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Nigerian Army troops killed scores of fighters linked to Bello Turji, the northwest’s most wanted bandit kingpin, in a coordinated offensive against his camps in Zamfara and Sokoto states on March 20, military sources said Monday — the latest in a sustained campaign against the armed network responsible for some of the most devastating mass kidnappings and community attacks in Nigeria’s volatile northwest over the past five years.
The operation, led by the 8 Division Strike Force of the Nigerian Army Sokoto, commenced at approximately 6:00 a.m. on March 20, targeting Turji’s camp deep inside Kagara Forest. The hideouts struck are located in Fakai community, straddling Shinkafi Local Government Area in Zamfara State and Isa Local Government Area in Sokoto State.
The two sites represent the geographic core of Turji’s operational base — a dense, cross-border forest terrain that has shielded his network from repeated security interventions and allowed it to range freely between the two states.
The operation did not proceed without cost or complication. During the advance into the forest, two combat support vehicles broke down near Maberaya village in Isa Local Government Area, temporarily halting troops’ forward movement. Bandits from Turji’s camp exploited the pause, launching an ambush from elevated positions and forest cover — a tactically sophisticated response that indicated a degree of advance intelligence or surveillance on the military column’s movement. Troops responded with superior firepower, engaging and neutralizing several bandits in the firefight. Three soldiers and one operative of the Department of State Services sustained injuries during the exchange and were evacuated to the 8 Division Military Hospital in Sokoto for treatment. The military did not confirm a specific death toll for the bandits killed, though multiple sources described the number as scores.
The operation also prompted military authorities to directly address a separate circulating claim. Reports had spread on Nigerian social media that more than 150 bandits drowned in a boat accident in the Sabon Gida area of Sokoto State — a narrative that military sources dismissed categorically. “The report alleging that over 150 bandits died in a boat accident is fake and should be disregarded,” a military source told the News Agency of Nigeria. The National Inland Waterways Authority’s area manager for Sokoto, Bello Bala, corroborated that dismissal, noting that the River Sabon Gida was not currently navigable and could not have been the scene of any waterborne event of the kind described.
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Bello Turji, whose full name is Turji Bello Jangebe, has occupied a singular position in the northwest’s security crisis for several years, operating from a base in the Fakai forests that straddles the Zamfara-Sokoto boundary and commanding a network estimated to number in the thousands. The Fakai-Kagara Forest axis has long been identified as a strategic enclave for bandit activity due to its dense terrain and proximity to multiple state boundaries — terrain features that make it resistant to conventional military clearance and allow fighters to evade across state lines when pressure intensifies in any single jurisdiction.
Turji’s trajectory within the northwest’s security landscape has followed a complicated and contested arc. He emerged as one of several prominent bandit commanders who engaged in peace dialogue with the Zamfara State government between 2021 and 2022 — a process that briefly reduced violence in some areas and produced his public appearance at a ceremony hosted by then-Governor Bello Matawalle. Those talks ultimately collapsed, and Turji subsequently resumed large-scale attacks that have included mass kidnappings of students, village raids, and the killing of soldiers and police officers across Zamfara, Sokoto, and Katsina states. He has been designated a global terrorist by the United States government, which imposed financial sanctions and travel bans on him in 2022 — a designation that has not constrained his operational capacity inside Nigeria.
Zamfara State has borne the heaviest cumulative toll of the northwest’s banditry crisis. Since 2011, thousands of civilians have been killed, tens of thousands displaced, and more than 35,000 people abducted for ransom across the state, according to estimates by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project. Agricultural activity across large parts of the state has been effectively suspended, with farming communities unable to access their land due to persistent threats from armed groups that have transformed the economic and demographic character of the state’s rural zones.
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The 8 Division Strike Force, headquartered in Sokoto, has been the primary operational formation responsible for ongoing operations against bandit networks across the northwest since President Bola Tinubu declared a state of emergency on the security situation and authorized the military to take more aggressive action against armed groups in the region in 2024. Whether the March 20 operation’s results represent a structural setback for Turji’s network or constitute a tactical engagement within a broader operational campaign remains unclear from the information available. No senior commander from Turji’s network was identified among those killed, and no weapons cache of significant scale was described as having been recovered from the camps.
The military said its operations in the northwest would continue, with ongoing surveillance and intelligence-led targeting of bandit hideouts across the region.
