No fewer than 271 children were among the 484 people displaced after armed bandits attacked Gummi Local Government Area of Zamfara State on June 15, 2026, the International Organisation for Migration has revealed.
The IOM, in a fresh assessment obtained by Saturday PUNCH, said the attack displaced 484 people from 101 households, with children accounting for more than half of those forced to flee their homes.
The figures are contained in two IOM reports on Nigeria obtained by Saturday PUNCH. They include Flash Report 291 on Population Displacement, obtained on June 25, and the Displacement Tracking Matrix’s Transhumance Tracking Tool Dashboard 20, which covers field data from 33 monitoring points across Katsina and Zamfara states in May 2026.
The latest displacement adds to the more than 143,189 internally displaced persons forced from their homes across the North-West between December 2025 and June 2026, bringing the region’s displaced population to over 794,018.
Within the same period, at least 8,521 Nigerians fled insecurity in the North-West and North-East to seek refuge in Niger, Cameroon and Chad, according to an earlier analysis of the UNHCR Nigeria Forcibly Displaced Populations Dashboard by Saturday PUNCH.
