduct frequent and or continuous patrols of the empty spaces outside their immediate fortified perimetre. Taken together with the lack of persistent aerial surveillance, and with the Army’s strained ability to produce accurate human intelligence within the civilian communities in the areas adjacent to its bases, leaves the soldiers in these FOBs and Supercamps “blind” and unable to “see” ISWAP movements to the contact line until they actually establish contact.
The Nigerian military’s major advantages have traditionally been in airpower and a deeper bench of trained officers for tactical leadership, but while the advantage in airpower looks likely to remain for the foreseeable future (especially with more strike aircraft expected in service soon), the Air Force will probably not be able to achieve reconnaissance and strike persistence over the core states of Borno and Yobe, anytime soon.
Also airpower can only blunt ISWAP, as we have seen locally and even in Iraq and Syria, ground forces are still needed to defeat them and hold the terrain to prevent a resurgence. In fact indiscriminate or non-precise airstrikes, which given the strained intelligence collection capabilities is what the Nigerian military has to rely on, can and do create a situation where airpower helps ISWAP recruit more fighters and supporters, and helps it mentally strengthen its hold over populations in areas it controls or exercises a competitive presence.
As for a deeper bench of trained officers at the tactical level, the more IS can bring down veterans from its various other theatres of operations down to ISWAP, as it is already doing, the more that advantage the Nigerian military possesses will be eroded.
Plus the more those IS veterans educate local ISWAP cadres and fight alongside them, the deeper the skilled pool becomes for the Lake Chad group.
Finally, should ISWAP continue to expand its access to night vision capabilities, and develop and train specialised units to fight at night as OG Islamic State did in Iraq and Syria, the balance on the ground will tremendously shift.
Not to be an alarmist, but the Nigerian Army today barely has any answer for ISWAP’s current tactical evolutions. Throwing diffused enough night fighting capabilities, and dedicated night raiding and assault units, into the mix, is not going to look great for the Nigerian Army units that have to face ISWAP on the ground.
If that is combined with a recon and strike battlefield drone programme built around quadcopters, as we saw OG Islamic State do in Iraq way before the Russians and Ukrainians expanded and iterated on the possibilities of small drones, then at that point, Abuja will either have to put up and go all in with its war against ISWAP, or shut up and lose.
Great and informative write up as usual. ...Pls keep this up!!!