By Gordon Brown
Edinburgh—In the last few weeks, more than 300 children have been abducted from Nigerian schools in a new wave of kidnappings by terrorist groups hellbent on extorting money and spreading fear.
By now, the pattern
is depressingly familiar. On the morning of November 17, gunmen broke into the
dormitories of a girls’ secondary school in Maga, a town in the northwestern
state of Kebbi, killing the vice-principal and abducting 25 students. Only days
later, on November 21, assailants staged an early-morning attack on St. Mary’s,
a co-ed Catholic school in Papiri, a town in the neighboring state of Niger.
It was first reported that 227 people were abducted, but that number has since risen to 303 students – between the ages of eight and 18 – and 12 teachers, surpassing the notorious mass abduction of 276 female students in Chibok in 2014.
