Under the broad shadow of a neem tree in a quiet Katsina village, a woman sits with her scarf clutched tight and eyes soaked in grief. Her name, for her safety, is Aisha Mohammed — not her real name. She’s 35, soft-spoken, and carries the unbearable weight of a story too horrifying to forget.
Aisha was a captive — abducted from her home in Dutsin-ma Local Government Area, Katsina State, during a midnight raid on April 18, 2025. Bandits stormed her village just past 2am, firing shots into the night. Her husband, a local vigilante, tried to defend their home. He never returned. “I didn’t even know he was dead. For weeks, I prayed he’d come and rescue me,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “But he died that same night.”
What followed for Aisha was three months of torture in the forest — months where she gave birth to twin boys, only to watch them murdered in cold blood.
“They said my babies cried too much… that the sound could attract soldiers,” she recounted, each word landing like a wound. “They told me, ‘Your twins are a risk. We’re ending the problem today.’ The next thing I saw was blood.”
The bandits didn’t stop at killing the newborns. In front of Aisha and other horrified captives, they fed the dismembered remains to dogs.
“I begged. I pleaded. I even offered to take them far away into the bush,” she said, wiping her tears with the edge of her scarf. “But they didn’t care. They laughed… said I talked too much.”
She fainted that day. “I died and came back,” she muttered.
In the camp, the suffering was relentless. Aisha described how she birthed her twins on the cold forest floor with no help, only the frightened hands of fellow abducted women. There was no food — just once a day, they were fed tuwon dawa, a rough dough of guinea corn served with a soured gruel.
But the hunger wasn’t the worst.
“Some of us were raped every day,” Aisha said, barely above a whisper. “They’d do it in front of others. If you resisted, they’d beat you. If you cried, they mocked you.”
And beyond the horror, she saw something else: wealth. Staggering wealth.
“These men were not poor. I saw sacks filled with N1000 notes — like rice bags. When they ran out of paper to roll weed, they used naira notes. Hundreds of millions. Just there, in the bush,” she revealed.
Their conversations were even more disturbing. She overheard them plotting a mass kidnapping at the Federal University Dutsin-ma. “They said professors and students bring bigger ransom,” she said. “They even mentioned buying anti-aircraft guns after that.”
One village — Sabon Gari Safana — was marked next on their hit list. “They claimed the villagers were working with security forces and said they’d clear everyone out,” she said.
Aisha’s escape came by sheer luck. One night, the guards slept off. She and five other women ran barefoot into the dark, unsure if they’d live or be caught.
She lived. But countless others haven’t. And many more remain in captivity — forgotten by a system that should have protected them.
Despite their forest hideouts, the bandits she encountered had access to smartphones, strong network, YouTube tutorials on guns, and even real-time news updates. Yet, they operated freely.
“They always said, ‘The government can’t track us here.’ And truly, no one ever came,” Aisha said.
Her story is more than one woman’s trauma — it is a wake-up call. A warning that Nigeria’s intelligence system, ransom-tracking, and rural security operations are broken in places where the price is paid in blood and silence.
Aisha is now under trauma care in a safe location. She’s trying to rebuild. But every day she wakes, she remembers. The forest. The pain. The twins.
And until real justice is served, her voice must echo — loud and clear — for those still trapped in terror’s shadow.
