Nigeria Rises To Fourth Place On Global Terrorism Index As Terror Deaths Jump 46 Percent — ISWAP And Boko Haram Drive Highest Death Toll Since 2020
Nigeria has risen to fourth place on the Global Terrorism Index compiled by the Australia-based Institute for Economics and Peace, recording 750 terrorism-related deaths in 2025 — a staggering 46 percent increase from the previous year and the country's highest death toll from terrorism since 2020. The grim milestone comes even as global terrorism deaths declined overall, making Nigeria's deterioration one of the most alarming counter-trends in this year's report and placing the country in the uncomfortable company of Pakistan, Burkina Faso, and Niger as the world's most terrorism-afflicted nations.
The report said: "This marks the highest death toll since 2020, driven by internal instability as well as ongoing conflict between ISWAP and Boko Haram." [Newnationalstar](https://newnationalstar.com/seyi-tinubu-backs-women-led-initiative-as-city-boy-movement-deepens-grassroots-mobilization/?claude-citation-77c40449-716c-4eb7-9a13-d5f2330c8be4=4f8414d0-3d41-431c-a318-de5840eb9810) The Institute for Economics and Peace's Global Terrorism Index has ranked 163 countries for 13 years based on the impact of terrorism, measuring indicators including the number of attacks, deaths, injuries, and hostages taken. Its definition of terrorism covers the systematic threat or use of violence by non-state actors, whether for or in opposition to established authority — a definition that captures the full range of insurgent, jihadist, and communal violence that has been consuming lives across Nigeria's north and middle belt for years.
The Global Picture — Terrorism Declining Worldwide But Surging In Nigeria
The central finding of the Global Terrorism Index is one that should be a source of both cautious optimism and deep national shame for Nigeria simultaneously. Globally, terrorism deaths fell from 7,555 in 2024 to 5,582 in 2025 — a significant and welcome decline that reflects security improvements across several historically affected regions including parts of the Middle East and North Africa. Nigeria went in precisely the opposite direction. While the world got safer from terrorism, Nigeria got dramatically more dangerous — recording not a decline but a near-50 percent surge in deaths that moved the country two places up the global terrorism rankings and placed it among the most affected countries on earth.
The Sahel region of Africa, which has become the "global epicentre of terrorism," accounted for nearly half of all terrorism-related deaths for the third consecutive year in 2025, with nearly half of the 5,582 deaths attributed to terrorists occurring in the Sahel. [Newnationalstar](https://newnationalstar.com/seyi-tinubu-backs-women-led-initiative-as-city-boy-movement-deepens-grassroots-mobilization/?claude-citation-77c40449-716c-4eb7-9a13-d5f2330c8be4=cc96b9ba-f66e-4b7b-bab4-8ea6386502d9) Nigeria's position within or adjacent to this Sahel corridor — and the active presence of ISWAP and Boko Haram across its northeastern and northwestern regions — means the country is absorbing a disproportionate share of the violence that has made sub-Saharan Africa the new global headquarters of jihadist terrorism.
Burkina Faso was the most affected country in the world for two consecutive years, but was overtaken in 2025 by Pakistan. Deaths from terrorism in Pakistan are now at their highest level since 2013, with the country recording 1,139 terrorism deaths and 1,045 incidents in 2025, following a sharp resurgence in terrorist activity driven in part by the Taliban's return to power in Afghanistan in 2021. [Newnationalstar](https://newnationalstar.com/seyi-tinubu-backs-women-led-initiative-as-city-boy-movement-deepens-grassroots-mobilization/?claude-citation-77c40449-716c-4eb7-9a13-d5f2330c8be4=ef30f91c-ed70-495e-986f-eed6fd8494e1) Niger climbed to third place with 703 deaths, more than half of which were civilians. Nigeria sits fourth with 750 deaths. Mali rounds out the top five with 341 deaths — a significant decline from its previous ranking that underscores the volatility of these rankings and the speed with which security situations can deteriorate or improve.
ISWAP And Boko Haram — The Two-Headed Insurgency Consuming Nigeria's Northeast
The two groups primarily responsible for Nigeria's catastrophic terrorism death toll are not new threats — they are long-established insurgencies whose roots stretch back over a decade and whose continued lethality represents one of the most damning indictments of Nigeria's security architecture and governance capacity.
The Islamic State West Africa Province, known as ISWAP, emerged as a splinter faction of Boko Haram following the death of Boko Haram's founder Abubakar Shekau in 2021. Under its new leadership, ISWAP initially appeared to be consolidating control of the Lake Chad Basin and establishing a more disciplined territorial governance model — one that some analysts cautiously suggested might represent a shift away from the indiscriminate mass-casualty attacks that had characterised the Shekau era. Those hopes have proven comprehensively wrong. ISWAP has continued to expand its operations, attack military installations, and terrorise communities across Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa states — while simultaneously clashing with reconstituted Boko Haram factions in an internecine conflict that generates its own significant body count.
What makes the ISWAP-Boko Haram dynamic particularly dangerous is the competitive dynamic between the two groups. Each organisation has an incentive to demonstrate its capacity for violence to recruit fighters, attract funding, and project power in the communities it seeks to control. The result is an escalatory spiral in which each group's attacks drive the other to more extreme and lethal responses — with civilian communities trapped between them bearing the consequences.
Beyond the northeast, Nigeria's northwest has simultaneously been experiencing an explosion of banditry and communal violence that, while structurally distinct from the jihadist insurgency, contributes to the overall terrorism death toll measured by the GTI. The Zamfara, Katsina, Kebbi, and Sokoto corridor has become a zone of near-permanent armed conflict in which communities are raided, farmers are killed on their fields, and mass kidnappings have become a routine feature of daily life. The Nigerian government's attempts to address this through a combination of military operations and controversial amnesty negotiations with bandit leaders have produced limited and inconsistent results.
What The Report Says About The Wider Sahel — And What It Means For Nigeria's Neighbours
Nigeria does not exist in isolation from the broader security dynamics of the Sahel. The GTI report's findings about the wider region provide essential context for understanding why Nigeria's security situation is deteriorating even as other parts of the world improve.
The Sahel has suffered a tenfold increase in terrorism fatalities since 2007, when it accounted for only one percent of global terrorism-related deaths. The epicentre of terrorism has shifted from the Middle East and North Africa into the Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa, with the report attributing most attacks to the Islamic State group and JNIM — the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims. [Newnationalstar](https://newnationalstar.com/seyi-tinubu-backs-women-led-initiative-as-city-boy-movement-deepens-grassroots-mobilization/?claude-citation-77c40449-716c-4eb7-9a13-d5f2330c8be4=76b2150d-314f-4c83-a0e1-8eb3093d65e4)
The report also highlighted the expansion of jihadist groups to West Africa's coastal countries, particularly Benin, which has shot up to 19th place on the index from 26th. [Newnationalstar](https://newnationalstar.com/seyi-tinubu-backs-women-led-initiative-as-city-boy-movement-deepens-grassroots-mobilization/?claude-citation-77c40449-716c-4eb7-9a13-d5f2330c8be4=81ad2565-4720-4690-aab0-d5d27bd22b0b) The southward creep of jihadist activity from the Sahel toward the Gulf of Guinea coast — affecting Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Côte d'Ivoire to varying degrees — represents a strategic threat that directly implicates Nigeria. Nigeria shares borders with Benin and Niger, and the porous nature of those borders means that fighters, weapons, and financing flow with relative ease between the various insurgencies operating across the region. Nigeria is both a source and a destination for this transboundary jihadist activity — a reality that no amount of domestic security operation can fully address without regional cooperation.
The Governance Failure Behind The Numbers
The Global Terrorism Index's findings about Nigeria are, at their core, a report card on governance failure. Terrorism does not emerge from a vacuum — it feeds on conditions of poverty, injustice, exclusion, unemployment, and the absence of legitimate state authority in communities that feel abandoned by their government. Every one of those conditions is present in abundance in Nigeria's most terrorism-affected regions.
The northeast of Nigeria — the heartland of the Boko Haram and ISWAP insurgency — has for decades been among the most underdeveloped and educationally deprived regions of the country. The northwest, where banditry has metastasised into near-territorial control, has been systematically neglected in terms of infrastructure, economic development, and effective policing for generations. The middle belt, where farmer-herder conflicts regularly produce mass casualties, has been the site of unresolved land and resource disputes that date back decades and have been consistently mismanaged by successive state and federal governments.
Until the structural conditions that produce terrorism are addressed — not just through military force but through investment in education, economic development, justice reform, and the extension of effective governance to marginalised communities — the trajectory suggested by the GTI's latest findings is likely to continue. A 46 percent increase in terrorism deaths in a single year is not a temporary statistical fluctuation. It is a flashing red warning light on the dashboard of a nation in crisis.
What The Tinubu Administration Must Do — Urgent Policy Imperatives
The GTI report lands at a politically sensitive moment for the Tinubu administration, which has been simultaneously managing the economic fallout from the Iran-US-Israel war, navigating the NLC's demands for wage increases, and preparing for the 2027 electoral cycle. But the security crisis documented in the GTI report cannot be subordinated to political calculations — 750 deaths in a single year, a 46 percent increase, and a ranking among the world's four most terrorism-affected countries demands an urgent and serious policy response.
Security analysts and policy experts have consistently identified several priority areas for action. The first is a fundamental reform of Nigeria's military and police capacity in the affected regions — not just in terms of equipment and numbers, but in terms of intelligence gathering, community relations, accountability, and the ability to hold territory after it is cleared of insurgents. The second is a genuine commitment to the economic development of affected regions — the Lake Chad Basin Development Commission, the Presidential Initiative for the Northwest, and related programmes must be funded and implemented rather than allowed to become paper exercises. The third is regional security cooperation — the Multinational Joint Task Force operating in the Lake Chad Basin needs sustained political support, consistent funding, and genuine operational integration among its member countries.
Pidgin Angle — Fresh Eyes Only 🔥
750 people die from terrorism in Nigeria for 2025. 46% increase. Fourth place on the global terror list. And the most painful part? The whole world terrorism death toll dey go DOWN — but Nigeria own dey go UP. While other countries dey become safer, Nigeria dey become more dangerous. Wetin kind reverse gear be this?
The same ISWAP and Boko Haram wey don dey destroy the northeast since 2009 — 16 years later, dem still dey operate freely. Billions of naira don go into defence budget. Multiple military operations don launch. Plenty press conferences don happen. And yet 750 people die last year alone — the highest number since 2020.
The real question wey every Nigerian suppose ask their leaders is this: where is the accountability? If a private company perform this badly for 16 years, dem go don close down and managers go don go to prison. But in Nigeria, the same security architecture wey fail from Jonathan era through Buhari era don follow carry the failure into Tinubu era. Na which kind continuity be this?
The children wey dey grow up in Borno, Yobe, Zamfara and Katsina under this terror deserve better. The farmers wey no fit go to their farms because of bandits deserve better. The mothers wey lose children to kidnapping and Boko Haram attacks deserve better. The GTI number na not just statistics — na human beings. And until Nigerian leaders start treating am like human beings instead of political talking points, the number go continue to rise. 🇳🇬🔥
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Sources: Punch, Institute for Economics and Peace, AFP, Global Terrorism Index 2026 Report