Jihadists and other armed groups kidnap around 500 women and children in Nigeria in one week

A woman cries and asks the authorities to rescue the 287 children kidnapped in Kaduna, northern Nigeria, last Thursday.AP Photo (AP/LaPresse)

Several armed groups have kidnapped around 500 women and children in northern Nigeria in the last week, causing enormous commotion in this African country. The first incident occurred on March 4 in Borno State, where at least 102 women and girls residing in displaced persons camps were kidnapped, allegedly by a jihadist group, when they were collecting wood in a nearby forest. The United Nations raises the number to about 200 women. Last Thursday, 287 students from a school in Kaduna State were also kidnapped by a criminal group. The latest abduction occurred last Saturday, when 15 pupils from a Koranic school in Sokoto State were forcibly taken while they were sleeping.

This wave of kidnappings has generated a reaction of widespread indignation. The president of the country, Bola Tinubu, assured last Friday through his X profile that he had given orders to the security forces for an immediate rescue of the victims. “Nothing else is acceptable to me and to the relatives of these kidnapped citizens. Justice will be administered firmly. I sympathize with the families and assure them that they will soon be reunited with their loved ones,” he said. Numerous international organizations have demanded the adoption of immediate measures to guarantee the safety of citizens in the north of the country and in particular schoolchildren, who have suffered from this type of criminal actions for more than a decade.

The first abducted women were settled in the Babban Sansani, Zulum and Arabic internally displaced persons camps in the town of Gamboru Ngala, in Borno State. These facilities house people who have fled their homes due to violence caused by the terrorist group Boko Haram, an insurgency that dates back to 2009 and has left some 40,000 dead and two million displaced. The 102 kidnapped women, a figure provided by the State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA), had left these fields to collect wood for cooking. No armed group has claimed responsibility for the kidnapping, but authorities suspect Boko Haram itself or the Islamic State West Africa Province (Iswap), affiliated with the Islamic State. The United Nations raises the number of kidnapped women to 200 and Amnesty assures that there are 400.

The most serious incident took place last Thursday, when about 100 armed men stormed a school in Kuriga, a town in Kaduna State. Some 287 secondary and primary school students, including a hundred children under 12 years old, were kidnapped, according to local authorities. Uba Sani, governor of Kaduna, said that the armed forces were “fighting against the clock” to rescue the children, who were forced to walk at gunpoint and enter the nearby forest area, where their trace was lost.

The third kidnapping occurred last Saturday in the village of Gidan Bakuso, in Sokoto State, where several armed men took away 15 children between the ages of eight and 14, all students of a Koranic school, when they were sleeping, according to reports. the Police to the Associated Press agency.

Since the kidnapping of the Chibok girls in April 2014, when 276 students were kidnapped by the jihadist group Boko Haram, generating a great media impact, northern Nigeria has been periodically shaken by this type of criminal acts, at least in 14 occasions. Amnesty assures that thousands of children and young people have abandoned the educational system for fear of kidnappings. “The Nigerian authorities should prevent these abductions, prosecute those suspected of being responsible for these crimes and ensure that they are brought to justice in fair trials,” says this international organization, which considers that there is a risk that there is “a lost generation.” ” unless Nigerian authorities take urgent action.

While the kidnappings in Borno, Yobe or Adamawa are mostly the responsibility of jihadist groups, those that occur in the rest of the north of the country are perpetrated by criminal gangs who are known generically in Nigeria as “bandits” and who They have turned kidnapping into one of their main sources of income. Since May last year, more than 4,700 people have been kidnapped in Nigeria for ransom, hundreds of them students from the north of the country. The Government has asked citizens not to pay for the release of their relatives, in an attempt to stop this wave of crime.

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