A top Nigerian general has ordered his troops to fight “day and night” to rescue 25 schoolgirls whose kidnapping in the northwest has been seized on by US President Donald Trump’s followers.
The early Monday morning raid on a secondary school in Kebbi State was the latest abduction of schoolchildren in Muslim-majority northern Nigeria, more than a decade after Boko Haram’s infamous kidnapping of 276 girls in the northeast sparked international uproar.
It has become another flashpoint to draw the ire of the US right following Trump’s threats of military intervention over the alleged killing of Nigeria’s Christians.
“You must continue day and night fighting. We must find these children,” Major General Waidi Shaibu, recently promoted to chief of army staff, told troops deployed to Kebbi State.
Shaibu urged the soldiers to “leave no stone unturned” in the search for the schoolgirls.
Though police rushed to the Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in the town of Maga, the gang had managed to scale the fence and abduct the students after killing the school’s vice-principal.
Kebbi is caught between the jihadist threat from neighbouring Niger and criminal gangs who loot villages while kidnapping and killing residents across the north of Africa’s most populous country.
– US tensions –
Kebbi State police told AFP on Tuesday that the abducted schoolchildren were all Muslim.
But Republican Riley Moore of the US House of Representatives, in a post on X urging his followers to pray for the 25 girls, echoed Trump’s claims of the persecution of Christians.
“While we don’t have all the details on this horrific attack, we know that the attack occurred in a Christian enclave in Northern Nigeria,” Moore wrote.
Trump at the start of November said he had asked the Pentagon to map out a possible plan of attack in Nigeria because radical Islamists are “killing the Christians and killing them in very large numbers”.
Nigeria has rejected that narrative, insisting that the country’s various security crises have left more Muslims dead.
Nigeria is the scene of numerous conflicts, including jihadist insurgencies, which kill both Christians and Muslims, often indiscriminately.
Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar told AFP on Monday that Nigeria was in talks with the United States about security.
Asked whether he thought Washington would send the military to strike, Tuggar said: “No, I do not think so.”
“Because we continue to talk, and as I said, the discussion has progressed. It’s moved on from that.”
– ‘Dragged me outside’ –
Amina Hassan, the wife of the murdered vice-principal, Hassan Makuku, told Nigerian television she had tried to wake her husband up after hearing noise outside their house at 3:30 am (0230 GMT), before the gunmen burst in.
“We started struggling with them and one of them pulled out his gun and shot my husband, then he dragged me by my hand outside the house and I told them to leave me alone, that I would not go with them since they have killed the father of my children,” Hassan said.
“I was still arguing with them when my daughter came out, then they left me and went to her and took her with them,” she said, adding that her daughter managed to escape into the bush after the attackers got distracted by the schoolgirls.
Monday’s raid was the second mass school abduction in Kebbi in four years, following a June 2021 incident when bandits took more than 100 students and staff members from a government college.
Those students were released in batches over two years after parents raised ransoms. Some of the students were forcefully married off and returned with babies.
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