Mass surrenders by Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province fighters have handed Nigeria its most significant counterterrorism gains in years. Thousands of militants have laid down their weapons. The military says the insurgency that has terrorized northeastern Nigeria for more than a decade is on its last legs.
But the victory comes with a warning that the Nigerian government would be unwise to ignore.
“Mass surrenders may weaken armed groups, but reintegration without justice risks fuelling resentment,” writes Hakeem Najimdeen of Alafarika for Studies and Consultancy in an Al Jazeera opinion piece published Wednesday.
The scale of the shift
The wave of defections, concentrated in the Sambisa Forest region of Borno State, accelerated after the death of Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau in 2021. Fighters who had been forced into the group or joined voluntarily have been streaming out, many with their families.
Nigeria has developed two main mechanisms to handle them: the federal government’s Operation Safe Corridor program and the Borno State government’s local Borno Model. Both are designed to demobilize, rehabilitate, and reintegrate former fighters into society.
Former combatants surrender their weapons, go through a de-radicalization program, and are eventually returned to their communities. The program has been praised by international partners as a model for post-conflict transitions.
The problem with forgiveness
The difficulty is what happens when fighters return to communities that remember what they did.
“Reintegration without justice risks fuelling resentment,” Najimdeen writes. Victims of Boko Haram violence — those who lost family members, homes, or livelihoods to the insurgency — are expected to live alongside men who confess to acts of torture and murder, because they were following orders or fighting for a cause they believed was righteous.
One former fighter, a man named Kachalla who left Boko Haram in 2020, told RFI that he had committed acts of torture and bloody crimes under orders from Shekau. “I also did it of my own free will,” he admitted, “because we were taught that it was the right thing to do.”
Such fighters express regret only in private. In public, they face “whispered insults” from community members who have not forgotten.
The risk of recycling
The deeper problem is that reintegration without genuine accountability can create conditions for the next insurgency. Fighters who pass through rehabilitation programs without confronting what they did — and without communities feeling that justice has been done — may reoffend or pass their grievances on to a new generation.
The Nigerian government has emphasized that the programs include monitoring and follow-up. But with tens of thousands of former fighters to process, the capacity for meaningful oversight is limited.
A broader lesson
Nigeria’s experience is not unique. Every country that has faced a large-scale insurgency has had to decide between punishment and reintegration. The record suggests that the choice is never clean: amnesty risks impunity, but prison risks radicalization.
The warning from Najimdeen is that Nigeria’s current approach, while producing welcome short-term security gains, is storing up problems for later. Mass surrenders empty the battlefield. But unless the peace that follows is seen as just, the quiet that follows may only be a pause.
Sources: Al Jazeera (July 8, 2026), RFI