At least 37 students remain missing after jihadist militants raided a secondary school in northeastern Nigeria on Monday, abducting pupils as they sat their final exams. The attack took place in Lassa, a town in the Askira Uba district of Borno state — a region at the heart of Nigeria's long-running insurgency — and left three people dead, including a soldier and a teacher.

The assault was carried out by fighters from the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), according to the Nigerian military. Authorities initially reported that ten of the abducted students had been rescued and that only one remained unaccounted for, but a list shared by a local government councillor, Ijagla Ijabila, told a starkly different story: 37 names, along with the students' genders and their parents' mobile phone numbers, were circulated among journalists and verified independently by an intelligence source.

The attack is the latest in a long series of school abductions that have plagued Nigeria's north and central regions. The tactic — kidnapping students, often for ransom — is employed both by jihadist groups and by non-ideological armed gangs known locally as "bandits." Nigeria's insurgency dates to 2009, when the jihadist group Boko Haram launched its campaign in the northeast. The most notorious episode remains the 2014 abduction of nearly 300 schoolgirls from Chibok, Borno state, which drew global attention. ISWAP emerged as a splinter faction from Boko Haram and has continued to operate across the Lake Chad basin region.

The crisis shows no sign of abating. In May 2025, jihadists kidnapped more than 40 pupils from Mussa village in Borno state; those children remain in captivity. That same month, suspected militants seized dozens of schoolchildren from three schools in Oyo state in southwest Nigeria — a region generally considered the country's most stable — marking an unusually rare incursion into the south.

Analysts have warned that after a relative decline in violence from its peak roughly a decade ago, attacks have intensified again in 2025. The recurrence of school raids underscores both the vulnerability of educational infrastructure in conflict-affected areas and the continuing failure to secure the safe return of previously abducted children, raising urgent questions about the protection of students across the country.