(ZENIT News / Kaduna, 11.18.2025).- The early hours of 17 November brought another grim chapter to Nigeria’s worsening security crisis. Before dawn broke over the central and northwestern states, armed groups struck two separate communities: one a parish house in Kaduna, the other a girls’ boarding school in Kebbi. By sunrise, a Catholic priest had vanished without a trace, a school official lay dead, and dozens of students had been driven into the forests that serve as refuge for criminal gangs.
In Kushe Gudgu, a rural community in Kaduna State, the attackers moved swiftly. They forced their way into the residence of St. Stephen’s Church, seizing the parish priest, Father Bobbo Paschal. Multiple residents were taken alongside him, though the exact number remains unclear. The raid turned deadly when the assailants killed Gideon Markus, the brother of another local priest, as he tried to intervene.
The Archdiocese of Kaduna, shaken but accustomed to issuing such statements, urged the country to unite in prayer for the safe return of all those abducted. But in Nigeria—a nation that has lived with kidnappings for ransom on a massive scale for more than a decade—prayer is only one element of a painfully familiar ritual.
Just hours earlier and 300 kilometers away, another community had lived through its own nightmare.
At around 4 a.m., heavily armed men stormed the Government Girls’ Comprehensive Secondary School in Maga, in Kebbi State. The attackers moved from dormitory to dormitory, firing shots as panicked students fled or hid. The school’s deputy head, Hassan Yakubu Makuku, was killed as he tried to defend the girls under his care. A security guard was wounded in the chaos.
By the time security forces arrived, the gunmen had already forced an unknown number of students onto waiting motorcycles and disappeared toward neighboring Zamfara—a region whose dense forests and porous borders have become a stronghold for kidnapping syndicates.
The attack fits a pattern that has become tragically routine. Nigeria’s northwest, once spared the insurgencies that ravaged the northeast, has become the epicenter of a criminal industry built on mass abductions. Large-scale kidnappings, once rare outside Boko Haram’s territory, are now carried out by loosely organized but heavily armed “bandits” whose motivations are primarily financial, not ideological.
The legacy of Chibok looms large. More than a decade after 276 girls were taken from their school, roughly a third remain unaccounted for. In the years since, more than 1,500 students have been abducted, according to international monitoring groups. Even the government’s decision to criminalize ransom payments has done little to deter perpetrators; instead, communities are sometimes left negotiating privately or waiting months—years, in some cases—for news of their missing children.
Kebbi, though far from Boko Haram’s traditional base, has not been spared. A mass abduction in 2021 saw 80 students and staff taken from a federal college in Yauri. While some were rescued by the military, others were released only after prolonged captivity. The last group came home not until 2023, after nearly two years in the hands of their captors.
For Christian communities in particular, the sense of vulnerability has intensified. Attacks on clergy have become startlingly frequent. Seminaries have been raided, priests kidnapped, and churches burned. Aid to the Church in Need’s latest report describes violations of religious freedom in Nigeria as “grave, systematic and ongoing,” particularly in the country’s middle belt, where religious and ethnic tensions overlap with criminal operations.
It is not lost on Church leaders that these latest attacks came just as the United States restored Nigeria to its list of Countries of Particular Concern—Washington’s highest designation for violations of religious liberty. The move reflects what many on the ground have been saying for years: that Nigeria’s security crisis is no longer a regional problem but a national emergency affecting every layer of society.
As search-and-rescue teams comb forests across Kaduna and Kebbi, the weight of the moment hangs heavily on those who wait. Families of abducted schoolgirls gather in courtyards, clutching phones that may ring with news—or may not. Parishioners in Kushe Gudgu keep vigil, hoping Father Paschal will return alive.
Nigeria’s Christian communities have responded with a blend of sorrow, courage, and dogged persistence. Their bishops continue to advocate internationally, their faithful continue to worship in damaged sanctuaries, and their prayers, as they often say, are the strongest weapon they feel they still possess.
But beneath the prayers is a growing plea: that the world pay closer attention, and that Nigerian authorities finally marshal the political will to address a crisis that devours the lives of children, teachers, clergy, and entire communities with terrifying regularity.
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