Ibrahim Adeyemi
17 Aug 2026
* This investigation was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Centre’s AI Accountability Network.
First, white smoke cut through the night. Then the sky tore wide open.
John Solomon says fire rained from above when a military drone hovered over the rustic Tudun Biri village in Kaduna, northwestern Nigeria. As the deputy youth leader in the satellite community, John was in a meeting with his local security volunteers on Dec. 3, 2023, to draw up night-watch rosters for the village’s annual Maulud celebration, an Islamic festival marking the birth of the Prophet Muhammad. Outside the community central mosque, scores of children, women, and men had gathered. They had travelled from surrounding hamlets, drawn out of their dark, unelectrified homes by a rare sight of a disc jockey’s sound system and a bright electric floodlight powered by a petrol generator. At exactly 10:00 p.m., when the children were basking and jumping around the mosque, the first military drone strike hit the centre of the crowd and incinerated everyone within the close-range radius.
“In our village, to see a single electric light bulb is an extraordinary thing for our children,” John quips. “When the generator started, and the mosque area lit up, the children left their family compounds and gathered around the light. We could not stop them.”
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In recent years, Nigeria has transformed its approach to counterterrorism campaigns, attempting to replace its ground troops with an arsenal of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) controlled by air combat operators sitting at computers miles away. The fundamental transformation reached its full force when the military began to patronise the booming global market of UAVs, amid the deepening unpopularity of ground troops losing heavily to shadowy terrorists. The air force, which fronts air wars against terrorists in Nigeria, embraced tech-driven warfare by acquiring different fleets of UAVs, including the Chinese-made CASC Rainbow CH-3 and CH-4 and Wing Loong UAV combat drones.
However, the UAV deployed for the Kaduna airstrike was different. The Nigerian army, which took responsibility for the attack, is known to operate the Bayraktar TB2, a Turkish-made drone. The journey to acquire the semi-autonomous drones began on August 31, 2021, when a Turkish ambassador visited the army headquartersin Abuja to pitch the hardware directly to the army leadership. Later in September 2022, photos of a fleet of Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones painted in the colours of the Nigerian flag surfaced online. This was followed by reports that the army had acquired six TB2 drones and that its officers were already receiving training in combat drone operations.
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