Between October 27 and 30, protesters from the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN), a Shia religious organization led by the pro-Iranian Sheikh Ibrahim el-Zakzaky, clashed with security services in and around Abuja, Nigeria’s capital. The IMN reported that Nigerian security services had killed at least forty of its members during the marches.

This is a guest post by Emily Mellgard, research associate for the Council on Foreign Relations Africa Studies program. A great discovery often brings together strange bedfellows. Such is the case w…

Fighting between government forces and Anglophone separatist groups, particularly in the country’s North West and South West regions, has killed approximately 400 civilians and displaced some 246,000 people in the South West region alone as of August 2018. 

Abdulbasit Kassim, leading Boko Haram scholar, recently discovered a thirty-eight-minute recording of a purported Islamic State in West Africa (ISWA) communique. I translated it from the original Kanuri. It provides a particular version and explanation of ISWA's immediate history, and sheds light on why the group executed Mamman Nur, one of the Boko Haram’s founding fathers and an influential ideologue, its internal decision-making, and ISWA’s relationship with the Islamic State (IS). It is not clear, however, the extent to which what is described in the audio is true to what actually happened. 

This is a guest post by Allen Grane, research associate for the Council on Foreign Relations Africa Studies program. On June 19, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) crushed more than a ton of e…