By Lesley Anne Warner, WPR
On the evening of April 11, Nigerian military airstrikes hit a market in the northeastern village of Jilli, located near the epicenter of the country’s two-decade long jihadist insurgency, killing as many as 200 civilians. While defending the choice of target as a terrorist enclave and logistics hub, the Nigerian Air Force subsequently announced it was dispatching a fact-finding mission to assess the extent of possible civilian casualties.
The Jilli market bombing is the latest in a series of government airstrikes over the past decade that have killed civilians, underscoring the Nigerian military’s continued challenges with intelligence, target identification and air-ground integration. Between 2017 and 2024, more than 500 civilians were killed in such attacks, both in the northeast against the two jihadist insurgencies operating there—Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP)—as well as in the northwest against armed criminal groups that the government generally refers to as “bandits.” In January 2017, an airstrike hit a camp for internally displaced persons in Rann. Another strike in December 2023 struck a religious gathering in Kaduna.
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Recognizing that civilian deaths boost extremist recruitment, the Nigerian Air Force unveiled a Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response (CHMR) action plan in May 2025 and inaugurated a dedicated CHMR Board two months later in July. The Jilli airstrike makes it clear that a gap remains between this emphasis on civilian harm mitigation and operational practice.
That gap is not unique to the Nigerian military. Indeed, U.S. conduct during the conflict with Iran has demonstrated that even well-resourced militaries with mature CHMR frameworks struggle with this issue. What distinguishes Nigeria is the convergence of two compounding pressures: domestic demand to show security gains ahead of elections scheduled for early next year; and external pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to protect Nigerian Christians from perceived persecution. Together, these pressures create the conditions in which incidents such as the Jilli bombing could become more, rather than less, likely.
Patients receive treatment for injuries suffered from Nigerian air force strikes, in Damaturu, Nigeria, April 12, 2026. (AP Photo)
This is all the more the case because of the Nigerian military’s current counterinsurgency strategy, which is built around airpower as a substitute for ground presence. The Nigerian military’s “supercamp” strategy, introduced in 2019, consolidated smaller forward operating bases into larger strongholds to reduce military casualties and the loss of equipment during insurgent raids. The practical effect was to cede the surrounding terrain to ISWAP and Boko Haram, and deepen reliance on air assets to project force into areas from which troops had withdrawn.
However, that reliance has carried a compounding cost: While airpower can enable and accelerate counterinsurgency operations, airstrikes alone rarely defeat insurgents, who simply disperse and adapt. In fact, empirical evidence increasingly suggests this approach amplifies violence instead of suppressing it.
The Islamic State is a case in point. ISWAP now operates in dispersed, mobile cells across the Lake Chad Basin, avoiding massed formations and fixed infrastructure that are easy to target from the sky. Furthermore, the group’s recent adoption of weaponized drones shows how it has turned the tables on the Nigerian military by exploiting the vulnerabilities presented by the latter’s supercamp approach. In late 2024, ISWAP launched drone strikes against a Nigerian military base, the first known instance of a nonstate armed group in the Lake Chad Basin expanding the use of drones beyond surveillance. By early 2026, the group had reportedly acquired a growing drone arsenal and was rehearsing coordinated drone operations in Borno and Yobe states.
Consequently, the asymmetric logic that limits Nigerian airpower against a dispersed insurgency has now been compounded. ISWAP’s low-cost commercial drones demand far less infrastructure, fewer trained pilots and a fraction of the maintenance costs that frequently ground Nigerian air assets. In essence, an approach that has already struggled to convert tactical air dominance into strategic gains now faces an adversary that has begun to contest that dominance from below.
The strategic cost of this dynamic is most visible on the ground. Two decades of domestic, regional and international stabilization efforts have yet to produce durable security in northeast Nigeria. That is unlikely to change under the Nigerian military’s current approach, which in relying so heavily on airstrikes sacrifices the kind of ground presence, human intelligence networks and civil-military engagement that population-centric counterinsurgency requires. Moreover, every airstrike that kills civilians in error generates grievances that ISWAP converts into fighters, funding and community allegiance, eroding precisely the intelligence access and local cooperation on which accurate targeting depends.
The Nigerian air force’s moves toward improving civilian harm mitigation last year signal an institutional recognition that such harms undermine both the legitimacy and effectiveness of military operations. The impact of those moves, however, will remain constrained in a political and security context in which the communities that should be receiving protection from the state end up in its crosshairs—whether unintentionally or due to Nigerian military’s long history of predatory behavior.
This was particularly the case when its counterinsurgency campaign relied more on ground forces. in the runup to the 2015 elections, Boko Haram openly controlled dozens of local government areas and surrounding rural territory in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa, representing a clearcut territorial challenge to the Nigerian state. The current situation differs markedly from that period, with ISWAP now the more prolific and tactically adaptive jihadist actor in the northeast, and insurgents relying less on holding towns and more on blending into rural communities. Because of the Nigerian military’s reluctance to recommit ground forces to the fight, airstrikes have become a convenient way to signal control in areas where it has formally recovered territory but without any meaningful reduction in day‑to‑day risk for civilians.
The Trump administration’s singular focus on alleged persecution of Nigeria’s Christian communities has compounded this dynamic, leading President Bola Tinubu’s government to demonstrate enthusiastic cooperation in order to forestall Trump’s threat of a “guns-a-blazing” intervention.
With elections rapidly approaching and political lines already being drawn, the pressure on Tinubu to demonstrate progress on security, not only in the northeast but across the country, may fuel an institutional bias toward kinetic action that seemingly produces tangible results over the slower, less tangible work of community engagement and the strengthening of intelligence networks. The practical effect is a campaign that “performs control” from the air, while civilians in places like Jilli continue to absorb the costs.
Lesley Anne Warner is a visiting scholar with the Africa Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She previously served at the U.S. Agency for International Development, the State Department and as a congressional staffer on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. You can find her on Substack and follow her at @lesleyannewarner.bsky.social.
@World Politics Review (WPR)