Amnesty International called on the authorities to safely rescue the students and hold the perpetrators to account.  “Schools should be places of safety, and no child should have to choose between their education and their life,” the rights group said on X, as it called on the authorities to also “take measures immediately to prevent attacks on schools, to protect children’s lives and their right to education”.

“We don’t know what to do, we are all waiting to see what God can do. They are my only children I have on Earth,” Fatima Usman, whose two children were among those taken, told the Reuters news agency by telephone.

Another parent, Hassan Abdullahi, told Reuters that local vigilantes had tried to repel the gunmen, but had been overpowered.  “Seventeen of the students abducted are my children. I feel very sad that the government has neglected us completely in this area,” Abdullahi said.

People gather in an area where gunmen kidnapped students in Chikun, Nigeria, on March 7, 2024 (Aljazeera)

Kidnappings for ransom are common in Africa’s most populous country, where heavily armed criminal gangs have targeted schools and colleges in the past, especially in the northwest, although such attacks have abated recently.

In 2014, the Boko Haram armed group kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls in Borno state’s Chibok village.

The last major reported abduction involving pupils in Kaduna was in July 2021, when fighters took more than 150 children in a raid. They were reunited months later with their families after they paid ransoms.

Since coming to office in May, President Bola Tinubu has made reducing insecurity one of his priorities, but the armed forces are embattled on several fronts, including a long-running battle in the northeast of the country.

Al Jazeera’s Mbah said that in recent weeks, Nigeria has seen a spate of attacks and abductions, and the military has stated that they lack the weapons to be able to confront and overpower armed groups.

Chris Kwaja, an associate professor at the Centre for Peace and Security Studies at Modibbo Adama University in northeastern Nigeria, told Al Jazeera on Friday that the frequency of abductions tells an “unfortunate story of the high level of coordination, sophistication and lethality” that defines the criminal organised groups in the country.

There is also a level of complicity within the communities affected that allows kidnappers to know how to undertake such operations, Kwaja said.

The criminal networks can provide incentives to people within communities who do not feel supported by the government and are facing “hunger, starvation,  poverty and unemployment”, he added.

(Aljazeera)