They freed the 279 students kidnapped in Nigeria last week

The 279 teenagers kidnapped on Friday from a boarding school in Jangebe, northwest Nigeria, were released and were at the seat of government in Zamfara state on Tuesday, where a ceremony was held in his honor.

“We thank God for bringing you back to us”, Zamfara governor Bello Matawalle said in front of the 279 teenagers, released this evening after four days of kidnapping.

“There are 279 and no other is missing”, assured the governor.

Initially, the authorities assured that 317 girls after a group of armed men attacked this boarding school.

The visibly tired girls, aged 12 to 16, arrived in Gusau on Tuesday morning in several minibuses (capital of Zamfara), said an AFP journalist.

The authorities gathered them in an auditorium and gave them clean clothes and a hijab. (veil which covers the hair and the chest) of light blue color.

Then, in the presence of journalists and photographers, the girls stood up to sing the Nigerian national anthem.

“They made us walk for hours”, Hafsat Umar Anka, one of the kidnapped girls, explained during the ceremony. “Some of us had so much pain in our legs that we had to wear them.”

The conditions in which they took place were totally atrocious, this continued and the kidnappers threatened to kill them if they tried to escape.

President Muhammadu Buhari expressed his “immense joy” at the release of the girls. “I join the families and residents of Zamfara in welcoming and celebrating the return of these traumatized students,” he said in a statement.

Buhari pledged to end the conflict that punishes the north of the country, but the situation is deteriorating every day. Tuesday morning a UN base and a military camp were target of an attack by militiamen of a jihadist group linked to the Islamic State (NO).

School, a new goal

The kidnapping of the students of Zamfara is the fourth attack on schools in less than three months in northwest Nigeria, where for a decade the criminal groups, called “bandits”, multiply cattle rustling and kidnapping for ransom.

Usually, these criminals attack public figures or travelers on the roads, but in recent months, schools appear to have become a more lucrative target.

Zamfara authorities are used to dealing with these groups, with whom they For more than a year, they have been negotiating an amnesty in exchange for the delivery of their weapons.

It was precisely the authorities of the state of Zamfara who negotiated the release last December of 344 boys who were abducted from a boarding school in neighboring Katsina state.

After each release, the authorities deny having paid a ransom, But security experts do not believe it and fear that these practices may promote kidnappings in these insecure regions plagued by extreme poverty.

This time, the governor explained that “repentant” criminals had served as intermediaries in the negotiations and denied having paid a ransom.

This new mass kidnapping rekindled the memory of Chibok’s kidnapping in 2014, when the jihadist group Boko Haram he kidnapped 276 students, a fact that sparked outrage around the world.

More than a hundred girls are still missing and no one knows how many survived.

Poverty and insecurity

But these two kidnappings are different: the criminals they act for money and not for ideological reasons, despite the fact that some have forged links with jihadist groups in the north.

These criminal organizations attract more and more unemployed young people from these regions where more than 80% of the inhabitants live in extreme poverty.

Some of these groups have hundreds of fighters, others only a few dozen.

Since 2011, this criminal violence has caused the death of more than 8,000 people and the displacement of more than 200,000 people, according to an International Crisis Group (ICG) report published in May 2020.

The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said in a statement Tuesday that it was “alarmed by the increase in violence in northwestern Nigeria.”

“Out of fear of armed groups and intercommunal violence, more than 7,660 Nigerian refugees have fled to Maradi”, in neighboring Niger, since the start of the year, which has led to 77,000 displaced peoples in this region from the Nigerian states of Katsina, Sokoto and Zamfara.

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