Mass kidnappings of Nigerian students leave parents in shock and despair

Rashidat Hamza is in despair. All but one of her six children are among the almost 300 pupils kidnapped from their school in Nigeria’s conflict-torn northwest.

More than two days after her children, aged seven to eighteen, went to school in isolated Kuriga town only to be herded away by a gang of gunmen, she was still stunned Saturday.

“We have never seen this kind of thing where our children were abducted from their school,” she told an Associated Press team that arrived in the Kaduna State town to report on Thursday’s attack. “We don’t know what to do, but we believe in God.”

The fact that there have only been three major kidnappings in northern Nigeria since late last week, including the one in Kuriga, serves as a reminder of the security situation that plagues the most populous nation in Africa. A few days prior, 200 people were kidnapped in northeastern Borno State, and on Saturday morning, a squad of gunmen seized 15 students from a school in another northwest state, Sokoto.

Ten years ago, in Borno’s Chibok town, Nigerian school kidnappings made international headlines when, in 2014, Islamic militants abducted over 200 schoolgirls, startling the whole globe.