On the night of December 24, 2024, Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) made history for all the wrong reasons. For the first time, a terrorist group in the Lake Chad Basin deployed four armed drones carrying locally modified grenades against Nigeria’s Forward Operating Base Wajiroko in Borno State, injuring five soldiers. Within days, two more armed drone attacks followed in Damaturu and Abadam. Africa’s insurgent drone war had entered a new phase, and most of the continent’s militaries were not ready for it.
What followed in 2025 confirmed that Wajiroko was not an anomaly. It was a turning point.
The Numbers Tell a Brutal Story
The data compiled from ACLED, ISS Africa, CTC West Point, GNET, and Castor Vali paints a clear and alarming picture. Documented drone incidents by non-state actors in Africa rose from just one or two per year between 2015 and 2019, to four in 2020, seven in 2022, ten in 2023, twenty-one in 2024, and at least fifty-seven in 2025 — a nearly three-fold year-on-year jump.
Three groups drove that 2025 surge. JNIM (Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin) carried out at least twelve confirmed drone attacks, with 82% of its total documented incidents occurring after March 2025 alone. The Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), the Tuareg rebel group active in northern Mali, conducted at least twenty-five attacks in Mali — a six-fold increase from 2024. ISWAP launched eleven attacks across Nigeria and Cameroon. ISSP (Islamic State Sahel Province) opened 2026 by deploying approximately ten kamikaze drones in a single strike against Niamey’s international airport in Niger on January 29 — likely the largest drone assault ever mounted by a Sahelian militant group in one operation.
These are confirmed, documented incidents. Actual frequency is significantly higher.
Sources: ACLED, CTC West Point, ISS Africa, GNET, Castor Vali, Sentrycs, Military Africa. 2026 = Jan only.
Stacked by year. FLA = Azawad Liberation Front / Tuareg rebels, Mali. RSF = Rapid Support Forces, Sudan.
From Watching to Killing
The tactical evolution of drone use by African non-state actors follows a pattern that security analysts have been warning about for years. It began with surveillance.
Al-Shabaab used drones primarily for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) between 2018 and 2020, culminating in the January 2020 assault on the joint US-Kenyan base at Manda Bay, Kenya, where drone-fed intelligence guided a complex ground attack that killed one US soldier and two contractors. Ahlu-Sunnah wal Jama’a (ASWJ) in Mozambique used drones to coordinate the March 2021 Palma attack. Through 2021 and 2022, ISR remained the dominant mode.
The shift to weaponized deployment came fast. JNIM made its first attempted drone strike in Mali’s Bandiagara in September 2023 — unsuccessful but significant. By late 2023, JNIM was dropping improvised explosive devices (IEDs) via weaponized quadcopters onto military positions in Djibo, Burkina Faso. By 2024, FPV (first-person view) drones — small, fast, and precisely controllable — were in active use across the Sahel, a tactic analysts link directly to knowledge transfer from Azawad rebels who studied FPV techniques from the Ukraine conflict.
Today, across the more than 100 documented incidents recorded between 2015 and early 2026, roughly 41% involve direct weaponized attacks, 37% involve drone-guided combined operations (ISR plus ground assault), and only 22% are pure surveillance. The ratio is shifting further toward kinetic use every year.
The Gap That Is Costing Lives
The toll is measurable. In January 2026, ISWAP used reconnaissance drones to guide a multi-wave assault on the 153 Battalion Forward Operating Base in Marte, Borno State, before extending the attack to bases in Dikwa and Rann. In Burkina Faso’s Djibo, weaponized quadcopters dropped explosives directly into defensive positions, contributing to the deaths of dozens of soldiers. In Mali’s Tessalit in April 2024, a drone strike killed ten members of the Drozo militia. In Cameroon, an ISWAP drone attack killed twenty-five soldiers.
These attacks share a common factor: the targeted forces had no effective counter-UAS (C-UAS) capability.
C-UAS refers to a layered set of technologies designed to detect, track, and defeat hostile drones. The toolbox includes radio-frequency (RF) jamming systems that cut the link between a drone and its operator, electronic warfare (EW) systems that spoof GPS signals, kinetic interceptors, directed-energy weapons, and integrated sensor networks combining radar, acoustic detectors, and electro-optical cameras. No single solution defeats all drone types. Effective C-UAS is an architecture, not a product.
Most African military forces currently lack that architecture. Nigeria’s Chief of Defence Staff, General Oluyede, has publicly acknowledged the urgency and confirmed the deployment of drone jamming systems, but deployments remain limited relative to the scale of the threat. Most Sahel armies have no systematic C-UAS programme at all.
What African Militaries Must Do Now
The path forward has three tracks that must run in parallel.
Procure immediately. Nations most exposed to the drone threat — Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Cameroon — need to procure functional C-UAS systems without delay. Options exist within reach. Turkish firm ASELSAN, already operating across twenty-one African nations and recently expanding in West Africa with a new Abuja office, has counter-drone products in its portfolio. Israeli firms Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Elbit Systems have operational C-UAS platforms with verified combat records. The upcoming Africa International Defence Exhibition (AFRIDEX), scheduled for October 26 to 29, 2026 in Lagos, will bring these companies directly to African procurement officials. That opportunity must produce contracts, not conversations.
Build indigenous capability. Procurement from foreign suppliers solves the immediate problem but recreates the dependency trap. If a jammer is built abroad and supplied under a foreign commercial arrangement, it can be withdrawn at a diplomatically inconvenient moment. The long-term solution is African. Terra Industries Nigeria, which operates Africa’s largest drone production facility in Abuja and is capable of producing ten thousand drones annually, represents the kind of industrial base that can be extended toward counter-drone systems, likewise the recent partnership between DICON and UNICCON on indigenous C-UAS solution is a step in the right direction. If you can build the drone, you can study and defeat it. DICON’s expanding collaboration with local firms points in the same direction.
Integrate regionally. Drone threats do not respect national borders. JNIM operates in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Togo simultaneously. ISWAP moves across Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon. A C-UAS capability that exists only at the national level will always be outmaneuvered by groups with regional operational reach. ECOWAS and the African Union must frame C-UAS not as a national procurement question but as a collective security requirement, with shared early warning systems, interoperable detection networks, and coordinated responses to cross-border drone activity.
The Clock Is Running
The trajectory is unambiguous. Drone incidents by non-state actors in Africa are doubling or tripling year on year. Groups that were using surveillance drones in 2020 are using swarms of kamikaze FPV drones in 2025. Groups that attacked one base at a time in 2023 are coordinating simultaneous multi-site drone assaults in 2026. The ceiling on this capability has not been reached.
Every month without a systematic C-UAS response is a month in which the enemy’s drone programme grows more sophisticated while African defensive doctrine stands still. The soldiers at Wajiroko, Marte, Djibo, and Tessalit deserved better. Ensuring that the next generation does not face the same exposure is not a future policy discussion. It is an immediate operational obligation.
Kill the drone. The capability to do it must be built now.
Data in this article draws on open-source reporting from ACLED, ISS Africa, CTC West Point, GNET Research, Castor Vali, Sentrycs, and Military Africa’s own incident tracking. Figures represent confirmed documented incidents; actual frequency is significantly higher.