Nura Ahmad, a teacher, said students were just settling into their classrooms at the government primary and secondary school when gunmen “came in dozens, riding on bikes and shooting sporadically”.

The LEA Primary and Secondary School, one of the few educational facilities in this area, sits by the road just at the entrance of the town, tucked in the middle of forests and savannah. Even with its decaying roof and wrecked walls, it gave parents hope for a better future for their children.

“They surrounded the school and blocked all passages … and roads” to prevent help from coming before kidnapping the children in less than five minutes, Ahmad said.

Fourteen-year-old Abdullahi Usman braved gunshots to escape the captors.

“Those who refused to move fast were either forced on the motorcycles or threatened by gunshots fired into the air,” Abdullahi said. “The bandits were shouting: Go! Go! Go!” he said.

Nigerian police and soldiers headed into the forests to search for the missing children, but combing the wooded expanses of north-western Nigeria could take weeks, observers said.

“Since this happened, my brain has been muddled,” said Shehu Lawal, the father of a 13-year-old boy who is among those abducted.

“My child didn’t even eat breakfast before leaving. His mother fainted [upon hearing the news],” he said.

Some villagers like Lawan Yaro, whose five grandchildren are among the abducted, say their hopes are already fading.

People are used to the region’s insecurity, “but it has never been in this manner,” he said.

“We are crying, looking for help from the government and God, but it is the gunmen that will decide to bring the children back,” Yaro said. “God will help us.”

But schools are not the only targets.

More than 3500 people have been abducted across Nigeria in the last year, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project. Some were even kidnapped from their homes in the capital of Abuja. Last year, President Bola Tinubu took office after he successfully campaigned on the promise to tighten security and stop the kidnappings.

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Experts say it is easy to smuggle in arms, used in kidnappings, over poorly policed borders. More than half of the country’s 1500-kilometre border with Niger, for instance, stretches across the north-west. Though mostly covered in woodland savannah, the region also has vast ungoverned and unoccupied forests where organised gangs hide and keep their kidnap victims.

In 2022, parliament passed a bill to penalise ransom payments, but Nigerian kidnappers are known for their brutality, forcing many families to succumb to their demands.

The military continues to conduct air raids and special military operations in the region as well as respond to pockets of crisis across the country but is fatigued by the 14-year Islamist insurgency in the north-east. Armed gangs also keep on multiplying in the region where many are poor and often work with extremists, seeking to expand their operations.

The military previously said that sometimes kidnap victims were used as “human shields” to prevent aerial bombardments of the forests where their captors hide.

The gangs are “adapting their strategies and further entrenching themselves in the north-west through extortion,” said James Barnett, a researcher specialising in West Africa at the US-based Hudson Institute.

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“Their mentality is that they should be allowed free rein to do what they please in the north-west and that if the state challenges them, directly or indirectly, they will have to respond and show their strength,” Barnett said.

More than a dozen checkpoints and military trucks now dot the dangerous 89-kilometre road running from Kuriga town to the city of Kaduna. But the soldiers are likely to be redeployed elsewhere soon, depending on security needs.

People in Kuriga can only hope their children are returned unharmed and the safety they now feel with the presence of military personnel endures.

Hamza, the mother whose five children were kidnapped, hopes the government will arrest the kidnappers and return the students. “The gunmen don’t allow us to have peace.”

AP