May 31, 2025:
Over the last year Iran has lost most of its groups of armed supporters that it has subsidized and armed. Some of these Iran-backed groups have been around for decades. In the last year Hamas, Hezbollah and various other factions have disappeared because of local and Israeli attacks. It will be a few years, perhaps even a decade before Iran can return to local haunting grounds. The Iranian Quds force, which specializes in stirring up trouble outside Iran, has been looking for new hunting ground and found one in Nigeria. Only half the population of Nigeria is Moslem. The other half is largely Christian, better educated and paid, and occupy the most government, military and commercial important jobs, The local Moslems resent this and the Shia minority in the Moslem community resent it most of all.
Iran is the largest Shia majority nation in the world and considers itself the champion of oppressed Shia everywhere. Shia in nations near Iran no longer want Iranian help because that assistance often backfires, with the local Shia taking most of the casualties and blame. So Iran went seeking other Shia communities to uplift and hopefully be grateful to Iran’s mullah regime. This led Iran to Nigeria which had been untouched by Iranian assistance.
Nigeria is the largest country in the sub-Saharan Desert in terms of area and population, with 225 million people. Population was only 120 million in 2000. The economy has grown even faster, with per-person GDP reaching $4,000 by 2024.While that is high for Africa, nearly half the population lives in poverty, barely getting by. One reason for this is the low literacy rate of 62 percent. That explains the high unemployment rate of over 30 percent. Endemic corruption means the national police is not only ineffective but part of the problem. Criminal activity is widespread and often intense. Currently there has been a sharp increase in kidnapping for ransom. If you are wealthy, you can hire expensive, but effective, mercenaries to recover a kidnapping victim alive. Paying the ransom encourages the kidnappers to come after more members of your family. Hiring the mercenaries encourages the kidnappers to go after more vulnerable victims.
Only about three percent of Nigerian Moslems are Shia but that comes to four million angry people. They have been angry for a long time and in 1978 some of them formed a group of armed supporters called the Islamic Movement of Nigeria or IMN. The plan was to overthrow the government and turn Nigeria into an Islamic state ruled by its tiny Shia minority. This was met with violent repression and by 2019 IMN was banned, debilitated and hunted down and killed wherever they were found. The bad reputation IMN earned was the work of a small radical faction who made the entire IMN look bad. IMN leaders could not control it so the government went after the entire group.
The IMN was a minor problem in Nigeria where the much larger Sunni Boko Haram group attracted most of the government's armed attention. While government persecution ebbed, the local Sunni Islamic terrorists, the Islamic State in West Africa Province or ISWAP, decided that the haram, or unclean Shia IMN, was to be cleansed with gunfire and explosives. Currently there are only a few hundred active IMN members left. Now Iranian assistance has arrived to finish the job in the name of protecting them.
Most Nigerian Shia believe in western education and peaceful protests against the persecution they receive from the Christian dominated government and radical Sunni Nigerians. The arrival of Iranians did not help because most Nigerians are hostile to what Iran is doing to their neighbors and see nothing positive about Iranians seeking to assist Nigerian Shia. That assistance usually brings calamity upon the recipients. Any association with Iran, real or suspected, is nothing but trouble for the local Shia minority.