Leonardo Santos Simão, the UN's Special Representative for West Africa and the Sahel, told the Security Council this month that armed groups operating across Nigeria and the broader Sahel are deploying commercial drones, sophisticated communications, and cryptocurrency to coordinate cross-border attacks.

His remarks were drawn from a Secretary-General's report covering the period November 2025 through June 2026.

From Borno State to the Blockchain

The group at the center of this shift is ISWAP, Islamic State West Africa Province, which emerged from a 2016 split with Boko Haram and has since consolidated control over significant territory in Nigeria's northeast, where it is now the more disciplined and dominant faction.

ISWAP now taxes trade routes, controls artisanal gold mining operations, and runs parallel administrative structures across its territory in Nigeria's northeast.

On the financial side, an ISWAP-linked media unit has publicly solicited Bitcoin donations, marking the first confirmed public cryptocurrency fundraising by a West African jihadist cell.

Two Telegram channels, CryptoHalal and Umma Crypto, provide fighters with guidance on setting up digital wallets and executing transfers.

A 2025 research paper titled "Inside Boko Haram's Wallet" documented the broader pattern: mobile money, encrypted messaging apps, and crypto are all being used for weapons procurement and logistics.

Researcher Oge Samuel Okonkwo, writing in Africa Defense Forum, noted that Boko Haram is exploiting "anonymous, unregulated peer-to-peer platforms" to receive funds, a reference to the P2P crypto trading that dominates Nigeria's retail market.

Nigeria's Crypto Volume Creates Cover for Illicit Flows

The scale of Nigeria's legitimate crypto market makes this problem structurally difficult to address. Chainalysis ranked Nigeria sixth globally in its 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index, with $92.1 billion in on-chain transaction volume recorded over a 12-month period.

Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole saw 52 percent year-on-year growth in on-chain value received between July 2024 and June 2025, reaching $205 billion in total. Stablecoins accounted for 43 percent of that volume, suggesting that dollar-pegged assets like USDT and USDC are the most likely instruments for cross-border illicit transfers in the region, not Bitcoin.

This high volume of legitimate peer-to-peer activity creates noise that makes small-value illicit transfers harder to detect. Nigeria's Securities and Exchange Commission requires licensed exchanges and virtual asset service providers to implement know-your-customer and anti-money laundering controls under its Digital Assets Rules. But unhosted wallets and P2P platforms remain largely outside that framework, and that is precisely where Africa Defense Forum analysts say illicit activity is most likely to be concentrated.

TRM Labs, which tracks illicit crypto flows globally, recorded a record $158 billion in illicit crypto transactions worldwide in 2025.

Drones: Externally Trained, Regionally Deployed

The financing picture connects directly to battlefield deployments. On December 24, 2024, ISWAP used four armed quadcopter drones carrying homemade grenades to strike Nigeria's Forward Operating Base Wajiroko in Borno State, injuring five soldiers. That attack was the first confirmed combat drone strike by a terrorist group in the Lake Chad Basin. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project has since recorded approximately ten armed drone strikes by ISWAP between 2024 and early 2026. ISWAP is reported to have acquired 35 quadcopter drones through smuggling routes around the lake.

The threat escalated sharply in March 2025, when cheap recreational drones reconfigured for combat were used in an attack near Wulgo, Cameroon, killing 25 military personnel. Analysts characterised that strike as a watershed moment in the regional drone threat timeline. A Nigerian Defence Headquarters report in March 2026 documented a further drone engagement in Borno State, confirming the threat remained active through the period covered by the Security Council briefing.

The technical capacity behind these strikes is not locally improvised. Islamic State dispatched 13 trainers from the Middle East to the Lake Chad Basin in 2024 specifically to build ISWAP's drone program, according to UN reporting.

Analysts suggest that this external coordination points to a financial pipeline running at least in part through international crypto channels, not solely through regional cash networks.

The problem extends beyond Nigeria. JNIM, a Sahel-wide jihadist alliance, has conducted armed drone missions across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Togo in the period between 2023 and 2025.

Simão warned the Security Council that the threat is now spreading rapidly toward the coastal states of the Gulf of Guinea, including Ghana, Ivory Coast, Benin, and Togo, jurisdictions that are also still building out their counter-terrorism financial infrastructure.

Major General Godwin Mutkut, commander of the Multinational Joint Task Force, was direct about the gap: "The lack of counter-drone technology, including jamming systems, leaves security forces and civilians vulnerable to aerial threats."

What Comes Next

Simão told the Security Council that "military operations alone would not be sufficient to defeat terrorism," and called for socio-economic interventions to address root causes. The scale of displacement underscores that urgency: the UNOWAS briefing recorded 6.8 million internally displaced persons and 1.28 million refugees across the affected region.

Compliance and regulatory analysts broadly expect the immediate pressure to fall on the financial sector.

Compliance teams at Nigerian virtual asset service providers may see the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit issue updated terrorism financing red-flag indicators, particularly around P2P platforms and wallet-to-wallet patterns consistent with procurement activity. That expectation reflects the publication's own analytical assessment; no formal NFIU guidance has yet been announced.

The Central Bank of Nigeria fined Access Bank 35 million naira in May 2026 for AML and CFT lapses, a signal that enforcement intensity is increasing even before this new threat environment is fully reflected in regulatory activity.

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Sources: UN News (SC16413), PRNigeria, allAfrica, ISS Africa, GNET Research, Africa Defense Forum, TRM Labs, Chainalysis, ACLED, Zigram.