The UN's top official for West Africa and the Sahel told the Security Council on July 15 that the region's armed groups have moved well beyond conventional financing and tactics. Leonardo Santos Simão, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General and Head of the UN Office for West Africa and the Sahel (UNOWAS), said in his briefing that these groups "are increasingly using drones, sophisticated communications and cryptocurrencies while coordinating operations across borders."

His report covered activity from November 29, 2025 through June 30, 2026, a period in which 1,258 civilians were killed in Nigeria alone between January 1 and February 10, 2026. Among the deadliest incidents was a Boko Haram splinter-group attack on February 3 in Kwara State that killed 170 people in a single strike. That same reporting window also saw a US-Nigerian joint military operation that killed 199 jihadists and produced what officials described as the largest equipment seizure since 9/11.

A Technology Leap on the Battlefield

The Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) carried out its first confirmed weaponized drone strike on December 24, 2024, targeting two Nigerian military forward operating bases, Forward Operating Bases Wajiroko and Gubio, in the northeast. By March 2025 the group had escalated further: a coordinated drone assault struck a Nigerian military base, killing 16 soldiers, before a separate coordinated drone attack killed 25 Cameroonian soldiers in one of the deadliest such incidents in African insurgency history.

Analysts at the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET) estimate ISWAP has acquired roughly 35 commercial off-the-shelf FPV (first-person-view) drones, the kind widely available online, adapted to drop grenades or small explosive devices. Technical knowledge for these modifications has been transferred from Islamic State's core network, a process documented as ongoing since at least 2014 that accelerated after 2022.

Nigeria's military has deployed a Lithuanian-made counter-drone system called the EDM4S Sky Wiper to disrupt control signals, but analysts say coverage remains limited relative to the scale of operations.

Crypto as a Financing Channel

The financing picture is more fragmented. Boko Haram, which operates in a more dispersed structure than ISWAP and requires international fund transfers, has pivoted toward digital financial infrastructure. A May 2025 GNET Research analysis documented the group's use of peer-to-peer (P2P) crypto exchanges, mobile money platforms, fintech apps with weak identity verification, and privacy-focused coins such as Monero, which is designed to obscure transaction trails. Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) specifically documented Boko Haram financiers using Binance as a transfer channel, often through P2P recruitment of unwitting traders. That finding contributed directly to Nigeria's high-profile regulatory confrontation with Binance in 2024, which resulted in the exchange being banned from serving Nigerian users. ISWAP, by contrast, relies more heavily on physical taxation and cash economies in territory it controls.

The EFCC has flagged a specific recruiting pattern in which ordinary users are enlisted without their knowledge. "Individuals, often unaware of the illicit nature of the funds, are recruited to trade cryptocurrencies on behalf of terrorist financiers," the EFCC noted in documentation cited by GNET.

The EFCC froze more than 1,100 bank accounts linked to terrorism in 2024 and secured convictions against more than 85 individuals on crypto-related terrorism financing charges. A separate July 2024 prosecution resulted in convictions against 125 Boko Haram terror financiers. Six Nigerians were also charged in the UAE for moving approximately $780,000 through crypto channels for similar purposes.

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) flagged in its July 2025 update on terrorist financing that stablecoins (tokens pegged to currencies like the US dollar) have now surpassed Bitcoin in share of on-chain illicit activity, particularly through unhosted wallets and P2P transactions, representing a shift from the Bitcoin-dominated patterns of prior years.

Nigeria's Executive Order Responds Directly

Two days after the UN briefing, on July 17, President Bola Tinubu signed a Presidential Executive Order on Virtual Assets Coordination.

The order creates a new multi-agency Virtual Asset Council drawing in the Central Bank of Nigeria, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Nigerian Revenue Service, the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit, and the Office of the National Security Adviser.

The stated motivation was explicit: the presidency cited terrorism financing as a primary driver, with spokesman Bayo Onanuga noting that agencies "operating in silos, overlapping in some areas and leaving gaps in others" had left the country exposed to money laundering and terrorism financing risks.

Nigeria is Africa's largest crypto market by volume, with some of the world's highest P2P trading activity. The new framework gives agencies shared supervisory technology to flag suspicious P2P transactions across platforms simultaneously.

Regional Stakes Extend Beyond Nigeria

The Sahel's trajectory makes the stakes regional rather than local. According to the 2025 Global Terrorism Index, the Sahel now accounts for 51 percent of worldwide terrorism deaths, up from roughly 1 percent 17 years ago. The region represents 19 percent of all global terrorist attacks.

Simão's briefing also warned that violence is spreading toward coastal Gulf of Guinea states including Ghana, Benin, Togo, and Côte d'Ivoire. The briefing further documented that JNIM and the FLA have expanded operations into Mali's capital Bamako, where a coordinated assault killed Mali's Defense Minister. That development signals a qualitative shift beyond rural insurgency toward the direct targeting of state leadership.

The departure of Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso from the ECOWAS regional bloc to form their own Alliance of Sahel States has fractured what coordination existed on counter-terrorism financing, leaving no unified AML (anti-money laundering) framework across the most affected states. Several West African nations remain on FATF's grey list, a designation that restricts access to international banking. At its June 2026 plenary, FATF removed Algeria and Namibia from the grey list, illustrating that the mechanism carries real consequences in both directions for regional states. For countries that remain listed, the designation tends to push more financial activity into informal and crypto channels.

What Comes Next

Compliance pressure on crypto platforms serving the region will intensify on multiple fronts simultaneously. Privacy coin implementations, including Monero and Zcash shielded transactions, are likely to face outright prohibition in upcoming Nigerian SEC guidance rather than simple disclosure requirements.

P2P platform operators, which currently run with minimal identity verification in many cases, face the highest near-term regulatory risk under the new shared enforcement architecture.

The Security Council's July session produced a consensus that military operations alone are insufficient: members agreed that governance reform, education, employment, and economic development are necessary complements.

Whether that consensus translates into the funding required to address the humanitarian side of the crisis remains uncertain. The 2026 humanitarian response for the region is currently only 14 percent funded, against a backdrop of 6.8 million displaced people.