A Catholic school in Nigeria has been the target of a horrifying kidnapping raid, with both students and teachers taken in a surge of attacks against Christians.

According to officials, armed criminals abducted children from St. Mary’s School located in Agwara, central Nigeria. This incident marks the second kidnapping at a school within a week.

Community members are concerned that nearly 100 students and staff members were seized during the assault, which took place early in the morning. This follows a similar incident on Monday, where 25 schoolgirls were kidnapped by bandits in the northwest region of the country.

In response to the escalating violence against Christians in Nigeria, Donald Trump has warned of potential military intervention, a notion dismissed by the Nigerian government.

With a population of 220 million, Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, is grappling with a 16-year-long jihadist uprising concentrated in the predominantly Muslim north.

Extremist groups like Boko Haram and ISIS are striving to establish a caliphate, intensifying mass kidnappings and violent attacks on Christians as they recruit mercenary bandits to further their cause.

Trump warned on October 31 that he had directed the Pentagon to prepare for ‘swift and brutal’ military action in Nigeria, framing the conflict as an existential threat to Christianity. 

The Catholic Church in the area said that ‘armed attackers invaded’ the school between 1am and 3am, abducting the kids and their teachers, and shooting a security guard.

Donald Trump in the Oval Office on November 10. The president has threatened military action over the targeted killings of Nigeria’s Christians by radical Islamists

The Niger state government said it had ‘received with deep sadness the disturbing news of the kidnapping of pupils … 

‘The exact number of abducted pupils is yet to be confirmed as security agencies continue to assess the situation,’ Abubakar Usman, the state government secretary, said in a statement. 

After gunmen on Monday stormed a secondary school in Kebbi state in northwestern Nigeria, abducting 25 schoolgirls, Friday’s attack further raises alarm over security in Africa’s most populous country.

For years, heavily armed criminal gangs locally known as ‘bandits’ have been intensifying attacks in rural areas of northwest and central Nigeria with little state presence, killing thousands and conducting kidnappings for ransom.

The gangs have camps in a vast forest straddling several states including Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, Sokoto, Kebbi and Niger from where they launch attacks.

The state government said the school had defied orders to temporarily close all boarding schools in parts of the state following an intelligence report of an ‘increased threat level’ in parts of northern Niger that border Kebbi.

Niger’s state police said its tactical units and the military were deployed to search for the pupils.

Police said they received a report that ‘armed bandits invaded’ the secondary school and ‘abducted a yet to be ascertained number of students from the school’s hostel’.

Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu speaks during a joint press statement with Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brasilia, August 25

It said security agencies were ‘combing the forests with a view to rescue the abducted students’. 

President Bola Tinubu’s government said earlier this week that security forces had been placed on high alert. He has sent a defense minister to lead the search for the Kebbi school girls.

Tinubu’s office said minister of state for defense Alhaji Bello Matawalle had ‘experience in dealing with banditry and mass kidnapping’, after he secured the release of 279 students aged between 10 and 17 who had been kidnapped from a secondary school in 2021 in western Zamfara state.

In a separate attack on a church in western Nigeria on Tuesday, gunmen killed two people during a service that was recorded and broadcast online. Dozens of worshippers are believed to have been abducted.

As Nigeria grapples with security challenges on several fronts, hostage-taking has spiraled nationwide and become a favored tactic of bandit gangs and jihadists.

Although bandits have no ideological leanings and are motivated by financial gains, their increasing alliance with jihadists from the northeast has been a source of concern for authorities and security analysts.

Jihadists have for 16 years been waging an insurrection in the northeast with the aim of establishing a Caliphate.

The jihadist violence has killed more than 40,000 people and displaced around two million in the northeast since it erupted in 2019.