How off-the-shelf drones are changing jihadist warfare in West Africa

Jihadist groups are increasingly carrying out drone strikes in West Africa, raising alarm that they are building the capacity to wage a “war from the skies”. A leading violence monitoring organisation, Acled, has recorded at least 69 drone strikes by an al-Qaeda affiliate in Burkina Faso and Mali since 2023, while two Islamic State (IS) affiliates have carried out around 20 – mostly in Nigeria, which has been battling numerous insurgent groups for almost 25 years. The latest drone attack took place in Nigeria’s north-eastern Borno state on 29 January, when jihadists carried out a two-pronged assault – with multiple armed drones and ground fighters – on a military base.

The military said nine of its soldiers were killed in the attack by the Islamic State of West Africa Province (Iswap) – identified by Acled as the “most prolific” IS African affiliate in “drone warfare”. The jihadists tended to carry out strikes with “commercially available, relatively inexpensive quadcopter [unmanned] drones” that were “rigged with explosives”, while also using them for reconnaissance and surveillance missions in preparation for ground attacks, Acled senior Africa analyst Ladd Serwat told the BBC. Despite the fact that Nigeria’s government tightly controls the import of commercial and hobby drones and prohibits their use without official permission, the jihadists were able to obtain them through their smuggling networks across the region’s porous borders, said a Nigeria-based senior researcher at the Good Governance Africa think-tank, Malik Samuel.

“The growing use of armed and surveillance drones by violent extremist groups in the Sahel and Lake Chad region is deeply concerning, and it marks a significant shift,” security analyst Audu Bulama Bukarti told the BBC. “Drones lower the cost of conducting attacks, allow militants to gather intelligence with minimal risk and enable strikes on military targets that were previously harder to reach,” he added. According to Serwat, Iswap has carried out 10 drone strikes since 2024 in north-eastern Nigeria as well as in northern Cameroon, southern Niger, and southern Chad – all countries affected by the insurgency in Nigeria. A similar number of drone attacks were carried out by another IS affiliate, the Islamic State of Sahel Province (ISSP), in West Africa, Acled data shows.