On a quiet night in July 2021, shortly after stepping out of his bathtub, Abdullahi Yusuf, 35, found himself face-to-face with a nightmare. A gang of 15 heavily armed men stormed his house in Illela, in northwestern Nigeria, banging on the door and demanding that he come out onto the porch. His wife and children, jolted awake by the commotion, huddled in fear as the menacing voices outside grew louder.
“It was around 2 a.m. when they came,” Yusuf recalled, his voice tinged with lingering fear. “My wife and children saw everything. It was terrifying.”
The men were bandits who belonged to criminal gangs that had been sweeping through the area. They were demanding money, valuables, anything they could get their hands on. Yusuf, who had made a modest living as a cattle trader and built a small home for his wife and children, didn’t have much, but the bandits wanted it all. In a moment of terror, Yusuf’s eldest son tried to flee; one of the men turned and fatally shot him. They snatched his wife to hold her for ransom. It would be weeks before he could raise the money the bandits demanded for her release. When she returned, the family made a decision: It was no longer safe to sleep in their home.
Since May 2021, Illela has been under siege by relentless bandit attacks; the raids have left scores dead, homes burned and entire families torn apart. The attacks have also rendered Illela, once a thriving rural hub, a ghost town by night and created a peculiar new kind of refugee in the region: the cross-border commuter. Many residents, Yusuf included, work in the town during the daylight, but flee to safety each night across the border to the small town of Birni-N’Konni, in neighboring Niger.
An elevated roadway connects Illela and Birni-N’Konni, which lie about 10 miles apart, straddling the border. For generations, the flow of traffic was toward Illela: It has a large livestock market, and merchants used to come from as far away as Mali to buy and sell their cattle, grain and goods. Both towns thrived in this cross-border trade, with buyers, herders and families moving freely, mixing markets, customs and even marriages. A shared identity was forged.
Then the banditry started, and everything changed.
Since the late 2010s, northwestern Nigeria has been consumed by banditry — a kind of criminal terror that is as hard to define as it has been to combat. Groups of well-armed fighters, loosely aligned but not ideological, have swept through several states in campaigns of looting, cattle rustling and kidnapping for ransom. The gangs take over rice farms, grazing lands, villages and towns, in what are often largely random attacks. Thousands of people have been killed; hundreds of thousands more have been displaced.
The Nigerian army, stretched thin fighting the insurgency of Boko Haram in the northeast, have few resources to bring to bear. The security forces, mired in corruption, are largely occupied with protecting the nation’s elite in major cities. A series of amnesty agreements brokered by the government initially yielded some success in getting bandits to lay down their arms, but the effects were only temporary. Local militias have formed in some parts of the northwest but are often no match for gangs of dozens, sometimes even hundreds, of men. Armed with weapons from Libya, the bandits descend on motorbikes to take over a town. In 2021, they reached Illela.
Nasir Bello, a car dealer and long-time resident, spoke to New Lines about how his once-peaceful community in Sokoto State had devolved into a hot spot for bandit attacks. “We enjoyed decades of peace and tranquility,” he said. “But everything changed when the attacks began.”
Bello had his own harrowing experience one night in November 2021. He had been in his yard, performing his prayers in the middle of the night, when four men, armed with cutlasses and small arms, burst into his compound. When he got up to run into his house, they fired their guns, and he froze. His wife and children rushed outside to check on him. The bandits forced the family to lie down on the ground.
“My wife and children were terrified,” he said. “They were praying silently while they lay on the ground, and one of them entered our house to check where I kept the money I used for my business.”
The bandits ransacked his home, stealing large sums of money and valuables before forcing him to dress and follow them out into the bush beyond Illela. The trek through the forest lasted six hours, taking them past several villages before they reached a remote hideout. Bello said he was stunned by how much his captors knew about him, fueling his suspicion that the attack had been meticulously planned.
The attackers demanded about $12,400. “I told them I’d never seen that kind of money in my life,” he explained. “But they didn’t believe me. They were angry and reminded me that I had built my house in just four months,” a sign that he had significant liquidity.
Bello was held for four days with a group of hostages, barely sleeping and eating the half-cooked rice their captors fed them. The trauma left a lasting mark on him. Shortly after his release, he made the difficult decision to abandon his newly built home and flee with his family across the border to Niger.
“I still live in fear,” Bello confessed. “Even now, whenever I return to my house in Illela, I feel paranoid. I look over my shoulder constantly, unable to shake the memories of that night.”
Despite being one of the poorest countries in the region, Niger has become a refuge for over 300,000 displaced people from Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Sudan and Nigeria. They fled their home countries for a number of reasons, including Islamist insurgencies, banditry and climate change. Unlike other countries that require refugees to stay in camps, Niger has allowed many to integrate into rural and suburban communities. That laxity — and regular patrols by Nigerien security forces to keep any attempts at cross-border banditry at bay — has made the nightly exodus to Birni-N’Konni possible for the residents of Illela, but the Nigerien town is feeling the pressure of absorbing so many temporary newcomers.
“We understand why they come — they’re our brothers and sisters,” said Issa Harouna, a community elder in Birni-N’Konni. “But life here is also difficult. We barely have enough for ourselves, and now we are expected to share with those fleeing the violence.” Despite these challenges, many residents have opened their homes or businesses to the displaced, driven by a sense of solidarity that transcends national barriers.
For those making the daily crossing from Illela into Birni-N’Konni, the process remains largely informal, reflecting the porous nature of the border before the violence. Many refugees do not officially register but rely on personal connections or temporary arrangements to find shelter. While Niger’s government, with support from international agencies, has established formal refugee camps further inland, many displaced Nigerians prefer to stay closer to the border, holding on to the hope that they may one day return home. They often rent rooms through word of mouth, without formal documentation, as Bello did.
But living in part-time exile is costly for those fleeing the violence in Illela. Many spent their life savings to build their homes and businesses in one town and now have to rebuild, not only in another town, but in another currency. Ismaila Umar, 36, fled part-time with his family to Niger after a friend was kidnapped for ransom. It took months to find decent accommodation across the border.
“Finding a place wasn’t easy, and it’s expensive.” A modest two-bedroom apartment in Birni-N’Konni costs around 60,000 CFA francs per month — roughly $100, or 60,000 Nigerian naira when exchanged at the black-market rate. In Illela, the same apartment would rent for as little as 5,000 naira, or just $7.50.
“We don’t even make 60,000 naira in profit in a week, but we have no choice,” Ismaila lamented. “We are suffering. I hope things get back to normal.”
The Nigerien government has been trying to lure the displaced away from the border toward Maradi, the country’s second-largest city some 150 miles east, both for security and economic reasons. Maradi’s bustling markets — and distance from the border — make it a safer bet for refugees looking to rebuild their lives; and the Nigerien government is banking on an influx of workers and consumers to boost the economy.
They have even gone as far as setting up villages — not camps — for the newcomers, with the buy-in of local leaders and the help of the refugee agency UNHCR. Landowners in three villages near Maradi gave up portions of their plots to the project, and in exchange, infrastructure — including boreholes, latrines, schools and clinics — was built to benefit the local communities and the refugees. The project, called Opportunity Villages, has seen some 21,000 refugees resettled and integrated there, helped along by what Olushola Ajao, a Nigerian professor and human rights advocate, said are “long-standing familial, cultural, religious, and economic connections between these communities.”
But what Niger gains in workers and capital, Nigeria — and especially a trading hub like Illela — loses. Tumininu Adedeji, a development advocate and founder of the Balm in Gilead Foundation for Sustainable Development, warned that the crisis in Illela and other northern Nigerian states is not just a security threat but an economic one, with far-reaching consequences for Nigeria’s GDP.
“This crisis is affecting people’s lives in ways we don’t always quantify,” she said. “Many residents leave Illela every night to seek safety across the border in Niger, but they still have families and businesses back home. The instability disrupts livelihoods and drains economic potential.”
“The reality that people now feel safer in another country than in their own is deeply troubling,” she added. “What should have contributed to our economy is now benefiting the Niger Republic.”
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