Two Christians Killed, 18 Seized in Kaduna Raid

Around 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday 4 November 2026, armed attackers laid siege to Akwando village in Kachia Local Government Area, southern Kaduna State, Nigeria, killing two Christians and abducting about 18 people. The hostages number 15 females and three males, including infants aged between four months and one year, mostly married women and children from one extended family, the family of Reuben Buhari, co-founder of the Resilience Aid Dialogue Initiative. No public response from the Nigerian authorities or police has been reported.

Hold that number for a moment. Eighteen people taken from their beds in the dark, among them babies who are four months old. Not soldiers, not officials, not anyone who could fight back.

Mothers, children, and infants, carried off into the night while their village slept. This is the reality of life for Christians in parts of southern Kaduna, and it happened again this week.

What Happened in Akwando Village

The attack came without warning in the small hours of the morning, when the village was at its most defensless. The attackers surrounded Akwando and struck fast, killing two Christians and gathering up their captives before disappearing.

Two married men were named in the reports, Irimiya Galadima, 41, and Benjamin Danlami, 31. What the available accounts do not make clear is whether those two men were among the dead or among the captives, and that uncertainty is part of the agony for their families.

Most of the seized belong to one extended family, and that detail matters. This was not a random sweep through a village. The attackers took the family of Reuben Buhari, a man who co-founded an organisation that speaks out for victims of exactly this kind of violence.

Whether the family was targeted because of who Buhari is, or simply because they were there, is not something the reports can say. Either way, the man who documents these attacks for the world has now lived through one himself.

A Village Hit Twice in Six Months

Akwando has been through this before, and recently. On 26 April 2026, nine schoolchildren from the village were kidnapped, and they were only freed after 36 days in captivity. A village that has already watched its children disappear once has now watched its mothers and babies disappear too.

The trauma does not reset between attacks. It piles up, year after year, until a community is hollowed out from the inside.

That is the pattern across southern Kaduna, and it is why this raid cannot be read as an isolated crime. Villages are hit, families are broken, people flee, and then the same villages are hit again.

The people who stay are the ones with nowhere else to go, or the ones who refuse to abandon the land their families have farmed for generations. They pay for that refusal in blood.

The Pattern Buhari Describes

Buhari says the captors deliberately kill male hostages, and the numbers he cites are chilling. At Ariko on 5 April, 37 worshippers were kidnapped. Seventeen died in the camp, and only eight ever returned, all women and children.

At Awon on 20 April, 11 people were kidnapped, and the four who came back were women and children. The men, in his account, do not come back. They are killed, and their families are left to wonder for the rest of their lives.

This is a different horror from the kidnappings that make headlines in other parts of the world, where hostages are usually held for ransom and released when the money is paid. Here, according to Buhari, the taking of hostages serves another purpose entirely.

The men are eliminated, the women and children are eventually let go, and the village is left weaker, smaller, and more afraid than before. It is a slow erasure, carried out one raid at a time.

A Wider Accusation in Southern Kaduna

Southern thought leaders accuse the Fulani Ethnic Militia of a deliberate campaign: the selective mass elimination of male Christians in order to seize their land. The accusation is stark, and it is backed by the scale of the displacement.

Over 110 villages in Kajuru alone have been chased away as of October 2026. Across the region, at least 245 villages have been displaced, with over 500,000 people driven from their homes.

Those numbers should stop anyone in their tracks. Half a million people is not a local dispute.

It is a population the size of a city, scattered across Nigeria, living in camps or with relatives, waiting for a home they may never get back. And behind every one of those numbers is a night like the one Akwando lived through this week, a night when the attackers came at half past midnight and took whoever they could carry away.

Silence From the Authorities

What makes the suffering worse is the silence that follows it. No public response from the Nigerian authorities or police to the 4 November raid has been reported.

The families of the 18 captives do not know if anyone is looking for their loved ones, or if anyone even plans to. They are left to wait, to pray, and to hope that someone, somewhere, is paying attention.

This is not the first Kaduna story of its kind in recent days. The 17 Kaduna Worshippers Died in Captivity, 4 Still Held report covered a different and earlier tragedy, the worshippers who died in captivity after the Ariko and Awon kidnappings.

The Akwando raid is a new attack, on a new village, with new victims, and it must not be confused with the earlier one. Each of these stories is its own wound, and each deserves to be told on its own terms.

The wider crisis in Nigeria has been documented again and again, from the Christians Killed in Nigeria Today: Pastor Buries Four Congregants After Midnight Attack (2026) report to the warnings raised in the Latest: US Congressman Riley Moore Says Christians in Nigeria Still Face Unspeakable Violence November 2026 report. The pattern is the same each time: a midnight attack, a village shattered, and a silence from those with the power to stop it.

For now, the fate of the 18 people seized from Akwando is unknown. Whether Irimiya Galadima and Benjamin Danlami are among the dead or among the captives is unknown. Whether the infants, four months to a year old, are alive and safe is unknown.

What is known is that a family that speaks out for victims has become a victim itself, and that southern Kaduna has lost another village to the night. The world will know in the coming days whether anyone comes to help, or whether Akwando is left to grieve alone.

But the most surprising part of this story is yet to come — keep reading.