Nigeria reports 33 killed in simultaneous armed attacks

Nigeria’s police say at least 33 people were killed in “simultaneous attacks” by an armed group, in the latest episode of mass violence that arrives with grim regularity and leaves behind the same official vocabulary. According to WTOP, the attacks were described by police as coordinated, with casualties spread across multiple locations—exactly the kind of operational competence that states claim only they can provide, just pointed the other way.

The numbers matter, but so does the predictable administrative choreography: statements, condemnations, promises of investigations, and the implied assurance that the state’s monopoly on force remains intact—despite armed actors repeatedly demonstrating they can choose the time and place of slaughter.

A parallel failure—less spectacular, more politically protected—played out in the occupied West Bank. Al Jazeera reports that a Palestinian-American was killed by Israeli settlers. The story lands in the familiar grey zone where “private” violence is rarely fully private: settlers operate amid an ecosystem of checkpoints, military protection, and legal asymmetries that can turn vigilantism into a tolerated method of territorial policy.

These are not identical conflicts, but they illuminate the same product defect in modern governance: the state demands exclusivity over violence, yet cannot reliably supply the one service used to justify that exclusivity—protection. In Nigeria, armed groups act as de facto security and taxation regimes in places where the government is present mainly as a logo. In the West Bank, the state is present in force, but the distribution of protection is selective, and accountability chains are notoriously elastic.

The critique is not that violence disappears without a state. It’s that the state’s promise to domesticate violence into something predictable, accountable, and law-bound is frequently marketing copy. When protection fails, individuals are told to wait for investigations; when “aligned” violence succeeds, victims are told the situation is complex.

The uncomfortable conclusion is that the monopoly on violence is often a monopoly on permission: who may do it, who may be defended, and which dead bodies will be processed as a tragedy versus a statistic. The state keeps the brand; everyone else gets the risk.