A women prays for the kidnapped LEA Primary and Secondary School students in Kuriga, Kaduna state Nigeria, Saturday, March 9, 2024. Security forces swept through large forests in Nigeria’s northwest region on Friday in search of nearly 300 children who were abducted from their school a day earlier in the West African nation’s latest mass kidnap which analysts and activists blamed on the failure of intelligence and slow security response.
Among the students abducted Thursday were at least 100 children aged 12 or younger. They were just settling into their classrooms at the government primary and secondary school when gunmen “came in dozens, riding on bikes and shooting sporadically,” said Nura Ahmad, a teacher. “Since this happened, my brain has been scattering,” said Shehu Lawal, the father of a 13-year-old boy who is among those abducted.
A major factor that conflict analysts say has fueled the abductions is how easy it is to smuggle in arms over Nigeria’s poorly policed borders. More than half of its 1,500-kilometer border with Niger, for instance, stretches across the northwest. Though mostly savannah, the region also has vast forests that are ungoverned and unoccupied, providing havens for organized gangs and their kidnap victims.
The armed gangs are “adapting their strategies and further entrenching themselves in the northwest through extortion,” said James Barnett, a researcher specializing in West Africa at the U.S.-based Hudson Institute.
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