Armed men on motorcycles abducted at least 52 people, including children, in a midnight raid on a village and a military installation in Zamfara state, in northwestern Nigeria, residents told the AFP news agency on Sunday. The attack on Kasuwar Daji village, in the Kaura Namoda local government area, began when the gunmen stormed a military base on the community's outskirts, seized rifles, and set a patrol vehicle on fire before sweeping through the village itself, going house to house and seizing residents.

Witnesses said the attackers initially took more than 100 people captive before releasing some. Shehu Abdullahi, a resident whose 12-year-old daughter was among those still being held, confirmed the final toll of 52 abductees. Another resident, Ahmad Usman, described the scene: "They abducted two of my sons' wives and they also took away two teenage girls from my family." A third resident said the gunmen had "overpowered" the military base and noted that this was not the first such assault on the community, pointing to a recent attack on a local police station as well. No soldiers were reported among the kidnapped.

The Nigerian army acknowledged the attack but offered a more limited account. Spokesman Olaniyi Osoba said troops had "successfully" repelled the assault on the base, in which one soldier and one police officer were killed and "an unspecified number of residents" were abducted. The military attributed the attack to "terrorists," a broad term used by Nigerian authorities to describe various armed groups.

Zamfara, a predominantly rural state in Nigeria's northwest, is one of the areas most severely affected by what authorities and analysts call "banditry" — criminal armed groups that have expanded significantly over the past decade. These gangs operate across large stretches of the northwest and central Nigeria, where government presence is limited. They are known to extort farmers, rustle livestock, conduct illegal mining, and carry out mass kidnappings for ransom, which have become a significant revenue stream. The pattern is distinct from, though sometimes overlapping with, the jihadist insurgency that has devastated Nigeria's northeastern states for over a decade.

Mass abductions have become alarmingly routine in Nigeria's northwest. The scale and brazenness of this latest attack — which included a direct assault on a military position — underscores the persistent security vacuum in rural Zamfara and the continued inability of state forces to protect civilian populations, despite ongoing military operations in the region.