When U.S. and Israeli strikes killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28, the reverberations reached Nigeria within hours. Members of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria, commonly known as the IMN or Shi’ites, staged protests across Lagos, Abuja, Kano, Sokoto, Gombe, Kaduna, Bauchi, Yobe, Katsina, and Taraba. Demonstrators waved Iranian flags, carried portraits of Khamenei, and displayed placards condemning the United States and Israel.

The IMN is a Shia organization founded in 1978 by Sheikh Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, directly modeled on Iran’s Islamic Revolution, with an estimated four million followers and branches in nearly 35 of Nigeria’s 36 states. Its headquarters is the Husainiyya Baqiyatullah spiritual center in Zaria, Kaduna State, which Zakzaky established after traveling to Iran in the 1980s, meeting Ayatollah Khomeini, and returning to build a Khomeinist movement in northern Nigeria.

The organization has sustained an ideological relationship with Tehran for more than four decades. The IMN maintains both schools and a paramilitary security wing.

IMN leader Zakzaky issued a formal condolence statement describing Khamenei as a pillar of the Islamic community whose loss would be felt across generations. He attributed the killing directly to what he called the terrorist aggression of Netanyahu in cooperation with American tyranny under Trump and said the attack was an assault on all humanity.

He praised Khamenei’s decades of leadership, his role in preserving Ayatollah Khomeini’s vision, and his efforts to promote Muslim unity, arguing the killing would ultimately strengthen rather than weaken Islam.

In Gombe, IMN leader Sheikh Muhammad Abbari called U.S. nuclear allegations a pretext for intervention. Other IMN leaders from various cities across Nigeria similarly condemned the United States and Israel. The reaction extended beyond the IMN. In Kano, followers of the Qadiriyya Sufi order held Salatul Ghaib, a funeral prayer in absentia, for Khamenei at the Darul Qadiriyya.

The geographic context of the IMN’s operations is significant for understanding the wider security landscape in Nigeria. The IMN headquarters in Zaria sits in northern Kaduna State, which shares a border with Plateau State to the east. Plateau State, particularly around Jos, is one of the epicenters of jihadist attacks on Christian communities in Nigeria. Southern Kaduna, the predominantly Christian southern portion of the same state where the IMN is headquartered, has itself been the scene of mass killings of Christians. The IMN is not operating in a distant corner of the country but at the geographic center of Nigeria’s most volatile religious fault lines.

A critical distinction must be maintained, however, between the IMN and the groups responsible for killing Christians. The organizations carrying out attacks on Christian communities in Nigeria’s northwest and north-central regions, primarily Lakurawa and the Islamic State–Sahel Province, are Salafi-jihadist organizations that have pledged allegiance to ISIS, not Iran.

Their ideological and command structure is Sunni and ISIS-derived, entirely separate from the Shia IMN network. Both are hostile to the West and to Israel, but they represent distinct threat vectors with different organizational lineages and different relationships to foreign state sponsors.

So far, the IMN’s record of violence has primarily consisted of clashes with Nigerian security forces rather than planned attacks on civilians. The Nigerian government banned the organization as a terrorist group by court order in July 2019, with the presidency citing attacks on soldiers, the killing of police officers and a youth corps member, and the destruction of public property.

In 2019, a confrontation in Abuja during a protest escalated when an IMN member grabbed an officer’s holstered pistol, resulting in the deaths of the officer, 15 IMN members, and a security guard. The House of Representatives subsequently expressed concern that the group was evolving in the same way Boko Haram had started. As recently as March 2025, five IMN members and one security officer were killed in a Quds Day clash in Abuja, with police claiming demonstrators were armed.

Quds Day was established by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 and is declared on the last Friday of Ramadan each year. It is an officially sanctioned Iranian state occasion calling on Muslims worldwide to express solidarity with Palestinians and opposition to Israel. It is explicitly designed as a global mobilization tool, one of the mechanisms by which Iran projects ideological influence beyond its borders. The IMN’s annual Quds Day marches in Nigeria are a direct expression of that system.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force takes its name from the same source. Its founding mission was the eventual “liberation” of Jerusalem. It is the IRGC’s extraterritorial operations unit responsible for training, funding, and directing Iran’s proxy networks abroad, including Hezbollah, Hamas, and various Shia militias across Iraq, Syria, and beyond.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran reported in December 2021 that the IRGC had established training centers for Zakzaky’s militants in Kano and Sokoto as part of Tehran’s strategy to expand influence across West Africa. Zakzaky met personally with Khamenei in October 2024, reinforcing a relationship that analysts at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point have described as enabling Iran to spread Khomeinism in Nigeria, including its antagonism toward the United States and the West.

Despite being proscribed as a terrorist organization, the IMN continues to operate openly across at least seven northern states and now in Lagos. The movement mobilized thousands within hours of Khamenei’s death, held organized marches through city centers, and issued coordinated statements from regional leaders, all without apparent government interference. The gap between the IMN’s legal status and its operational reality reflects a broader failure of enforcement that leaves Iran’s most organized Nigerian network free to function.

Academic analysts have warned that the IMN, under sustained state repression and continued Iranian backing, is positioned to undergo a more violent phase of radicalization, potentially triggering a Shia insurgency with direct support from the IRGC and Hezbollah.

For now, the IMN remains Iran’s ideological and political foothold in Nigeria rather than an armed proxy. The demonstrations following Khamenei’s killing, with children marching alongside adults and American and Israeli flags dragged across the ground, signal that Tehran’s investment in that foothold is multigenerational and ongoing.

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