Inside Nigeria's battle against terror, corruption and mass kidnappings

Aicha Ibrahim was six months pregnant when they came to her village at night.

The 19-year-old had returned to her birthplace in northwestern Nigeria to celebrate her brother’s marriage to a neighbour.

The bride and eight other women, including Aicha, were meant to spend the night together before the wedding the next day.

At 10pm, around 20 heavily armed bandits arrived on motorcycles and abducted the entire bridal party.

“I was so scared,” she told The Telegraph. “We didn’t know what they were going to do with us, if they were going to rape or kill us”.

The women were forced to march for six hours through the thick Dajin Rugu forest, away from the village of Muji in Katsina State. One of the grandmas struggled to keep pace and was beaten mercilessly.

Fears Nigeria is following Somalia

After they reached the border with Zamfara State, Aicha was held for 13 days in appalling conditions before a £5,000 ransom was paid for her release.

Unfortunately, her story is now common in Africa’s most populous country.

Armed bandits have kidnapped thousands of people in Nigeria’s northwest in recent years - and the violence is getting worse.

Experts fear that Nigeria may be becoming a failed state, with security breaking down in almost all corners of the massive West African country amid a deadly mix of poor leadership, corruption and widespread unemployment.

On top of the kidnappings, Boko Haram and other jihadist groups have started launching recent attacks outside of their historical base in the northeast. Plus there is a small but growing secessionist movement among the Igbo and Yoruba tribes in the south.

“We are just a couple of steps away from what we have in Somalia,” said Kola Alapinni, a human rights lawyer based in the capital city Abuja.

“It will be catastrophic for Africa and the world if Nigeria gets to that point. Nigeria has a population of around 215 million people. If anything happens to Nigeria, millions of people will flood into small West African countries and up to Europe.”

A total of 7,222 Nigerians were killed in the first six months of this year, according to a report released last week by Beacon Consulting, an Abuja-based security firm - a 30 per cent increase on the first six months of last year.

Northwest descends into chaos

The northwest - where Aicha was kidnapped - has seen one of the most shocking descents into chaos.

Previously considered safe, the arid region has seen more than 3,800 people abducted this year.

An estimated 30,000 armed bandits now roam the area, most of whom are associated with the Fulani tribe – a giant ethic group that spreads across many West African and Sahelian countries.

Over the last few years, the gangs have launched steadily more audacious attacks that include kidnapping entire schools and holding up a train from Abuja to Kaduna State in March.

Attahiru Turaki, 50, told The Telegraph that bandits had never ventured into Katsina town, the capital of Katsina State, before he was abducted in June.

“They came to my house at around 2am holding AK-47s,” he said. “I gave them some cash, but they didn’t like my money so they took me and my wife captive.”

Mr Turaki believes that he was seized because he is a well-known businessman and the gangs hoped for a large ransom.

He and his wife were placed on separate motorbikes, sandwiched between two men and driven for 10 hours west towards Zamfara State. They arrived at a huge camp where more than 1,000 bandits lived alongside several hundred captives.

The couple were placed in a “VIP hut” where they stayed for two days, before Mr Turaki paid almost £24,000 for their release.

Others were not so lucky – there was a designated spot to kill people who could not pay the ransom called “the mortuary”.

There is mounting evidence that the gangs are now becoming more ideological, with many either working with jihadists from the northeast or joining terror organisations.

That means they have started killing people rather than releasing them for ransom.

“Bandits killed more people than they abducted in the first three months of this year, which goes against the original notion that bandits do it for money,” said Bulama Bukarti, senior analyst in the Extremism Policy Unit of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. “Their modus operandi is changing.”

Officials said that bandits collaborated with Boko Haram in an “unholy handshake” to launch the attack on the Abuja-Kaduna train. Some of the bandit leaders have reportedly joined the group and its offshoot the Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP) to spread jihadist ideology in the northwest.

Experts say that the little-known Ansaru terrorist group is also taking advantage of the explosion of banditry in the region. Mr Bukarti said the group has launched multiple attacks in Kaduna State against Christians, as part of wider aims to spark a “civil war” in Nigeria.

The group wants Christians to believe that the Fulani ethnic group is responsible for the attacks, which it doesn’t claim responsibility for.

“If you suspect that they are Fulani bandits then Christians will naturally attack Fulani communities in Kaduna State,” Mr Bukarti said.

This dynamic feeds into wider concerns that tensions between Christians and Muslims will spill over into other peaceful parts of the country. In June, armed gunmen killed over 50 people at a church in southwestern Ondo State which is rarely associated with violence.

“If you had asked me a year ago if the northwest would become like the northeast, I would have said no,” Mr Bukarti said. “But the data shows that it is very possible, we are already seeing it as a trend”.

Most analysts blame the explosion of violence on a failure of leadership at the highest level.

Despite being a former army general, President Muhammadu Buhari has failed to make military advances against the criminals or jihadists. His presidency has been criticised for inaction and incompetence.

Mr Alapinni, the lawyer, believes President Buhari has not dealt with the kidnappings because he is also a Fulani from the northwest.

“A lot of people have been calling the president a Fulani apologist,” he said. “He seems to be unwilling or reluctant to deal with the issue properly”.

Other public officials have been accused of profiting from banditry through corruption.

'I wake up worrying they'll come again'

Nigeria’s war on terror faces a similar set of issues. Experts claim that entities within the government are working with and benefiting from Boko Haram.

According to a report, the government was warned 44 times about an upcoming Boko Haram attack on a prison in June, but it did nothing. Former president Goodluck Johnson even announced that he had Boko Haram sympathisers in his cabinet while in office.

Nigeria’s military strategy to combat insurgents is also widely criticised. It has spent billions of dollars on heavy machinery that is ineffective against insurgents who live in forests and rural areas.

The government announced it would buy $1 billion worth of military equipment from the US in April, less than a year after purchasing 12 A-29 Super Tucano Planes. Mr Bukarti says that most of the airstrikes end up killing innocent civilians.

Yet innocent civilians are being harmed regardless.

After she was kidnapped, Aicha spent several days in hospital worried that she might have a miscarriage. Despite losing a lot of weight and catching malaria, the doctors said her baby would be fine.

She is now healthy again - but she still suffers from nightmares.

“I wake up every night, worrying that they will come for me again."