The Man Who Was Kidnapped Twice
Izuchukwu Anyanwu, a university lecturer in Abuja, Nigeria, came home one evening and settled in for a quiet night. It was September, 2023, and he had spent the afternoon playing soccer with friends on the campus of Veritas University, where he taught. He was tired and was running a fever, so he took a shower and had some tea and bread; he also took medicine for malaria, in case he had contracted it. His wife, Immaculata, put their infant daughter to sleep, then went to bed herself. Around midnight, Anyanwu was watching a political-news program on TV when he heard a noise at the outer door of the veranda. It sounded as though someone was trying to break in. There had been a power outage that night, and he was using a solar-energy system to run the TV. He opened a window but couldn’t see who was there. “I was scared,” he told me recently. “I started shouting, ‘Who is that? Who is that?’ ”
At thirty-eight, Anyanwu is slim and bearded, with a youthful face. He grew up in a small town in the southeast of the country, then went to Veritas, a Catholic university, to get a master’s in political theory. He eventually was offered a teaching job, and rented a place in Zuma II, a neighborhood just outside the university’s gates where many faculty members live. It’s on the northern outskirts of the city in the rocky foothills of some nearby mountains. “I felt safe,” he said. “My hope was to build up my academic profile and eventually have my own house here.” His daughter would be turning one in February, and the family was planning a big celebration.
As the noises grew louder, Anyanwu tried calling a neighborhood-watch group, then some friends, but the calls didn’t connect. His wife woke up, and the two of them screamed out the window for help. Then the intruders broke the locks. “That is when I saw that it was over,” he said. Seventeen men entered his house, some wearing camouflage and carrying AK-47s, rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, and machine guns. “They were armed like people going to war,” he recalled. They made Anyanwu and Sunday Ujah, a twenty-year-old man who lived with the family and helped with housework, lie on the floor in the sitting room, then demanded that Immaculata show them where the valuables were kept. Anyanwu protested, telling them that he was not a politician and had no money. Since there was little of value, the men took rice, groundnuts, soft drinks, and powdered milk. A few finished Anyanwu’s leftover tea and bread.
The men took away Anyanwu’s and Ujah’s phones, and brought the two to a neighboring house to kidnap a local trader. Then they all set off on foot toward the mountains. The captives carried the stolen food. Anyanwu was still in his house clothes: shorts, a polo shirt, and slippers. They walked through the forest for hours. The area was wild and uninhabited, but the bandits moved through it with practiced ease. “There were those that went ahead of us and then gave signals for us to continue,” Anyanwu said. The kidnappers were all Fulani, a Muslim-majority ethnic group whose members live largely in the north of the country. Considering their sophisticated weaponry, he wondered if they were associated with the Islamist militant group Boko Haram, but the men didn’t give a name for their group or profess any particular ideology.
They set up camp in a forest near a village called Tunga Maje. Anyanwu knew their location because he saw the address of a local manufacturer on a package of bread that the kidnappers bought. He and the other two hostages were kept in a cave. It was the rainy season, and he had to put leaves on the wet ground to sleep. He could hear the voices of another group of hostages somewhere in the forest, out of sight. “They kept them apart from us,” he said.
The men asked what each of the hostages did for a living. “They were trying to profile us to know how much they could demand,” Anyanwu said. He tried to downplay his position at the university, but they set a ransom of a hundred and fifty million naira, or about two hundred thousand dollars, to release him and Ujah. “I told them, ‘If I had such an amount, you wouldn’t have been able to access me,’ ” he said. “ ‘You saw the house I was living in.’ ” They eventually agreed to about half that figure. They gave him his phone back to call his family, but he couldn’t remember his wife’s new phone number. He called his uncle, and then his priest. In the days that followed, he called other relatives. While he was on the phone, the kidnappers beat him with machetes, wires, and the butts of their guns, so that his family would know he was in danger. Before each phone call, he would get excited to hear a familiar voice, then remember the brutal beating to come.
After a few weeks, when the bandits saw that he could not raise the money, they relented, settling for a ransom of about six thousand dollars, which his sister brought to a transfer point. But several days passed, and they still didn’t release him and Ujah. The bandits finally told Anyanwu that they had decided his family hadn’t paid enough. The next day, one of the men brought him before the oga, their boss, who said that they would cut off his leg as punishment. The oga asked him to choose which leg to lose. Anyanwu started crying and begged for mercy, saying that he would bleed to death. “But the oga insisted,” he said. He chose the left one.
Kidnapping is now so rampant in Nigeria that it seems as if everyone knows someone who has been taken. People have been kidnapped while driving on interstate roads, while worshipping at church, and while sleeping in their homes. The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s late father, a professor, was once kidnapped on the road between his home town and the university town where he lived; he was released three days later, after his family paid a ransom. The mother of the former finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was taken; so were an Anglican archbishop and his wife. At least forty-seven hundred Nigerians were kidnapped between July, 2024, and June, 2025, and more than seven hundred of them were killed, according to the research firm S.B.M. Intelligence. Victims’ families and friends collectively paid more than two and a half billion naira, or about one and a half million dollars, to kidnappers during that time—double the figure from the year before. This study relied on cases reported in the media, meaning that the real total is almost certainly higher. The kidnap-for-ransom industry has become one of the most lucrative in the country.
The crisis began in the nineties, in the Niger Delta. Militant groups had formed there to oppose the exploitation and pollution of their communities by foreign oil companies such as Shell, and they began abducting oil workers and demanding ransoms from the companies as a form of protest. In the two-thousands, criminal gangs in the southeast began emulating the practice—but as a way of making money rather than as an act of resistance. They often seized people from vehicles on busy roads. “People could not go home for Christmas,” Abubakar Siddique Mohammed, the director of a Nigerian think tank called the Centre for Democratic Development Research and Training, told me. The gangs would pay cattle herders in the vast, ungoverned forests of northern Nigeria to hold the hostages until ransoms were paid. “That is how some of them were actually initiated into kidnapping,” Mohammed said.
In 2009, Boko Haram, based in the northeast of the country, began a campaign of guerrilla attacks and suicide bombings, in an effort to establish a caliphate in the region. It declared itself against Western-style education, and began kidnapping children from schools and forcing them to convert to Islam. Fighters raped the girls and married them against their will. In 2014, Boko Haram took almost three hundred girls from a secondary school in Chibok; the whereabouts of some ninety are still unknown. Last November, the group is believed to have kidnapped about three hundred students from a Catholic school, some as young as five.
In the northwest, the practice spread through less ideological conflicts. There are ongoing disputes in the region between farmers from the Hausa ethnic group and Fulani cattle herders over access to grazing land. Attacks between the communities have displaced thousands of people. Some young herders turned to organized crime. “Initially, they would go to a village, attack, and extract money from the local notables,” Mohammed said. “Then they moved to blocking local highways to seize whatever is in the vehicles. Then they started kidnapping people.” Today, according to a report from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, some thirty thousand armed Fulani militants operate in Nigeria. Some groups consist of only a couple of dozen people; others, several hundred.
The groups are usually named for their leaders. One of the most brutal is led by Bello Turji, a Fulani man believed to be in his early thirties. Turji uses the language of Fulani liberation; he told a Nigerian newspaper called the Daily Trust that he had “been forced into banditry” because of “a genocide being committed against the Fulani,” and that a group of farmers had stolen a thousand cattle from his family and killed several of his relatives. His group now carries out kidnappings, extortions, and evictions in farming communities. A few years ago, a pseudonymous musician released a song calling Turji a hero, angering many Nigerians. A group led by a man named Ado Aleru, which kidnapped twenty-five schoolgirls last November, has promised to stop its campaign if the government provides alternative means of livelihood for its followers, along with better schools and hospitals and access to clean water. (Turji and Aleru did not respond to requests for comment.)
“When we started our work, they had grievances, and they were eager to discuss them,” Mohammed said of the militant groups. But the ones he sees today “are very dangerous, because they are just criminals.” Young bandits brag about their kidnappings on TikTok. A screenshot from one man’s account shows him in a traditional Fulani tunic and turban, wearing dark sunglasses and flashy rings; he has a stack of cash in one hand and another stack in his mouth—like a nomadic herder who doubles as a rapper. A kidnapping group led by a man named Kachalla Mati also makes money from illegal gold mining in the state of Zamfara, and has begun forcing nearby residents to work in the mines. “There are now no-go areas” of the country, Mohammed said. “They have been taken over by bandits, and nobody passes there.”
The government’s efforts to alleviate the crisis have been ineffective. Mike Ejiofor, a former director of the Department of State Services, the country’s domestic-intelligence agency, told me that the police and the military do not have the resources to deal with the situation. “There is inadequate funding,” he said. In 2010, Nigeria awarded a four-hundred-and-seventy-million-dollar contract to a Chinese company to install CCTV cameras around Abuja; there is still not a single working camera, and the money is unaccounted for. A government program called the Safe Schools Initiative was given thirty million dollars in 2014 to provide guards for schools, create security plans for them, and work with the government to develop a rapid-response system for attacks. None of that appears to have been done. Investigators of the program’s implementation found that more than sixteen hundred children have been abducted since its work began. (A government spokesperson said that the initiative is ongoing, but that local compliance levels are unknown.)
Paying a ransom is technically illegal in Nigeria, a crime that carries a minimum prison sentence of fifteen years under the country’s Terrorism Prevention and Prohibition Act. In reality, though, it’s often the only way to get people back alive. Even the government has been accused of secretly paying ransoms for cases that make international news. A former intelligence official told me that the Office of the National Security Adviser has paid ransoms in at least a few high-profile kidnapping cases. (A spokesperson for the Nigerian government maintains that it does not pay ransoms.) Payments are mostly made in cash, with the money routed through multiple middlemen. “No government will openly admit that it has paid ransom to criminals,” the former intelligence official said. “That will serve incentives to the criminals.”
Still, the cycle continues. In 2022, terrorists kidnapped dozens of people from a train between Abuja and Kaduna, and Tukur Mamu, a newspaper publisher, negotiated their release. The government is now prosecuting Mamu for coördinating with Boko Haram to demand ransom money from the families and to take a cut for himself. (Mamu denies the charge, and says that the families themselves suggested paying the ransoms.) Ejiofor told me that he, too, was kidnapped, in 2017, while driving across the country. But he would not admit to paying a ransom. “I was just freed,” he said. “In my position as a former official, I don’t encourage payment of ransoms, and I wouldn’t want to be seen as paying a ransom.”
In the forest, Anyanwu placed his left leg on a rock, and the oga told one of the men to get a sharp machete. But after a moment the oga called the man off. “They said my people need to bring the money quickly,” Anyanwu said.
Not long afterward, the group heard drones in the sky and started moving again, perhaps to evade capture by the military. They trekked for two days to a big camp. It looked like a market, with at least three hundred bandits. “They were on motorbikes,” Anyanwu recalled. “They were shouting, firing guns. What scared me the most was the ages I was seeing. You see children who are ten, fourteen. They were the ones busy servicing the guns, assembling them.”
While en route, the bandits had kidnapped several more hostages: two farmers, an elderly school principal, and a man who had met with the group to deliver a ransom for his brother and was abducted himself. The kidnappers had begun making Ujah fetch water, gather firewood, and carry out other tasks. So, while most of the hostages were chained to one another, Ujah was allowed to roam. One night in December, Anyanwu woke at about 4 A.M. to learn that Ujah and the two farmers had run away. The bandits caught one of the farmers, tied him to a tree, and began beating him. “Blood was gushing from his body,” Anyanwu recalled. “We pleaded for them to stop.” But Ujah escaped.
Meanwhile, Immaculata, Anyanwu’s wife, was struggling to get enough money for his additional ransom payment. She was going house to house to beg for contributions. By January, Anyanwu was wasting away. His slippers had fallen apart, and his clothes were torn. The hostages ate only white rice, and not every day; the water they drank was dirty. They washed themselves in a river just once or twice a month, without soap. “My skin was peeling off,” Anyanwu said. “The kidnappers were calling me ‘skeleton.’ They would look at me and start laughing.” But, later that month, Anyanwu got his own chance to escape. The hostages were being watched by a bandit who was epileptic, and he had a seizure. They splashed water on his face to revive him. As he came to, they asked him for the keys to their shackles so that they could urinate, and he relented out of gratitude. Once free, they fled in different directions.
Anyanwu ran all night, for nine hours. Finally, he lay down under a tree and slept. When he woke up, he crossed a ravine and saw cigarette butts and human skulls on the ground. “I was scared,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do.” He was determined to make it home for his daughter’s first birthday, on February 4th.
The next morning, he encountered a Fulani herdsman, who let him use his phone to call his wife. Immaculata had just dropped off another ransom payment of about forty-five hundred dollars. The money was lost, but she was glad that he was free. After he hung up, the herdsman made his own call, and, very quickly, four men from a different bandit group arrived with AK-47s. Anyanwu pleaded with them for help. The bandits took him to their camp, where they gave him medicine and food, and expressed sympathy about his long captivity. They seemed kind. “I thought this was the point that they would let me go home,” Anyanwu said. But that night they chained him up and told him to call his wife for another ransom. He was a hostage again.
The violence in Nigeria has become a cause célèbre for the American right. Since Donald Trump’s first term, Christian activist groups, including one called Aid to the Church in Need, have been lobbying the U.S. government to do something about the persecution of Nigerian Christians by Islamist groups. They made progress last year, when Riley Moore, a Republican congressman from West Virginia, introduced a resolution condemning violence against Christians in Muslim-majority countries, and Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, introduced a bill calling for sanctions against Nigeria. Activists also met with Sebastian Gorka, a member of the National Security Council, and other White House officials.
Soon afterward, Trump announced that Islamist terrorists were kidnapping and killing Christians in Nigeria. Celebrities have since joined in. The rapper Nicki Minaj, who has recently taken a political turn to the right, testified before the United Nations about the oppression of Christians. The TV host Bill Maher called the situation an attempted genocide. I recently passed a billboard in Manhattan with the words “END THE GENOCIDE IN NIGERIA,” next to an illustration of a woman holding a baby in front of a burning church. Last Christmas, Trump, with the knowledge of Bola Tinubu, the President of Nigeria, launched an air strike against the Islamic State in Nigeria, a terrorist group; it hit largely empty forest encampments and farmland. A Nigerian newspaper reported that villagers were visiting the site of the bombing to collect metal fragments and then selling them to scrap dealers.
In Nigeria, the air strike prompted confusion. “When the allegation of genocide came, many of us were shocked,” Sunday Dare, the Nigerian President’s special media adviser, said. “We said, ‘Genocide?’ ” Boko Haram has waged an insurgency for nearly two decades, killing tens of thousands of Nigerians. But in recent years the group has splintered and inspired copycats. Some, such as the Islamic State West Africa Province, take a hard ideological line. Others are motivated more by money than by religion. Most operate in the Muslim-majority north, and most of their victims are Muslims, too, not Christians. Naseer Mu’azu, the security commissioner in Katsina State, told me, “Muslims bear the brunt more than anybody.”
Northern Nigeria has the highest illiteracy rates in the country and twice as much poverty as the south. The entire country is experiencing an economic crisis because of inflation caused by the recent removal of a fuel subsidy. Kidnapping has become an alternative to the formal economy. The bandits’ networks are difficult to identify, in part because they are now so deeply rooted in their communities’ economic life. “You don’t know who is the informant, who is divulging information to the bandits,” Mu’azu said. Katsina State has begun cultivating locals who might provide intelligence, but recruitment remains difficult.
This year, the U.S. sent two hundred military personnel to assist Nigeria in counterterrorism efforts. Trump has launched further strikes in the country. But Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, a Muslim cleric who has acted as a middleman between the government and bandit groups, told me that economic development would be more effective than bombs. “The military approach cannot solve this problem,” he said. “Indiscriminate bombardment is only going to worsen the situation, because we will have innocent casualties. People will start uniting against the United States.”
Muslims bear the brunt of both the kidnappings and the military actions against the kidnappers. Since 2014, hundreds of people have been killed in Nigerian air strikes intended for bandit groups. In 2023, a bombing accidentally killed eighty-five people during a Muslim religious festival in Kaduna. This past April, a strike killed a hundred civilians in Yobe State, including several children. In May, Trump posted online that U.S. and Nigerian forces had killed a leader of the Islamic State in Nigeria named Abu Bakr al-Mainuki, during a “powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria.” Nigerians were perplexed: their government had announced two years before that it had killed Mainuki. The Nigerian government then clarified that the killing in 2024 had been a case of mistaken identity.
Kidnappings in Nigeria target the rich and the poor, the prominent and the unlucky. Last December, Praise Idesimi, a twenty-five-year-old nursing student, was travelling home on a bus from Veritas University for Christmas break. After she’d been on the road for nine hours, men with covered faces, carrying guns, stopped the vehicle and ordered the passengers to get out. “I was so scared,” Idesimi said. “I thought I was going to die.” One of the kidnappers cocked his gun at her and accused her of staring at him. Later, the group released some of the children, and the bus driver took them to the main road. He never came back, and she wondered then whether he had been working with the bandits all along.
The kidnappers made the hostages walk through the forest for almost a week, travelling each night for ten hours. During the day, they were tied up and forced to lie on the ground in the sun; they were beaten with sticks. Idesimi’s ransom was set at about three thousand dollars. At one point, she and the other hostages tried calling the bus company for help. “They said it was none of their business,” Idesimi said. (A manager at the bus company told me, “It is not our business to negotiate with kidnappers. We are not security.”) After six days, her family paid her ransom, and she was released.
I visited Idesimi afterward at Veritas. The campus was calm, but on guard. Young people walked freely among the terra-cotta buildings and mango trees, but there were military posts at the gates. The kidnapping crisis “keeps the university tensed up at every moment,” Hyacinth Ichoku, the vice-chancellor of Veritas, said. “Students are afraid. Their parents are worried.” The university has increased its security: Ichoku said that members of the police, state security services, and local watch groups patrolled the campus. He rarely slept through the night; he usually woke up several times to check in with campus security. I sat with Idesimi in Ichoku’s office. She appeared younger than her age, with a soft voice and a thin frame. She was seeing a therapist, but still had nightmares. She was having difficulty keeping up with her living expenses, because her family was in debt after paying her ransom; Ichoku said that he would help arrange some kind of financial assistance.
Nigerians are not always better off when they seek help from the police. Adoyi Omale, a lecturer and a politician who lives in Abuja, was kidnapped from his car while driving out of town with his niece and two builders who were working on his home. “It was broad daylight, at around two o’clock in the afternoon,” he recalled. His family paid a ransom of about six thousand dollars for the release of Omale and one of the builders. “I went straight to the police,” he said. Instead of receiving help, he was given a bill for the money they had spent on the case: getting his niece and the other builder back to Abuja, hiring local vigilantes to look for Omale, holding his car at the station. The total was about twelve hundred dollars. “I just paid them,” he said. “I wanted to get myself back to Abuja.” (A spokeswoman for the police blamed this on the actions of a rogue officer. “It’s wrong,” she said, adding, “It’s bad enough that we could not stop the kidnapping.”)
In January, 2024, Mansoor Al-Kadriyar, a civil servant, was kidnapped with his five daughters from his home in Abuja. “They marched us all out,” he said. Kadriyar called his brother, who called the police, and when they arrived there was a shoot-out. But the bandits overpowered the police and took the hostages into the woods. Kadriyar’s daughter Nadheerah had been unable to cover her hair with a hijab before they left, which made her feel exposed. Her older sister Nabeeha was the bravest among them; even when the bandits pointed a gun at her, she didn’t flinch. Kadriyar agreed to pay a ransom of about sixty thousand dollars, then was released so that he could gather the money.
When he returned to Abuja, he learned that his brother had been killed in the shoot-out. A relative started an online fund-raising campaign for his daughters’ ransom. But a week passed, and they still didn’t have enough money. The bandits then called to say that they had killed Nabeeha, in punishment. “It was a calamity,” Kadriyar said.
After Nabeeha’s death, more donations came in, and the family paid the ransom. Kadriyar’s remaining daughters were released. “We were celebrating, we were thanking God,” he said. He grieved for his daughter and brother, but tried to focus on his gratitude that the rest of them had survived. When I visited the family, Nadheerah could joke darkly about her ordeal. “Before it happened, I was trying to lose weight,” she said. “So I was kind of happy that I was walking. I was getting my steps in.” Kadriyar had since moved his family to an apartment in a more secure part of Abuja, but it was expensive. “We are not finding life easy,” he said.
On February 4, 2024, the day of his daughter’s birthday, Anyanwu’s captors released him. Local motorbike-taxi drivers had brought money and phone cards from his sister, along with food, power banks, solar panels, and two new motorcycles. One of the drivers dropped Anyanwu off at the nearest highway, and his sister picked him up and took him to a hotel. The next day, he went to the hospital to be evaluated, then finally returned home. His wife cried when she saw him. She, too, had lost weight. “I couldn’t recognize my wife. My baby didn’t know me,” he said. Immaculata told me, “My life was shattered. I was traumatized and very depressed. But I didn’t give up.”
Kidnappings in Nigeria have continued unabated. In Kogi State, bandits recently raided an orphanage and took twenty-three children hostage. In Katsina State, a retired military general and his wife were kidnapped from their car; the general later died in captivity. More than eleven hundred people were kidnapped in northern Nigeria in the first three months of 2026, according to Amnesty International.
Earlier this year, I visited Anyanwu and his wife at their home in Abuja. Their bungalow had modest furniture, and sunlight filled the sitting room. Anyanwu marvelled at the beauty of Immaculata, who was wearing a leopard-print dress and a matching headband. They seemed protective of each other: she stayed close as Anyanwu and I talked, keeping her eyes on him. “We are still not feeling comfortable,” he said. “The incident is always with us.”
He was looking for academic opportunities abroad. If they had had the means, he said, they would have left the country as soon as he was released from the hospital. But they had to pay back the money they had borrowed for the three ransoms. “There was no institutional support, nothing,” Anyanwu said. “The support I got was from my friends, the school, of course, family, and the church.” These days, he can’t fall asleep until after midnight—the time when the bandits broke into his house. Before his abduction, Anyanwu had heard of people being kidnapped, but had not thought much about it. He said, “I never knew that it could happen to me.” ♦