In the farming community of Yawota, on the fringes of Old Oyo National Park, the silence is broken only by whispered prayers and the occasional wail. Inside a crumbling family house, sisters Deborah Oyedele and Abosede Ojedele cling to each other, waiting for news that never seems to come.

Their boys are among 46 children and staff taken in coordinated raids on two schools in Yawota and nearby Ahoro-Esinele. The youngest abductees are barely toddlers, the oldest just 16. Witnesses say the gunmen arrived on motorcycles, dressed in military-style fatigues, sweeping through classrooms and playgrounds before vanishing into the vast forest reserve that straddles Oyo and Kwara states.

Nigeria’s army has blamed Boko Haram, raising fears that jihadist groups, long entrenched in the northeast, are pushing into the country’s southwest, a region once seen as a relative haven from the country’s overlapping security crises.

For families here, geopolitics is an abstraction. What they know is that beds are empty and routines shattered. Ojedele’s three-year-old daughter, Hannah, keeps asking for her missing brothers and cousin. “She does not understand why she has not been seeing them,” her mother says, rocking the child as she speaks.

The attacks have transformed quiet agrarian towns into symbols of national anxiety. Schools are shut, streets are half-deserted, and a new military detachment now occupies one of the targeted compounds. The National Union of Teachers has ordered members to withdraw their services, insisting classrooms cannot reopen until credible security measures are in place.

Local hunters describe a desperate, improvised pursuit: dozens of men on motorcycles riding for hours into the forest, then a two-hour firefight with the kidnappers. One man was killed and several injured when an explosive device hidden in an abandoned motorcycle detonated.

Police have announced a 24-hour emergency line for school incidents, and senior officers have toured the area, promising that “all hands are on deck” to bring the captives home. Community leaders, however, say the attackers exploited a communications blackout and the near-total absence of state security before the raids.

For grandmother Funmilayo Ojo, the crisis is laced with guilt. She had urged her daughter-in-law, teacher Mary Akanbi, to move to Yawota for work. Akanbi and her two-year-old child are now among the missing. “No parent would willingly send a child to a school where bandits have kidnapped students,” Ojedele says. “There will be no more schooling for them here.”