13 women and an infant were abducted during an overnight raid in northwestern Nigeria. A bride and ten bridesmaids were amongst those who were kidnapped on 30 November 2025 in the village of Chacho in Sokoto State. This abduction comes amidst a string of mass kidnappings across Nigeria, reflecting the country’s worsening security crisis. 

“Bandits stormed our village last night and kidnapped 14 persons, including a bride and 10 bridesmaids, from a house in Zango neighbourhood,” Aliyu Abdullahi, a resident of Chacho village, told AFP. The village had already been targeted in October, when bandits kidnapped 13 people. “We had to pay ransom to secure their freedom. Now, we are faced with the same situation,” he said. In northern Nigeria, kidnappings for ransom are becoming increasingly common; with armed gangs and other groups known locally as “bandits” overwhelming local security forces. At the end of November, over 250 children and staff were kidnapped from a Catholic school in the country’s central Niger state in one of the country’s worst mass kidnappings. Whilst all of those abducted were freed by the end of December according to a presidential spokesperson, the kidnapping is reflective of the broader crisis. There were at least 4,722 victims of kidnappings across Nigeria between July 2024 and June 2025, with at least 762 people killed and about $1.66m paid as ransom in total, according to Lagos-based geopolitical advisory S.B.M. Intelligence.

The security issues within Nigeria vary in different regions of the country, with different armed groups and non-state actors operating in different parts of the country. Eromo Egbejule, The Guardian’s West Africa correspondent, points out the significance of data blind spots and intelligence sharing in the crisis, “Nigeria is so big, there’s forests where there’s no network, so sometimes you hear of atrocities 10 days later when a person escapes. Nigeria doesn’t even know how many people it has, we see an estimated 220 million, it could be less, it could be more. It’s been a problem spanning more than 100 years, since the first British census of Nigeria in 1921.” There is no state police, and in under-governed spaces such as the forests across the middle and northern parts of the country, non-state actors are able to organize and take power.

The security crisis in Nigeria has also drawn the attention of the United States administration. Donald Trump redesignated Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” in November, characterizing the ongoing violence as a “Christian genocide” and threatening unilateral military intervention in Nigeria. Experts have rejected this framing as false, arguing that the problem is much more multifaceted. Extremist violence in Nigeria has impacted both Christian and Muslim communities in Nigeria, and resource strain has contributed to the ongoing security crisis. The impact of conflict over resources and criminal exploitation has created interconnected and overlapping security issues throughout Nigeria, and kidnapping for ransom is one facet of the crisis. Eromo also points out the complex variety of actors: “You have ideological criminals who are persecuting the religious, political and ethnic minorities. Then you have commercial criminals looking for money. There’s just so many groups – which is why the catch-all term is ‘bandits’.”

 Deeper structural issues, such as socioeconomic inequality, conflict over land and resources, and lack of state presence and police in more rural and under-governed areas, are large drivers of the complex problem. In order to properly address the security crisis in Nigeria, support needs to be focused  on strengthening state capacity to provide security and share information. Addressing root causes of the current insecurity is the only way to protect civilians and work towards sustainable peace building.