Colonel I.A. Muhammad died late Sunday night after his vehicle struck an improvised explosive device in Monguno, Borno State, moments after his troops had beaten back an insurgent assault. The colonel and six soldiers were killed not during the firefight but while he was leading a post-battle assessment, a routine that ISWAP had anticipated and exploited. The attack began around 10 p.m. on 12 April when fighters hit Charlie 13 location; the soldiers repelled them, then rolled forward over a buried bomb planted on the expected route. Security analyst Mubashir Adamu said the pattern is now standard: draw troops into combat, then detonate a pre-positioned IED aimed at eliminating command structure. ISWAP, which split from Boko Haram in 2016, fields an estimated 3,500–5,000 fighters across the Lake Chad Basin and has shifted from indiscriminate attacks to precision strikes against military leaders. Between 2020 and 2023 the Lake Chad Basin saw over 1,200 IED incidents, with Nigerian forces bearing the heaviest toll. The same week Colonel Muhammad died, an air raid on Jilli market—intended to hit insurgent logistics—killed dozens of civilians, intensifying public anger and highlighting the tightrope the military walks between degrading ISWAP and alienating local communities.
Colonel Muhammad's death exposes the cruel efficiency with which ISWAP has turned the army's own after-action protocol into a death trap; the insurgents now bank on a commanding officer's reflex to "go forward after a fight" and plant explosives exactly there. This is no longer guerrilla harassment—it is calculated decapitation, designed to rip out institutional memory at the moment troops feel safest.
The wider context is sobering: the same corridor where the colonel died is under relentless air bombardment because ISWAP's supply lines run through it, yet the group still has the tactical bandwidth to predict and exploit troop behaviour. While public outrage fixates on civilian casualties from the Jilli strike, the insurgents quietly score a bigger victory by eliminating field commanders who coordinate those very air operations.
For residents of Monguno, Gubio and surrounding villages, the implication is double-edged. Every successful insurgent ambush invites heavier military reprisals, but every errant airstrike swells the pool of locals whom ISWAP can tax or recruit, ensuring the cycle continues.
Taken together, the week's events illustrate a grim equilibrium: the army can clear ground and drop bombs, yet ISWAP retains the initiative by weaponising predictability on one side and grievance on the other.
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