Tuesday April 07, 2026

Bandits took 150 people from Zamfara in one night. The communities are deserted.

Kurfa Danya and Kurfan Magaji are two villages in Bukkuyum Local Government Area, Zamfara State. On Thursday night, April 3, gunmen raided both communities, firing at vehicles and homes.

By the time it was over, over 150 people, mostly women and children, had been taken into the surrounding forest. The residents who managed to escape fled. The communities were left largely deserted.

The local council chairman, Umar Abubakar Faru, confirmed the numbers to Reuters. Police said they were still verifying the figure. A joint team of police, military, and other security agencies was deployed. Rescue operations, the statement said, are ongoing.

Amnesty International called it Nigeria's "forgotten conflict." One resident said people now sleep with fear and uncertainty. Every day is lived on edge, waiting for the next attack.

On the same night, gunmen ambushed the convoy of the Chief of Staff to the Zamfara State Governor along the Funtua-Gusau highway. They missed their target. The attack happened anyway, which tells you that the people operating in Zamfara are not running from state authority. They're operating beside it.

The pattern in northwest Nigeria is not new. Armed groups have operated from forest enclaves in Zamfara, Sokoto, and Katsina for years, conducting mass kidnappings for ransom, livestock raids, and village attacks. The Nigerian military has announced operations. States have announced dialogue processes. Governors have announced amnesties. None of it has ended the kidnappings. The kidnappings keep happening because the underlying conditions that make them possible have not changed. Ungoverned forest terrain, weak local intelligence, communities too isolated to be protected quickly.

What the Zamfara attack adds to that picture is scale. 150 people in a single night from two villages. The community emptied and left deserted. This is not an isolated incident inserted into a stable situation. It is the latest in a sequence that Amnesty International correctly calls ongoing and overlooked.

The families of those 150 people are waiting. That wait has no official timeline. And in Zamfara, it has happened enough times that waiting is not hope. It is just what you do next.

The manhunt announcement is the government's standard response. Nigeria deploys, announces pursuit, and waits. Sometimes people come back. Sometimes they don't. The communities that watched their neighbours taken on Thursday night know the full sequence better than any press release describes it.