Gunmen abducted at least 287 students from a school in northwest Nigeria yesterday, less than a week after Islamist extremists abducted at least 200 people, mostly women and children displaced by violence, in the country’s northeast. (AP; AP)
Our Take
For the international community, the back-to-back abductions totaling nearly 500 people recall the worst of the Islamist insurgency that began in 2009 and gained widespread international attention in 2014, when the armed group Boko Haram abducted 276 schoolgirls from their boarding school in Nigeria’s northeast.
But the attention paid to that attack, and the lack of attention paid to the security crisis afterward, created a misleading sense that the violence was subsiding. If anything, insecurity has worsened and spread in the past decade, with every single one of Nigeria’s six regions now facing a major challenge.