ABUJA
\nMore than 100 people are missing after militants in northeast Nigeria carried out a mass kidnapping that targeted women and children from displacement camps, officials said on Thursday.
\nAnti-militant militia leaders have blamed Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) for last week\u2019s attack in Borno state, the heart of a militant insurgency which has left more than 40,000 people dead and two million displaced since 2009.
\nSeveral details about the attack in rural Ngala are still unclear and officials have given conflicting accounts. The number of people reported missing does not necessarily reflect the number held in captivity.
\nThe UN\u2019s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said the attack took place on Thursday last week and estimated over 200 people from camps for displaced people had been abducted.
\nIt said armed attackers took the women while they were out collecting firewood.
\n\u201cThe United Nations strongly condemns the reported abduction of internally displaced persons (IDPs), many of them women, boys and girls,\u201d it said.
\n\u201cThe exact number of people abducted remains unknown but is estimated at over 200 people.\u201d
\nOCHA said the figure came from initial estimates from community leaders, and said headcounts were being carried out in four displacement camps to verify the number.
\nIt said the camps house almost 104,000 people, mostly women and children.
\nAli Bukar, an officer at the Ngala Local Government Information Unit, said families had confirmed 113 people missing.
\nAnti-militant militia leader Shehu Mada had said that women from displacement camps were \u201crounded up by ISWAP insurgents\u201d on Friday.
\n\u201cSome of the women were able to escape and returned,\u201d said Mada, who helped conduct a headcount which found \u201c47 women from the wood-collecting mission could not be accounted for.\u201d
\nUsman Hamza, another anti-militant militia leader, confirmed the account.
\nBorno State police spokesman Nahum Daso Kenneth has said an attack took place at around four p.m. (1500 GMT) on Friday, but the police could not give a precise figure for the number kidnapped.
\nKidnapping is a major problem across Nigeria, which is also grappling with criminal militias in the northwest and a flareup of intercommunal violence in central states.
\nLast month kidnappers seized at least 35 women returning from a wedding in northwestern Katsina state.
\nPresident Bola Ahmed Tinubu came to power last year promising to address insecurity in Nigeria, but critics say the violence is out of control.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ABUJA More than 100 people are missing after militants in northeast Nigeria carried out a mass kidnapping that targeted women and children from displacement camps, officials said on Thursday. Anti-militant militia leaders have blamed Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) for last week\u2019s attack in Borno state, the heart of a militant insurgency which has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":392234,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-392218","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n