When shots are fired and villages are burning, they’re Nigeria’s front line: Young men carrying single-shot firearms made by local blacksmiths are the first to charge into combat against bandit gangs on fleets of motorbikes or jihadist insurgents driving gun trucks.
Increasingly, the vacuum left by conventional military has been filled by armed civilian volunteers called vigilantes or neighborhood watchmen. Yet the vigilantes often form the only effective line of defense for villages and towns under attack by bandit militias, an Epoch Times investigation has learned.
