The raid on a secondary school in Kebbi State on Monday 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.
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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”. [Vanguard]