The Nigerien military has announced the death of Boko Haram commander Bakura during an operation in the Lake Chad basin, a volatile area shared by Niger, Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon.
According to a military statement released Thursday, Bakura was eliminated in a “surgical operation” carried out last week on one of the islands in Niger’s Diffa region.
Bakura, identified by the army as Ibrahim Mahamadu, was around 40 years old and originally from Nigeria. He had been a Boko Haram fighter for more than 13 years and assumed leadership of a splinter faction after Abubakar Shekau’s death in 2021. Refusing to align with rival Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), he relocated with his loyalists to the islands within Niger’s territory.
The army described him as a “feared leader” and confirmed that he was struck by an air force jet on August 15. “Very early in the morning of August 15 an air force fighter aircraft launched three targeted and successive strikes on the positions Bakura used to occupy in Shilawa,” the statement noted.
Boko Haram, which began its armed rebellion in northeastern Nigeria in 2009 in pursuit of an Islamic caliphate, has caused over 40,000 deaths and displaced more than two million people. The insurgency has also destabilized neighboring countries, with Niger first experiencing Boko Haram’s violence in 2015 during attacks in Bosso near the lake.
