BIN MPER, PLATEAU STATE — In the darkest hours of Monday morning, when horror swept into Bin Mper village in the Kombun District of Mangu Local Government Area, thirty-five-year-old Kyerna Jonathan was faced with a mother’s most desperate choice. With the crack of automatic gunfire echoing through her home, she did the only thing her heart knew how to do: she threw her body over her children.
The quiet of the rural Plateau community was shattered on August 17, 2026, when armed terrorists speaking Fulani and chanting slogans invaded the village in overwhelming numbers. Kyerna’s home was the first to be targeted. Outside, her husband, Jonathan Ishaku, was keeping watch. Armed with no weapons to defend his loved ones and stripped of any time to get them to safety, he was forced to flee into a nearby cornfield, praying in the dark that the invaders would pass over his house.
They did not. Driven by a ruthless determination to leave no survivors, the attackers shot off the locks of the house and forced their way inside. They stormed the room where Kyerna lay sleeping alongside her five children, instantly opening fire with automatic rifles into the dark space.
With only seconds to react to the hail of bullets, Kyerna made an immediate, selfless choice. She threw herself over her two youngest children who were sleeping beside her bed, using her own body as a physical shield against the gunfire. The gunmen continued to fire for several agonising minutes, striking Kyerna multiple times in the back before leaving the room, assuming everyone inside was dead.
When rescuers and community members cautiously entered the home minutes later, they were met with a scene of absolute devastation. They found Kyerna bleeding heavily from multiple gunshot wounds and completely unable to move. Yet, beneath her blood-stained body, the two young children she had covered were pulled out entirely unharmed.
Tragically, the seconds did not allow Kyerna to reach her three other children. They were murdered in the bedroom alongside twenty-two other villagers who lost their lives in the broader assault. The following morning, a heavy grief fell over Bin Mper as twenty-five victims were laid to rest in a mass burial.
Kyerna survived the attack against all odds. Rushed to the hospital where she remains under intensive medical care for her severe injuries, her survival stands as a harrowing, deeply painful testament to a mother’s ultimate sacrifice—taking the bullets intended for her children and living to tell the story.
