Original subtitles

Hello and welcome to Global Eye.

Each week, we bring you unmissable stories

from across the BBC World Service,

hard-hitting investigations and tales of hope and resilience.

I'm Yemisi Adegoke, and this week we're in Nigeria.

I've come to northern Nigeria

to find out why the government is struggling to stop

the wave of mass kidnappings

terrorising schoolchildren and their families.

And I meet a group of remarkable young women

who survived an abduction

and are now back at school in defiance of their kidnappers.

Also on the programme...

When will you hear the cries of Nigerians, of Christians?

You can no longer deny genocide!

Reports are spreading on social media that

a so-called "Christian genocide" is happening in Nigeria.

BBC Eye has investigated the claims.

And we'll bring you the moving story of the Sudanese wedding photographer

documenting love, loss and survival in wartime Darfur.

This is Oriire, Oyo State, south-west Nigeria,

the site of a mass kidnapping that rocked the country.

Earlier this year, gunmen on motorcycles

attacked three schools here, including this one.

They abducted 39 children, the youngest just two years old,

along with seven teachers.

One teacher was killed here during the raid.

Another teacher's murder was filmed and shared online,

sparking national outrage.

Videos of the kidnapped teachers emerged,

purportedly showing them pleading for the government to save them.

After 56 days in captivity,

to the joy of their families, the children were released.

Authorities say no ransom was paid

and a successful security operation led to their release.

But despite this positive ending,

the fear and trauma that the attackers caused

has become all too familiar to many families here.

I've lived and reported in Nigeria for the last 13 years

and seen up close how the kidnapping crisis has escalated.

Mass abductions have plagued this country

since at least the early 2000s but made global headlines in 2014

when 276 schoolgirls were kidnapped from their school in Chibok.

Back then, mass kidnappings

were often thought of as a northern issue,

something confined to the Boko Haram strongholds of the north-east

or the bandit zones of the north-west.

But what's happened this year here in Oriire

proves that's no longer true.

The perpetrators are mostly criminal gangs,

known locally as bandits.

They are largely made up of herders from the Fulani ethnic group,

who traditionally reared animals

but have swapped cattle trading for kidnap and extortion.

They move in large numbers on motorcycles,

allowing them to attack quickly

and escape before security forces arrive.

Bandits are not necessarily driven by ideology,

and there is no centrally organised leadership.

They see kidnapping as a quick, easy way to make money,

as did the jihadist groups like Boko Haram and its splinter groups,

like Islamic State West Africa Province, or ISWAP,

who are also involved in abductions.

So what is the government doing about it?

President Bola Tinubu, who is standing for re-election next year,

allocated a record $4 billion

for defence and security in the annual budget,

and thousands of new military recruits have been approved.

To bandits, kidnappers

and sponsors of terror,

surrender or face the full force of the Nigerian state.

No mercy will be shown

to those who trade in blood of Nigerians.

The kidnapping in Oriire sent shock waves across the country,

but, here in Zamfara, in the north-west,

worsening insecurity has become part of everyday life.

Zamfara is the heartland of the banditry crisis.

Successive governments here have tried everything

to put an end to the violence -

deploying soldiers, launching military offensives,

even granting amnesty to the armed gangs.

None of it has worked. In fact, kidnapping has increased.

And the question the whole country is asking is, why?

It's basically the failure of the government

to deal with insecurity generally.

And if you look at where these mass abductions happen,

they happen in remote areas where the state is largely absent.

And when I say the state is absent, I'm talking about

not just in the area of development, but also in the area of security.

President Tinubu's administration

says it won't negotiate with armed groups,

warning them to surrender or face the full force of the law.

But in reality, the government's grip continues to weaken.

In this state, some villages are under bandit control.

Residents are extorted - forced to pay up or die.

And that's just one state.

Across Nigeria,

the government is fighting multiple battles at the same time.

The jihadist insurgency in the north-east,

conflict over land in the Middle Belt,

secessionist violence in the south-east.

The kidnapping crisis is just another symptom

of a government struggling to keep its citizens safe.

Four years ago,

BBC Eye gained unprecedented access to Nigeria's kidnap gangs

for an unflinching look

at how they planned and carried out their attacks

and the devastating impact on their victims.

That film was The Bandit Warlords Of Zamfara.

This is one of the bandits who led the attack on the girls.

It took me five months to contact him

and another four to persuade him to meet.

I eventually met Abu Sanni deep in the forest.

After the film aired,

some donors reached out to the girls featured in it,

saying they wanted to help fund their education.

I wanted to see how much life had changed for the girls

since their ordeal,

so I came here to Zamfara to meet with them and hear their stories.

THEY SING

The courtyard of this school in the city of Gusau

is buzzing with excitement.

In just a few weeks, these girls will graduate.

In many ways, Hannatu is just like any other teenage girl -

nervous about her exam results, a big fan of BTS and K-dramas.

Amongst the fun and games,

they're all thinking about university

and what they want to do when they leave here.

Ummu is a student at university in the nearby town of Talata Mafara.

Hannatu and Ummu's time in education has not always been so happy.

Gunmen in Nigeria have kidnapped hundreds of girls

from a boarding school...

In 2021, they found themselves

at the centre of an extraordinary story

that made headlines around the world.

Gunmen attacked this rural school they were attending

in the town of Jangebe.

Almost 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped.

They were seized by bandits,

heavily armed groups of men on motorcycles

who have terrorised communities in the region,

attacking towns, villages and seizing people for ransom.

Speaking to BBC Africa Eye a year later,

Hannatu and Ummu described their terrifying ordeal.

The release of the girls who were abducted was met with joy.

But security fears meant their education was put on hold.

Following the BBC's Bandit Warlords Of Zamfara programme,

a group of girls

had their education funded by a nonprofit organisation.

The Illmi Children's Fund paid for them

to attend this boarding school in the state capital.

It offers pupils much better educational opportunities

in a safe environment.

Things that affects our news stories.

After graduating from the school Hannatu attends,

Ummu is now in the first year of

an early childhood education degree course.

Tovia Muo works for the Illmi Children's Fund.

They help support girls across Nigeria.

We are not educated. You don't have a choice.

You don't have a say in how your life,

the course of your life. For example,

if they say, oh, you need to get married, at that point,

you don't even understand what marriage entails.

And that is not what we want for girls. We want girls

to be able to understand the different opportunities

that are out there for them.

And these opportunities are attainable through education.

Their abduction changed the course of their lives

but, through education,

Hannatu and Ummu are determined that it will not define them.

GUNSHOT

While Nigerians in the north and south of the country struggle with

the banditry crisis, in central Nigeria,

a communal conflict has also claimed thousands

of lives and led to fears that the region is

in the grip of what some have called a Christian genocide.

This claim has reached millions,

echoed by campaigners and shared on social media.

It's influencing public opinion and even shaping government policy.

If we attack, it will be fast, vicious and sweet.

But as violence and fear has spread, so too has misinformation.

So are Nigeria's Christians being deliberately targeted

for their faith, or has one of the world's most complex conflicts

become one of its most misunderstood?

Africa Eye's Adejuwon Soyinka has been investigating.

Around 12,000 Nigerians of

all faiths and ethnicities were killed

in armed violence in 2025.

These attacks have many causes,

but all are rooted in decades of state failure.

But beyond their borders,

these overlapping conflicts have increasingly been described

as a deliberate genocide of Nigeria's Christians.

It's the silent genocide unfolding against Christians in Nigeria.

Since the early 2020s, this narrative has spread globally

through social media and political lobbying,

and even prompted the White House to launch military action.

But how credible is the theory?

And where has it come from?

I'm in Lagos to meet the BBC disinformation team.

Olaronke Alo identified

one organisation in particular, Intersociety,

as a key driver of the narrative.

Its statistics are often cited by Christian advocacy groups

and US policymakers as evidence

of targeted violence against Christians in Nigeria.

Intersociety is based in the south-east of Nigeria

and what they do is to track

and monitor human rights abuses and violent attacks,

you know, happening across Nigeria.

But many conflict analysts have expressed serious

concerns about the group's methodology.

Like, for instance, they, you know,

they have this crisis in majorly Christian-dominated states, right?

So then they look at it, if there's an attack,

they sum it up to say that those that were,

you know, that have been killed, will likely be Christians.

And decide that, because the community

is a predominantly Christian community...

Yeah. ..then, if a certain number of people were killed there,

then the majority must necessarily be Christian.

Yeah.

VOICE-OVER: Despite these concerns,

Intersociety's statistics have been repeatedly used

by advocacy groups, commentators and even politicians.

According to Intersociety,

4,020 Christians have been killed by militant Islamists,

with over 2,000 abductions between January and October this year alone.

Since 2009, Islamic jihadists have murdered

more than 50,000 Christians in Nigeria.

How concerned are you about the framing of the,

you know, security concerns or challenges going on in Nigeria?

On social media, the framing has been causing some kind of tension.

Now people are freely saying, oh, it's because they're Christians,

that's why the community has been attacked.

And then sometimes, um,

it's increasing an already tense situation.

I'm off to Jos, Plateau State, in Nigeria's Middle Belt.

Decades of communal conflict have left deep scars in this city.

Now online discourse is fuelling old divisions.

Since 2001, Jos has faced recurring ethnic and religious violence,

leaving the city divided along sectarian lines.

On March 29th this year, Palm Sunday,

gunmen shattered the fragile peace of this divided city.

I'm taken to the junction where, according to community leader

Jeff John Yaro, the gunmen first opened fire...

Look at the one here. This one? Yeah, this very one here.

VOICE-OVER: ..killing everyone in their path,

including those hiding in nearby shops.

We don't know exactly how many

were killed in the attack,

but most of them were Christians.

They just murdered over ten people. Innocent Christians.

Within a short time of him learning of the attack,

Alex Barbir, an American Christian social media influencer

who was in the country doing humanitarian work,

arrived on the scene.

He reported the incident as a deliberate

attack on Christians to his nearly 500,000 followers.

When will it stop?

When will you hear the cries of Nigerians, of Christians?

You can no longer deny genocide.

They're being slaughtered!

But Christians weren't the only victims.

Muslims were also killed - some in the attack,

others in the revenge violence that followed.

As a result of that attack,

and then the misinformation that went viral,

there was reprisal attacks and counterattacks

for a couple of days, and it led to the death of many people.

Many were injured, and then the...

...whole city was like trying to fall back

to days of civil unrest.

And it's terrible, actually.

Among the dead

were two university students who died in the city.

Claims that the University of Jos campus had become

a battleground quickly spread on social media.

According to the University's vice chancellor, the campus was quiet.

When I saw this particular video, I was sitting at home looking at

the video and people were saying, oh, Unijos is on fire.

I decided, "OK, I'm coming." I went round the campus,

the campus was peaceful.

I went to the student village hostel.

Student village hostels were peaceful.

Six months after the Palm Sunday attack,

the motive remains unclear.

No group has claimed responsibility

and police have yet to establish one.

Yet the attack continues to fuel claims

that Nigerian Christians face

an organised campaign of elimination,

with some critics even accusing the government of complicity.

This is where it beats logic because the wife of the president,

for instance, is not just a Christian.

She's a pastor.

The governor of Plateau State is a Christian.

The chairman of Jos North local government,

where the Palm Sunday attack happened,

is also a Christian.

Now, are we suggesting that these Christians

are presiding over the process of exterminating fellow Christians?

That doesn't add up.

It simply just doesn't make sense.

But one fact can't be ignored.

Over the past two decades,

Christians in the Middle Belt have died in their thousands.

And according to Christian advocacy groups

in numbers that are disproportionate to Muslims.

I've come to the village of Dogo Nahawa,

just outside Jos city limits.

For this work that is ahead of us.

So that we will build this house of God...

At the heart of this Christian community is the church

where I meet Masara Kim.

A local reporter and activist,

Kim frequently appears on American Christian channels,

which claim a global audience of hundreds of millions.

When you look at the issues from the bird's-eye view...

...they look rather complicated.

But when you zoom in to the experience of one community,

it points to acts of genocide -

especially in the Middle Belt region,

which is majority Christian.

Despite being a prolific online presence,

Kim believes the power of social media

can cut both ways.

Social media is helping to bring attention to the situation.

It's helping voiceless communities

and voiceless individuals to be heard.

But I must admit also

that it is stirring up a revolution

and contributing to

what we now see as reprisal attacks

and even religious wars in various communities -

including in Jos, where I live.

Claims of Christian genocide have proved divisive in Nigeria...

...but the crisis is far more complex.

Online discourse is fuelling tensions,

leaving millions of Nigerians to live with fear and uncertainty.

Some may stand to benefit from this information war.

Many of them will never set foot here...

...but that is little consolation to those Nigerians

who continue to die in their thousands.

And you can watch the full BBC Eye documentary...

...on BBC iPlayer or on the BBC World Service YouTube channel.

Here's some more content from the World Service

that has been making an impact this week.

BBC Nepali has been on the ground,

reporting from some of the areas hardest hit

by Nepal's devastating floods.

They spoke to a 97-year-old woman

who spent four hours trapped in mud

before being pulled out by excavators to safety.

The team also followed rescue efforts from the air,

speaking to helicopter pilots carrying out missions

in difficult conditions.

Over 1,000 miles east of Nigeria is a region also mired in conflict.

Darfur, in Sudan, has been gripped

by a brutal civil war, on-and-off, since 2003.

But even amidst the violence,

there are moments of love, hope and community.

After years spent documenting war, displacement and loss,

one Sudanese photojournalist

has now turned his lens to a different subject.

DRUMMING AND SINGING

We want to know your feedback about Global Eye

so let us know what you think on social media

using the hashtag #bbcglobaleye.

We'll be back next week.

Goodbye.