A horde of motorcycle-riding gunmen stormed the village of Gamdum Mallam in Nigeria’s Zamfara State on Saturday, shooting up the town and riding off with over a hundred captives, mostly women and children.
Zamfara has long been plagued by “bandits” with a penchant for mass kidnappings. Saturday’s attack would bring the total number of people abducted over the past year to almost 5,000.
Local residents said the attackers roared into town on motorcycles with guns blazing, then split into two groups. One group established a roadblock to prevent any of the residents from escaping, while the other set about stealing livestock and taking human prisoners.
“We were being treated like slaves in our own land, as if there is no government,” one of the villagers told Reuters on Wednesday.
Before departing the area, the bandits grabbed another 46 captives from the nearby village of Ruwan Rana. Heavy rain masked their escape into the Makakari forest, a notorious hideout for armed gangs.
Zamfara residents fear the bandits will strike again soon. The Nigerian military has been conducting airstrikes and ground operations in the Makakari forest, and while the military frequently claims to have killed dozens of terrorists and wiped out their strongholds, the attacks keep coming.
On August 11, the Nigerian military said its intelligence operatives spotted over 400 bandits massing for an attack on the farming community of Nasarawan Burkullu. The military hit the bandit stronghold with airstrikes guided by reconnaissance drones, then moved in for a ground attack, purportedly killing over a hundred fighters and several gang leaders.
“They thought they could regroup, rearm, and launch another wave of terror. Instead, they walked straight into a well-laid trap,” a Nigerian military source said — claiming victory rather prematurely, since terrorists would swarm out of the Makakari Forest to kidnap over a hundred villagers just two weeks later.
Zamfara is Nigeria’s top kidnapping state and kidnapping has become one of the top industries in the region, with an estimated $31 million in ransoms demanded over the past year. Less than $2 million of the ransom money was actually collected, due in part to the overall poverty of the region.
Dr. Umar Yakubu, executive director of the Center for Fiscal Transparency and Public Integrity, told the Daily Trust of Nigeria on Thursday that “low human capital development” was a major factor in the kidnapping epidemic. He and other experts faulted the government for not doing enough to track ransom payments, or to dissuade local families from paying them. Faith in the police and security services is so low in northwest Nigeria that residents immediately begin scraping money together to pay ransoms as soon as they are demanded.
Security analysts worried that ransoms are soaring as the value of Nigeria’s currency collapses, leaving desperate villagers unable to pay the huge sums demanded for the return of their loved ones. Weak security in northeastern Nigeria makes mass kidnappings, like the one in Gamdum Mallan last weekend, an absurdly easy way for predatory gangs to make money.
“Without coordinated strategies targeting both the crime’s profitability and its socioeconomic drivers, Nigeria risks entrenching kidnapping as a grim national industry, one that perpetuates poverty, undermines recovery, and leaves citizens hostage to a failing system,” warned a recent report from SB Morgen Intelligence.
The Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) published a report on Nigerian banditry on Wednesday that argued the gangs of the Makakari Forest region have become an alternative government — brutal and medieval in character, their power based on “bandit capital” such as weapons, manpower, and fear.
“While bandits are often dismissed as mere criminals engaged in violent wealth accumulation, we argue that bandit groups borrow old historical repertoires of rule, involving a time-tested combination of submission in core areas, the levying of tributes on farming communities, and raiding at ungoverned frontiers,” DIIS said.
Nigerian government officials and media often fail to distinguish between mercenary thieves and jihadi terrorists, describing them all as “bandits.” Jihadis are a severe threat in northern Nigeria, and a growing number of Islamist gangs are operating in the northwest. The government’s response has included airstrikes and ground attacks that inflict a great deal of collateral damage on civilians in the region.
Last week, a group of prominent Nigerian business leaders, politicians, and activists issued a statement warning that parts of Nigeria are enduring “wartime levels of slaughter.” They called on President Bola Tinubu to form a task force with broad authority to end conflicts with various militant groups, including Islamists like Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP).
The group said at least 15 jihadi attacks have been recorded so far this year along Nigeria’s northern and eastern borders with Niger and Cameroon, respectively. These attacks have grown increasingly sophisticated, including drone surveillance. The activist group seemed skeptical of the Nigerian army’s perpetual claims to have killed hundreds of bandits and terrorists in every military operation, since the strength of these groups does not appear to be diminishing.
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