By Nicholas Bariyo in Kampala, Uganda, and Gbenga Akingbule in Maiduguri, Nigeria

Gunmen stormed a Catholic school in Nigeria, abducting more than 300 students and teachers at a time when President Trump is threatening military action to protect Christians in the West African nation.

The attackers hit St. Mary's Catholic School in central Niger State in the early hours Friday, spraying bullets into the air before rousting students from their dormitories and forcing them into the forest at gunpoint, police said.

At the time, authorities thought more of the student body -- 629 primary and secondary students -- had evaded capture, and early reports put the total seized at just over 50. But the count grew in the hours that followed and, on Saturday, Bishop Bulus Dauwa Yohanna, Niger State chairman of the Christian Association of Nigeria, said 303 students and 12 teachers had been abducted.

"Some parents whose children we had thought had escaped came asking for their children," the bishop said in a written release. "More students were captured after they tried to escape."

The mass abduction is even larger than the infamous incident a decade ago in which Islamist insurgents belonging to Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls from the Chibok Government Secondary School, sparking the worldwide #BringBackOurGirls campaign. Many of those students were Christians forced by their captors to convert to Islam.

In a social-media post early this month, Trump accused the Nigerian government of allowing the killing of Christians. He said he had instructed the Defense Department to draw up military plans aimed at destroying Islamist militants in Nigeria, raising the prospect of American forces attacking the country, in his words, "guns-a-blazing."

"All these incidents point to the fact that the [Nigerian] federal government is not doing enough to fight insecurity," Joseph Hayab, regional chairman of the Christian Association of Nigeria, told The Wall Street Journal on Saturday. "So I don't mind if President Trump can come help us fight the insecurity."

Nigeria is home to some 240 million people, about half Muslims, concentrated in the north, and half Christians, generally in the south. Extremist groups such as Boko Haram -- its name translates as Western education is forbidden -- are conducting a religiously motivated insurgency that reaches into neighboring Chad, Cameroon and Niger, while bandits are carrying out a parallel kidnap-for-ransom campaign. The result is widespread killings and abductions of both Christian and Muslim civilians.

On Monday, gunmen grabbed 25 students -- largely Muslims -- from a school in Kebbi State, according to police. The next day attackers raided the Christ Apostolic Church in central Nigeria, killing two and kidnapping 38, police said. On Wednesday, gunmen killed two people during a church service in western Nigeria. They kidnapped dozens of other worshipers, according to religious groups.

The motivations of the kidnappers of the St. Mary's students weren't immediately clear.

The International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, a Nigerian nonprofit, estimated that Boko Haram and other groups were responsible for the deaths of 43,000 Christians between 2009 and 2021, with 17,500 attacks on churches recorded. The society estimated 29,000 Muslims were killed during the same period.

Trump and his conservative allies in politics and the media focus on incidents involving Christians and blame the Nigerian government, led by President Bola Tinubu, for failing to prevent them.

"It would be a gross understatement and a blatant denial to refer to serious and sustained attacks against religious communities in Nigeria of this magnitude as anything but acts of religious persecution," U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R., N.J.), chairman of the House Africa subcommittee, said Friday, when authorities still believed that fewer than 60 St. Mary's students had been kidnapped.

Nigerian authorities are trying to persuade Trump that they are doing everything possible to protect Christians. Tinubu postponed a trip to the Group of 20 summit in South Africa in order to address the kidnapping crisis, according to his office.

Authorities ordered the closure of public and private boarding schools in Niger State on Saturday. State Gov. Mohammed Bago ordered students to vacate dozens of schools following a meeting with heads of security agencies, a spokesman for Bago said.

Authorities were still conducting a head count to ascertain the number of those abducted, Bago said.

Write to Nicholas Bariyo at nicholas.bariyo@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 22, 2025 14:17 ET (19:17 GMT)

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