More than 300 children and a dozen teachers vanish from a Catholic school in northern Nigeria, and the world barely looks up. In her report for The Media Line, Keren Setton tracks a mass kidnapping [1] that should shake diplomats and church pews from Abuja to Washington, yet remains buried beneath louder wars.
Gunmen stormed the school just days after 25 students were seized in a neighboring state, turning classrooms into hunting grounds in a region scarred by Boko Haram and other armed groups. Former Israeli ambassador to Nigeria Uriel Palti tells Setton that Africa barely registers on Western priority lists, a blind spot that leaves teachers to bargain with terror for children’s lives.
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Into that vacuum steps President Donald Trump, who has redesignated Nigeria a “country of particular concern,” warned that the US military is “preparing for potential action,” and threatened to cut aid while casting the crisis as a “mass slaughter” of Christians by “radical Islamists.” The African Union pushes back, insisting there is no genocide and stressing that both Christians and Muslims are dying.
Tel Aviv University scholar Dr. Irit Back and independent researcher Dr. Y. Sella pull the lens wider: kidnappings have become part of an “informal economy” built on ransom, poverty, corruption, land disputes, and herder-farmer wars in a resource-rich state split between a Muslim north and Christian south. Boko Haram’s long campaign against “Western education” and girls’ schooling hovers over every shuttered classroom.
By the end of Setton’s piece [1], the Catholic school siege reads less like an isolated outrage and more like a test of whether the world is willing to grapple with Nigeria’s tangled wars instead of reducing them to slogans and moving on.