ABUJA — They had been held in the mountains for three months, seized from their homes in a single night while the army retreated. On Saturday, most of them came out.
Nigerian special forces and ground troops of the Joint Task Force North East, operating under Operation HADIN KAI, freed 360 captives from a heavily fortified enclave belonging to Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad — the formal Arabic designation for the main Boko Haram faction — deep in the Mandara Mountains of southern Borno State. The military described it as one of the most significant hostage rescue missions conducted in the North East theatre in recent times.
Two infants did not survive the journey out. Lt. Col. Haruna M. Sani, the acting media information officer for Operation HADIN KAI, said both died from exhaustion brought on by the harsh mountainous terrain and the conditions of their prolonged captivity. The remaining hostages — men, women and children — were evacuated to secure locations for medical care and humanitarian support.
But the military’s tally of 360 may not capture the full picture. The Borno South Youth Alliance, a community group that says it has been in direct contact with Boko Haram intermediaries, told Channels Television that all of the Ngoshe abductees were released on Saturday night — and that the full group numbered 416, not 360. Four additional babies born during captivity also died from infections, the group’s president, Samaila Ibrahim-Kaigama, said, with their mothers now receiving treatment at a government facility in Borno State. The alliance spent months in persistent negotiations alongside the military effort, and the discrepancy between official and community figures remained unexplained as of Sunday morning.
The rescue traced back to the night of March 3, 2026, when Boko Haram fighters attacked the Ngoshe community in Gwoza Local Government Area, overran a military base, set operational vehicles ablaze, forced security personnel to withdraw, and abducted scores of residents. The attack exposed a persistent vulnerability: Gwoza’s proximity to the Mandara Mountains — a chain of volcanic ridges straddling the Nigeria-Cameroon border — has made it one of the most resilient insurgent strongholds on the continent. The terrain provides cover that conventional military sweeps cannot easily penetrate.
What broke through it this time was intelligence. Lt. Gen. Abdulsalam Abubakar, the theatre commander, told the News Agency of Nigeria that the June 6 operation was the product of weeks of human intelligence, signals intelligence, and persistent surveillance by unmanned aerial systems combined with long-range reconnaissance patrols. Special Operations Forces conducted preliminary disruptive strikes that created confusion inside the terrorist camps, which then allowed ground troops of the 26 Task Force Brigade to move in and extract the captives. Six of the rescued individuals had already been recovered in earlier, smaller operations near Amuda, a deserted settlement between Ngoshe and Gava.
The rescue comes as a separate kidnapping crisis unfolded less than 200 kilometres away. The deputy speaker of the Borno State House of Assembly, Abdullahi Musa Askira, used a press conference in Maiduguri on Saturday to demand the immediate rescue of 42 schoolchildren abducted from Mussa Primary and Junior Secondary School in Askira/Uba Local Government Area on May 15. Those children remain missing. The Borno South Youth Alliance, the same group that engaged intermediaries in the Ngoshe case, has not confirmed any active channel in the Askira/Uba situation.
Senator Ali Ndume, who represents Borno South — the constituency that includes Ngoshe — called the operation a remarkable success and simultaneously called on the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs to complement the Borno State government’s work in rebuilding the community and facilitating the return of displaced residents. He did not address the numerical discrepancy between military and community figures.
Nigeria’s northeast has recorded mounting insecurity even as the military reports tactical successes. According to The Punch, defence spokesman Maj. Gen. Markus Idris acknowledged in recent days that Operation Hadin Kai had repulsed infiltrations along the Kirawa-Pulka and Ngoshe axes, with more than 50 terrorists neutralised in follow-up operations. Idris also cited a joint Nigeria-United States-supported mission that disrupted terrorist logistics networks and eliminated key commanders of the Islamic State West Africa Province, the faction that has increasingly absorbed disaffected Boko Haram elements since the death of Abubakar Shekau in 2021.
The insurgency has killed tens of thousands and displaced more than two million people in Nigeria’s northeast since 2009, Reuters reported. President Bola Tinubu has repeatedly promised to curb the crisis, though analysts and the UN have consistently said civilian protection in rural Borno remains inadequate. The Ngoshe attack — which preceded the rescue by three months — raised pointed questions about force protection at a forward military position. What the military’s intelligence apparatus managed to reconstruct in the weeks that followed was, by any measure, considerable. What it has yet to explain is the gap between the 360 it says it freed and the 416 a community group says it counted walking out of those mountains.
