Key Points

• A 2025 Nigeria Mine Action review recorded 1,934 improvised explosive device incidents across the North-East between 2017 and 2024, with road-emplaced devices accounting for the largest share every single year.
• The deadliest year was 2017, with 381 incidents, while 2022 recorded the lowest toll at 185, partly because no body-borne IED attacks were logged that year.
• A senior military official warned at a March 2026 counter-IED workshop that insurgents have consistently adapted their detonation methods faster than security forces could neutralize them.

Nearly 2,000 times in seven years, a bomb went off somewhere in Nigeria’s North-East. A new report puts a hard number on what security forces and civilians there have been living through.

A 2025 Nigeria Mine Action review documents 1,934 improvised explosive device incidents across the region between 2017 and 2024. Road-emplaced IEDs drove the bulk of those attacks in every single year covered, making them the most persistent and lethal threat throughout the period.

The numbers, year by year

The report’s breakdown tells a story of violence that surged, dipped and surged again, never fully going away.

The worst year on record was 2017, with 381 incidents. That figure included 165 road-planted devices, 211 body-borne IEDs and four vehicle-borne attacks. By 2018, the total had fallen to 267, then dipped again to 189 in 2019.

But the decline did not hold. Incidents climbed back to 249 in 2020 and jumped to 281 in 2021, driven largely by road IEDs, which accounted for 228 of that year’s attacks alone. The count eased to 185 in 2022, the lowest in the series, before settling at 191 in both 2023 and 2024.

The final year in the dataset, 2024, recorded 174 road-emplaced devices, four body-borne attacks, five vehicle-borne incidents and eight other explosive devices.

Insurgents keep adapting

The numbers are troubling enough on their own. What makes them harder to contain, military officials say, is the speed at which militant groups have evolved their methods.

Maj. Gen. Adamu Laka, coordinator of the Nigeria Counter Terrorism Centre, described the pattern at a counter-IED workshop in Abuja on March 11, 2026.

“From 2011 to 2017, I saw how the use of IEDs in the North-East evolved,” he said. “It moved from wire control and telephone control to pressure plates.”

Each time security forces found a way to counter one method, insurgents responded with a new one. Laka described how troops learned to remove pressure plate devices from the ground, only for militants to begin stacking a second explosive on top of the first. Removing the outer device then triggered the one beneath it.

“By the time the first device holding the pressure plate was removed, the second one would explode,” he said. “I can tell you that the effect is devastating. To this day, Nigeria is still facing this threat.”

A threat with no clear end

The persistence of IED use across the North-East, and increasingly the North-West, reflects a broader tactical reality: insurgent groups including Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province have treated explosives as a core part of their operational playbook for well over a decade.

Road-emplaced devices, in particular, have functioned as a sustained campaign against military convoys, civilian transportation and supply routes, stretching security forces thin across difficult terrain.

The 2025 Mine Action review does not offer projections, but the trend line heading into 2026 offers little comfort. Incidents in 2023 and 2024 held steady at 191 each, suggesting the threat has plateaued at a persistently dangerous level rather than declined in any meaningful way.