Dakar, Senegal: The children were still sleeping when gun-toting men on motorcycles arrived at the Catholic boarding school in the early morning hours of Friday, witnesses told friends and family members. They fired their weapons into the air and headed straight for the elementary dormitories. Then the gunmen forced dozens of young students, some as young as six, into a large truck and sped away into the darkness.
Many other details about the mass kidnapping at St Mary’s School in Niger state, in north-west Nigeria, are still unknown, including the identity of the kidnappers and the number of children taken, with estimates ranging from 50 to more than 300. Such incidents are common in this long-volatile region where criminal gangs operate with impunity, analysts said, targeting schools and places of worship and holding hostages for ransom.
Assailants kidnapped two dozen girls from a school in neighbouring Kebbi state overnight on Monday. The next day, two worshippers were killed during a live-streamed church service in the state of Kwara.
A man walks past belongings at the St Mary’s Catholic Primary and Secondary School in Papiri community, Nigeria, after gunmen abducted children and staff. Credit: Christian Association of Nigeria via AP
The violence comes at a fraught moment in US relations with Nigeria, the most populous nation in West Africa. US President Donald Trump recently caught Washington and the region off guard when he threatened to go “guns-a-blazing” into Nigeria if the government failed to address the persecution of Christians.
On Thursday, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth met with a delegation of Nigerian security leaders at the Pentagon, according to a statement from his office, to discuss “ways to make tangible progress on stopping violence against Christians in Nigeria and combating West African jihadist terrorist groups”.
Hegseth “emphasised the need for Nigeria to demonstrate commitment and take both urgent and enduring action to stop violence against Christians and conveyed the Department’s desire to work by, with, and through Nigeria to deter and degrade terrorists that threaten the United States”, the statement said.
Republican congressman Riley Moore, whom Trump has appointed to lead an investigation into the killing of Christians in Nigeria, described the situation at St Mary’s as “heartbreaking” in a Friday post on X.
“Enough is enough,” he wrote. “We must do everything we can to defend our brothers and sisters in Christ.”
Basuna Magaji, 54, is an uncle to four students at St Mary’s, which is known as one of the best schools in the area. His 20-year-old nephew and 16-year-old niece managed to escape their abductors, he said, but his brother’s two youngest children – an 11-year-old girl and six-year-old boy – were taken.
The dormitories of St Mary’s after the kidnapping. Credit: Christian Association of Nigeria via AP
The older children told Magaji they were able to slip away as the armed men herded them into the truck at about 3am, sprinting more than three kilometres back to the nearest village. “They were crying, tired, they had no shoes,” he recounted during a phone interview.
On Friday afternoon, the local government in Agwara said all schools would be closed immediately “to protect the lives and safety of students, teachers and school workers”. Spokesman Bello Gidi said authorities were still trying to determine how many students were abducted.
Magaji said his brother and other families were camped out at the school, waiting for answers.
Surging violence
Nigeria’s population of 230 million is roughly split between Christians and Muslims. While Trump officials have focused on the dangers facing Christians, experts say Muslim communities are frequently victimised as well, and many attacks are not religiously motivated.
Insecurity is widespread throughout the country. Islamist insurgencies rage in the north-east, farmer-herder conflicts are common in central Nigeria, and the north-west – where the two school kidnappings took place – is afflicted by increasingly violent banditry.
While bandits were probably responsible for the kidnapping at St Mary’s, experts said, Islamist militant groups had made recent gains in the area. Sometimes, they said, criminals sold hostages to the militants, who ransomed them back to their families.
“There are rivalries and co-operation when it comes to the relationship between the bandits and the Islamists, and it could be a mix of both,” said Confidence McHarry, a senior analyst at SBM Intelligence, a Lagos-based consultancy. “The financial incentive is very strong.”
Between July 2024 and June, according to an SBM report, 4722 people were kidnapped across Nigeria in nearly 1000 separate incidents. The kidnappers received the equivalent of $US1.7 million ($2.6 million) in ransom payments, the report found.
McHarry said the money was often paid by a mix of federal and local governments, in addition to relatives. The vast majority of school kidnappings take place at government institutions, which are not religious. This made the kidnapping at St Mary’s especially “high profile”, he said, and “will definitely lead to more attention and more pressure on the Nigerian state”.
A spokesman for Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu did not respond to requests for comment. Tinubu had postponed international travel plans this week after the earlier kidnapping in Kebbi state.
“My fear is that we are in a new cycle,” said James Barnett, a Nigeria specialist based between Lagos and the United Kingdom, noting that mass kidnappings “tend to come in bursts”. They were quite common in 2021, he said, when there was “something of a copycat effect”.
A man in Lagos reads a local newspaper with headlines about the abductions.Credit: AP
Bandits looked for soft targets, Barnett added, typically driven more by opportunism than ideology. The 24 girls taken on Monday were from Muslim families, while those abducted on Friday were from a Catholic school, he noted.
Some Christian communities had been targeted, said Dengiyefa Angalapu, a research analyst with the Centre for Democracy and Development. Many big churches, he said, now had armed guards out front.
Nigeria could use US assistance to address the security crisis, but any help should be “more strategic than tactical”, Angalapu said. “Our country is very divided,” he continued. In the event of a heavy-handed American intervention, “there is no guarantee that things won’t escalate”.
A missionary in Agwara, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation, said he personally knew three children kidnapped from St Mary’s.
In the villages now, “there is a lot of crying and praying”, the missionary said. “Everyone is calling us and asking us for prayers.”
The Washington Post
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