Islamic State Pays Fighters $750 for Every Rifle They Loot

Somewhere in the Lake Chad Basin, a young man is handed cash for a rifle he took from a dead soldier. The rifle is worth $750 on the group's price list. A rocket-propelled grenade fetches $1,000. A pickup truck with a heavy machine gun mounted on its back brings $30,000. This is not a guess. It is the documented payment system of Islamic State West Africa Province, and the Institute for Security Studies has laid it out in detail.

Let that sink in. Terrorists have turned our soldiers' weapons into a commodity with a fixed market rate.

We have spent years asking why ISWAP keeps overrunning military bases in Borno and across the Lake Chad region. We have blamed poor intelligence, thin supply lines, and exhausted troops. Those failures are real. But the ISS research points to something colder: a deliberate financial model in which every raid is a paycheque and every captured arsenal is a bonus. The group keeps one-third of the spoils, and the rest goes to the fighters who did the attacking. Ex-fighters interviewed by ISS describe a system that pays out in naira, in cash, and on schedule.

Consider what that means for a community of people already living on almost nothing. Across Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, and Niger, national monthly minimum wages range from about $53 to $108. Gross domestic product per capita sits somewhere between $775 and $1,972 a year. In the border districts where Boko Haram operates, actual incomes fall far below even those meagre figures. ISWAP has also been paying some fighters around ₦75,000 a month from its own revenue, which is barely above Nigeria's national minimum wage of ₦70,000. That is the terrorist group's offer: a salary a little better than what the state pays, plus a share of whatever you can seize.

We need to be honest about the uncomfortable arithmetic here. When a fighter can earn a month's wage from a single raid, and when a government's own soldiers are underpaid, under-equipped, and sometimes left to face attackers with inferior kit, the recruiting pitch writes itself. ISWAP does not need to win every argument about ideology. It only needs to be the employer that pays on time.

The money itself moves along a traceable path, and that is where the real scandal lies. According to ex-fighters, funds travel from Islamic State through Dubai to exchange houses in Kano in northwest Nigeria, or to N'Djamena in Chad. Local couriers then carry the cash to island hideouts on Lake Chad. Dubai to Kano. Kano to the lake. A chain as simple as a bus route, and it has been running long enough for the United Arab Emirates to act on it. In 2021 the UAE arrested and convicted six Nigerians for moving money from Dubai to Boko Haram. The United States followed with sanctions in 2022. In June 2026, Washington designated a Nigerian currency exchange operator, Mukhtar Adamu Muhammad, and three of his companies for providing material and financial support to ISWAP.

Notice the pattern. Every person convicted in Dubai and later sanctioned in Washington had an address in Kano. Our own financial system was the conduit, and our own citizens were the couriers and middlemen. Ex-fighters named an individual called Alhaji Surajo as a key facilitator between Dubai and Kano. ISS could not confirm whether he is the same Surajo Abubakar Mohammed who was jailed in the UAE for transferring $782,000 to Boko Haram. The unanswered question should keep every Nigerian banker, regulator, and legislator awake tonight. If a man can move hundreds of thousands of dollars toward a terrorist group through currency exchanges in a major Nigerian city, how many others are doing it right now, and who is looking?

The answer, too often, is nobody.

This is also a story about resilience. In May 2026, US and Nigerian strikes killed Bukar Mainok, an ISWAP leader. The group kept fighting. Its finance department kept functioning. That is precisely the danger. A terrorist organization that treats logistics and payroll as seriously as it treats ideology will not collapse when you kill its commanders. It will simply promote the next accountant. Killing leaders is necessary. It is not sufficient. Until we dismantle the money, the group regenerates.

Let us be clear about the wider context. Africa is not the cause of this violence, and the people of Borno are not its authors. They are its victims. Yet the continent's security landscape has become a marketplace for everyone with a stake in it. Gulf financial hubs, unregulated exchange houses, weak border controls, and fragile state institutions create precisely the conditions in which terrorist financiers thrive. We have been told for decades that our security problems are local. The ISS findings show they are networked, transnational, and financed through the very global banking channels that Western and Gulf governments claim to police. If the world can freeze a Kano currency dealer's assets in Washington, it can also demand that the Dubai end of the corridor be audited with the same seriousness.

So what must be done? The answer is not more rhetoric. It is institutions that work.

Nigeria's Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit and Central Bank must treat the UAE-to-Kano and UAE-to-N'Djamena corridors as priority threats. That means real-time monitoring of recurring transfers, mandatory enhanced due diligence for foreign-exchange bureaux, licensing that can be revoked without a political favour, and public reporting on enforcement. Free markets depend on trustworthy financial rails. A currency exchange that doubles as a terrorist remittance service is not a free market. It is a criminal cartel wearing a business licence.

Armed forces must be audited the way their budgets are audited. Every rifle, RPG, and armoured vehicle issued to a base should be logged, serialised, and reconciled. Every base lost to an ISWAP raid should trigger a public inquiry into how the weapons were lost and who was accountable. Soldiers must be paid on time and equipped properly, because a looted arsenal is also a failure of the procurement system that was supposed to protect it.

Look to our neighbours who have done this well. Botswana built a reputation for relatively clean, rules-based governance by insisting that institutions outlast individuals and that public money be accounted for. Mauritius turned itself into a serious financial centre by investing in regulation and transparency rather than by turning a blind eye to whoever wanted to move money through it. These are not perfect models, but they prove the central point: when institutions are strong and rules are enforced without fear or favour, criminals lose access to the system that sustains them.

Civil society and the private sector have a role too. Banks that flag suspicious transfers should be protected, not punished, for doing their jobs. Journalists and researchers like those at ISS should be given space to publish without intimidation. Business associations in Kano and Maiduguri should demand clean compliance systems because their reputations, and their children's futures, depend on it. Regional bodies such as the Lake Chad Basin Commission and the African Union should coordinate intelligence sharing across borders, because ISWAP does not respect the lines on our maps.

And the international community must stop lecturing Africa about democracy while leaving the financial corridors that feed terrorism open for business. If the UAE can convict and the United States can sanction, then they must sustain that pressure and extend it to every node in the network. Justice that stops at the first arrest is not justice. It is theatre.

Here is what we, as citizens, must demand. We must demand that our governments publish the names of every exchange house under investigation and the status of every case. We must demand that military procurement and inventory reports be made public, at least in summary. We must demand that soldiers in the northeast are paid, equipped, and treated as the heroes they are, not sent to die with rusted rifles and empty promises. And we must demand that the financiers of terror, whether they wear Kano robes or Dubai suits, face the same consequences as the fighters they pay.

Every rifle that ISWAP buys with our soldiers' blood is a rifle a mother will one day have to bury beside. Do not let that become normal. Share this. Ask your MP what the Central Bank is doing about the Dubai-to-Kano corridor. Ask your state government how many weapons went missing from its bases last year. The terrorists have a price list. It is time we wrote ours: zero tolerance for the people who fund the killing, and full accountability for the states that let it happen.

Based on reporting by ISS