Thread by @JoeWSJ

It's almost impossible to believe, but 6 years after the kidnap of 276 schoolgirls ignited the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, Nigeria is again reeling from a mass school abduction by Boko Haram, this time of what appears to be more than 300 boys. A thread: wsj.com/articles/boko-…

The students were seized from an all-boys boarding school in Katsina, northwest Nigeria and marched deep into a nearby forest. Details of the attack, in a remote region with patchy cell phone reception, remain murky, including the true tally of the missing.

Local officials say 333 of the school’s 800 students are missing and assumed captive. If confirmed, that would make it one of the largest mass kidnappings of schoolchildren in history—and bigger than the abduction in Chibok.

The kidnapping happened on Friday night, and as with Chibok, news from has been trickling out since then.  Nigerian security officials say surveillance aircraft and American drones are flying over the areas where they believe the boys have been taken.

The claim of responsibility by Boko Haram "Imam" Abubakar Shekau has surprised some analysts, as it marks a big departure from the group's usual area of operations.

But Shekau, who swore allegiance to ISIS in 2014 then split from them in 2016, has been busily exploiting the deteriorating security situation to rebuild old networks & cultivate new ones with criminal groups. In recent videos, he's boasted of a growing reach in the Northwest.

The claim also comes after two blood-soaked weeks where Shekau has reannounced himself as the key player in Nigeria's overlapping northern insurgencies. In late November, his fighters abducted and killed some 70 farmers near Maiduguri. Last week, they killed 28 in southern Niger.

It may be the case that the kidnapping was done by a coalition of actors--fighters loyal to Shekau alongside more mercenary "bandits" for hire. BUT the details and the choreography of the Katsina operation are eerily similar to the Chibok abduction.

One student who escaped the Katsina captors—Usama Male—recalled an MO familiar to anyone who has studied Chibok: armed men in military fatigues enter school campus shortly after 10pm, falsely tell students they are soldiers, then march them at gunpoint into the forest.

Whichever group directed the attack, it is particularly embarrassing for President Muhammadu Buhari, a native of Katsina, who has repeatedly claimed that Boko Haram and its affiliates have been technically defeated.

But since last year, militant groups have been advancing, overrunning smaller military bases and looting weapons. According to @CFR_org, the period since July 2018 has been deadlier for Nigeria’s security-service personnel than any other time in the decadelong conflict.

We wrote last month about how deteriorating security across Nigeria’s northeast had made its highways some of the world's most dangerous roads. wsj.com/articles/outsi…

@bulamabukarti says of the Katsina attack: “Only in Nigeria have we seen militants walk into a high school and abduct the whole student body... The security situation across the north is rapidly deteriorating. An attack on Nigeria’s children is an attack on the country’s future.”

The question now is whether Nigerian government can get the boys back. For the Swiss-led mediation to succeed in bringing 103 of the Chibok girls home, it took 3 years. 112 are still missing. Many presumed dead.

If Shekau has the schoolboys in his custody then we can expect more echoes of the Chibok kidnap and the viral videos that came in its aftermath... Recall it took 3 weeks from the Chibok kidnap to @MichelleObama’s tweeting #BringBackOurGirls and the deployment of US drones.

Hopefully the Chibok experience has also given Nigeria’s government the knowledge of how to bring those boys home. #BringBackOurBoys