Sexual Assaults and Sex Slavery Continue in Lawless Border Zones
By Masara Kim
(Jos) First, the Good News.
The Nigerian Air Force made “precision airstrikes” that “significantly” degraded terrorists cells in Katsina State, State authorities announced Friday, Nov. 22. The dense Savannah forest on the Katsina’s borders with Zamfara and Kaduna states have served as a criminal refuge for bandits and jihadists for years.
But the bad news. Dozens of residents are still held captive by bandit-terrorists kidnapping for ransom and sex slavery according to residents and experts speaking to TruthNigeria.
Katsina State Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs, Nasir Mua’zu, on Friday, November 22 claimed several terrorists were neutralized after fighter jets bombed a terrorist camp 129 miles south of Katsina City, the state capital.
The raids in the Ruwan Godiya district of Faskari county represent “a critical step in restoring peace and security” in local communities,” Mu’azu said in a statement.
But just hours after his statement was made public, civilian guards fought a two-hour battle to protect residents from a criminal gang invasion just 30 miles away.
The counties of Faskari and Dandume on Katsina’s lawless southwestern flank are a frontline of Nigeria’s decade-long struggle with radicalized bandit terrorists, whose specialty is kidnap for ransom and sex slavery. They are every bit the threat to the Nigerian government as the better-known political insurgencies [Boko Haram and Islamic State of West Africa] operating in Nigeria’s Lake Chad region, but the bandit-terrorists are loyal chiefly to their crime lords and do not carry flags. All the same, they claim to be jihadists, and the current government of President Bola Tinubu labels them as terrorists.
Bandit Terrorist Assaults on Southwestern Katsina
On Friday evening, a group of local 15-20 volunteers managed to push back dozens of bandit-terrorists armed with assault and sniper rifles, saving more than 500 residents of Mangorori. The volunteers made good use of homemade single-shot pipe guns and hunting rifles.
TruthNigeria reported about the attack in Mangorori, part of a cluster of villages known as Kadisau, located in Dandume county, while it raged. Despite receiving the alert by direct text message, spokesman for the Police in Katsina State, Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP), Abubakar Sadiq Aliyu denied knowledge of the incident.
“We are yet to receive any report on that. However Investigation ongoing and further development will be communicated in due course,” wrote Aliyu in a text message to TruthNigeria.
The incident marked the latest in a series of armed assaults by an unknown jihadist faction specialized in kidnapping for ransom and sex slavery according to locals.
As of the time of the incident – between 9:30 pm and 11:30 pm local time – more than 40 residents of the area, chiefly women and girls, were held captive by the terrorists in the wooded borders of Katsina, Zamfara and Kaduna States.
Among the victims is 10-year-old Hadiza Audu, who was snatched from her home on October 27. Family members tell TruthNigeria her captors have threatened to marry her off if a $1,250 ransom is not paid by Nov 30.
“How are we going to raise that money, I don’t know,” said one relative, Bameyi Audu to TruthNigeria. “Our communities have been devastated and impoverished by these recurring attacks and kidnappings with many barely able to feed,” said Audu, a freelance reporter in Jos.
Northwest’s Lawless Badlands
But Katsina State is part and parcel of a pattern across Nigeria’s Northwest. As of April 2024, as many as 1,302,443 people have fled their homes due to armed attacks wracking communities in the northwest and north central regions of Nigeria, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Katsina State accounted for more than 18 percent of the figure, with 244,839 displaced — the highest in the entire northwest.
The devastations and displacements in the region have resulted in ‘catastrophic’ levels of malnutrition according to the French nonprofit Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF).
Yet, time is running out, and Audu’s captors are not shifting grounds.
“We have begged even for time and a little reduction of the ransom, but they wouldn’t listen,” Audu said.
“I know they mean business,” said Audu. “This is not the first time,” he said.
Abdullahi Ibrahim, a Christian missionary working with Calvary Ministries CAPRO in the area told TruthNigeria: “I am not aware of any particular incident where they married off any hostage. However, they always make such threats and sexually abuse female victims.”
Both Audu and Ibrahim report the terrorists are members of the Fulani ethnicity. The large, West African group with more than 10 million members in Nigeria has been implicated in thousands of genocidal massacres and is credited with the earliest jihad wars in West Africa.
This year alone, Fulani terrorists have jointly killed more than 4,000 people in Nigeria, according to Intersociety, a global genocide monitoring organization. The attacks, which temporarily subsided in late 2023 following the infamous ‘Black Christmas’ massacre of Christians in Plateau state, have intensified since January, as reported by the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (GCRP). The near-daily attacks have resulted in the kidnapping of at least 580 civilians across several states, with women and girls, particularly students, being the primary targets, according to GCRP.
In late 2020, Tabitha Nuhu, a resident of a Christian town in Kaduna just 2 hours’ drive away from Kadisau, endured two weeks of sexual violence at the hands of Fulani terrorists.
Nuhu, 28, was kidnapped from her home in northern Kaduna on December 23, 2020 along with 20 other residents and subjected to two weeks of gang-rape. Nuhu fled her home in Rumanan Gbagyi, located in the Birnin Gwari county after the ordeal. Nuhu has made progress battling the trauma – thanks to Equipping the Persecuted, an Iowa-based mission which provides economic and psychosocial support to Nuhu and several other victims from her region.
“With two to three guns pointed to our faces, they raped us multiple times a day,” Nuhu told TruthNigeria.
“Five years later, I am still struggling to recover from the experience,” Nuhu said. “Sometimes I feel like taking my life, but thank God for this organization, [Equipping the Persecuted Initiative] that has been of support,” she added.
“Usually when they kidnap, they do one of five things — demand ransom, exchange hostages for arms, kill as punishment for resisting their orders, or forcibly marry female hostages,” said Dr. Yahuza Getso, a respected security analyst.
“Sometimes they will storm a wedding venue and snatch the bride and her bridesmaids and forcibly marry them off or demand ransom for their release,” said Getso, the Managing Director of a private security company in Abuja — Eagle Integrated Security and Logistics Company Ltd.
“In some instances they will go to into communities and move from house to house, picking women and girls and could even rape them in front of their husbands, siblings or children,” Getso told TruthNigeria.
“In some instances they will kill, especially if the woman is resisting or unable to walk to the bush. This is most common with pregnant women whom the terrorists would like to kidnap but can’t due to their conditions,” Getso said in a telephone interview.
The mission on November 22 was no different, but thanks to brave civilian volunteers who stepped in, they managed to rescue 30 female hostages and injured some of the terrorists in the process.
This was the second time ordinary community members had to face off against terrorists in the area within three weeks.
During the first battle on October 27, a group of ten volunteers fought off 30 terrorists on motorcycles. Unfortunately, 10-year-old Hadiza Audu was kidnapped during the late-evening raid of Bango village after she and her two-year-old brother got stuck in a thorn bush while trying to escape, TruthNigeria learned. Her brother was left behind with critical injuries, while Hadiza was ferried away, joining more than 40 majority-female victims of previous kidnap attacks in the area.
Masara Kim is a conflict reporter in Jos and a senior editor at TruthNigeria
