Nigerian Major General Ibrahim Manu Yusuf, commander of the Multinational Joint Task Force (MJTF) fighting the Boko Haram Islamist insurgency in the Lake Chad Basin, announced that 109 Boko Haram fighters and their prisoners had defected in Cameroon.

The security situation around Borno’s capital, Maiduguri, appears to be going from bad to worse. On February 9, The Boko Haram faction Islamic State in West African (ISWA) shot or burned alive some thirty people sleeping in their cars and trucks that night outside the town of Auno, some ten miles from Maiduguri. They also kidnapped others.

As the military dislodged Boko Haram in 2015 from the territory it had captured and occupied earlier, victims of suicide bombers grew as a proportion of those the group killed through August 2018. Between June 2014, when Boko Haram reportedly deployed its first female suicide bomber, and February 2018, about 468 women and girls have been deployed or arrested in 240 suicide attacks, killing roughly 1,200 and injuring some 3,000.

This post analyzes Nigeria Security Tracker (NST) data on state security service casualties as a result of the Boko Haram conflict. The tracker shows deaths of security services in Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria.

The kidnapping of hundreds of schoolboys from the Government Science Secondary School in Kankara, located in Nigeria's northwestern Katsina state, recalls Boko Haram's 2014 kidnapping of Chibok schoolgirls.