ANALYSIS: How Boko Haram gathers intelligence for its deadly activities

Since launching its Camp Holocaust offensive at the beginning of 2025, Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) has carried out over 200 attacks, killing at least 500 people. And Jama’tu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad (JAS), excelling in predatory offensives and kidnappings for ransom, shows increased capacity for bold attacks against military posts.

These offensives by the Boko Haram factions, sometimes on the same targets in one week, are generally preceded by espionage, which is rapidly evolving with new technologies.

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To gather information, Boko Haram factions have specialised military and non-military services, with designated internal units. Both factions have a police service (hisbah) with a designated leader.

While the hisbah’s primary role is to maintain order within the group, they also have agents who have infiltrated communities to collect intelligence to protect the group. These units are non-military and comprise ISWAP members who lead civilian lives as farmers, traders or artisans. Through their interactions with communities, they are among the group’s main sources of information.

Military agents, or qaids, are military leaders responsible for conducting operations in the field. Each has around 400 fighters under his command. Former fighters told ISS Today that the qaid designates several men to infiltrate the target communities days in advance to collect strategic information to plan an assault.

Boko Haram relies on networks of family members, friends, and other relatives to gather information. Interviews with ex-combatants reveal that several active combatants do business with their family members, sending them money for subsistence, including support for farming or other agricultural tasks, small-scale trade and livestock farming.

Many fighters lead double lives. They live between their communities and insurgent camps, collecting information for the terror group. Throughout the week of 13 April this year, in Niger’s Diffa region, several active ISWAP members were intercepted by the defence and security forces as they tried to rejoin Boko Haram camps after spending time with their families. The group’s logistical suppliers are renowned for living between their communities and insurgent camps.

Boko Haram also kidnaps people who can provide useful information for the group’s operations. Shepherd children are kidnapped for information, for ransom, or to bolster the group’s numbers. Through their work as shepherds, leading livestock in the fields, they know discreet paths that lead to communities. They also provide information on the advanced positions of defence and security forces.

Key to Boko Haram’s system of information collection are herders, fishers, and farmers, who are in the lake area for various seasonal agricultural activities. Their survival depends on how well they collaborate with the militants.

At least 10,000 artisanal fishers access the territory controlled by ISWAP each year for fishing activities. Several hundred herders travel each year to Lake Chad’s islands controlled by ISWAP to graze their livestock during the dry season. They come from Yobe, Borno, Jigawa, Sokoto and Zamfara in Nigeria; Cameroon’s Far North and North regions; and from Lake Chad and Hadjer-Lamis in Chad.

Farmers stay there at certain times of the year, attracted by the lake’s fertile land. And the group’s enclaves provide important routes for smugglers, who cross these regions several times during the year.

All these users are not only required to pay taxes in return, but also to provide information that can be useful for terrorist operations.

Boko Haram also takes advantage of gaps in disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) programmes to collect information. Many non-deradicalised ex-combatants are back in their communities without any supervision, and continue to provide information to active fighters.

Numerous ex-combatants who are dissatisfied with the DDR programme return to Boko Haram with information and contacts. On several occasions, former Boko Haram fighters have been intercepted by defence and security forces while trying to rejoin the group, mainly due to concerns about reintegration programmes and mistrust in the community.

Boko Haram uses advanced technologies, including drones and other specialised electronic devices for eavesdropping, surveillance and photography to collect and process information. Fighters use satellite and cell phones, social media, high-definition digital cameras, and other technologies for propaganda and to gather intelligence for attacks.

Undercover agents share images and other information about civilian and military targets via WhatsApp, for example. Boko Haram also uses surveillance and reconnaissance drones, some of which are armed for pre-emptive attacks or disruption of military drills and planning meetings. On 11 May 2025, Cameroon’s army shot down three ISWAP reconnaissance drones flying over Mayo-Tsanaga.

Boko Haram sometimes infiltrates the military or paramilitary, corrupting agents in exchange for information or services. In 2019, for example, several Boko Haram fighters posed as demobilised fighters by joining the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) camp of Mora, where repentant fighters were being held. Their aim was to gather information on the force’s actions. They then escaped.

In practice, this system of collecting and processing information allows Boko Haram’s various factions to have accurate intelligence on the exact number of soldiers on duty, their calibre and quantity of weapons, and their movements.

This enables insurgents to plan precise attacks and anticipate military counter-offensives; identify escape routes, plan kidnappings, cattle thefts, or the sale of stolen cattle; obtain logistical supplies; and extort communities and carry out financial transactions.

It also enables the group to procure important supplies and to plan and organise visits by its foreign trainers – from North Africa, the Maghreb, the Middle East, and even Chechnya – to the lake’s islands. A video released in December 2024 by ISWAP shows a foreign trainer teaching fighters how to use heavy weapons.

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Efforts to combat the group’s information-gathering system must be stepped up. Boko Haram infiltrators and their accomplices must be systematically tracked down through specific and continuous operations, beyond the work of the intelligence services, and repression against them must be tightened. This could have a deterrent and coercive effect.

Governments in the region should invest more in human, open-source and imagery intelligence. This would help counter and dismantle Boko Haram’s information-gathering system, improve counter-espionage, and strengthen the MNJTF’s intelligence capabilities to neutralise the groups and their camps – and the ideology and rhetoric attracting youth to these groups.

If JAS and ISWAP can infiltrate the army, why is the army unable to infiltrate these groups?

Célestin Delanga, Regional Office for West Africa and the Sahel, Institute for Security Studies (ISS)

(This article was published by ISS Today, a Premium Times syndication partner. We have their permission to republish.)