When kidnapping kills more than bullets: operational lessons from civil–military coordination in humanitarian crises

On 23 January 2025, Houthi forces in Yemen kidnapped eight United Nations (UN) personnel. The following day, the UN suspended all official movement into and within Houthi-controlled territory. By 10 February, the UN had imposed a full operational pause in Sa’ada governorate. On the same day, a detained World Food Programme (WFP) worker named Ahmed died in a Houthi prison. He was 40 years old, survived by a wife and two children. The UN expressed grief.

The contrast is striking but not accidental. It reflects a pattern that humanitarian security practitioners have long observed: armed actors who want to stop humanitarian assistance do not need to kill aid workers. They need to kidnap them. When international staff are kidnapped or detained, organisations suspend operations and withdraw. What happens next – to the national staff left behind, to the communities depending on assistance and to the humanitarian mission itself – is the subject of this piece.

A pattern observed from the field

Before becoming a researcher, I served as a military officer in counter-insurgency operations in north-eastern Nigeria between 2018 and 2019, coordinating directly with humanitarian organisations delivering relief to internally displaced persons (IDPs). That experience raised a question I have spent years trying to answer: does the form of humanitarian targeting matter for civilian welfare?

Drawing on a country-year panel of 22 conflict-affected states monitored by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network between 2009 and 2024, and using data from the Aid Worker Security Database combined with food security assessments and conflict event data, the answer is yes. When approximately 18 additional aid workers are wounded, kidnapped or detained in a given country in a single year, around one million additional people fall into acute food insecurity. Lethal targeting shows no significant association with food crisis severity. The Yemen case illustrates this: eight kidnappings suspended operations across an entire governorate. One death produced a statement.

Large humanitarian organisations are structured to absorb individual losses. When an aid worker is killed, the organisation grieves, conducts a security review, and typically continues operating. Kidnapping operates through a different logic. It forces immediate organisational responses: senior management attention and security assets are redirected towards hostage recovery, and field operations are suspended because the security environment that permits kidnapping is assessed as threatening to all personnel. International staff are withdrawn from the most insecure areas, which in conflict settings are precisely where food insecurity is most severe and where the humanitarian presence matters most for civilian survival. National staff are left to hold the fort.

What withdrawal means for national staff

When international staff are withdrawn, the operational burden does not disappear. It is transferred to national staff and local partner organisations who remain on the ground with reduced institutional support, reduced resources and increased exposure to the very conditions that triggered the withdrawal in the first place. This transfer of risk has consequences not only for the safety of those staff, but also for their ability to maintain humanitarian neutrality, and therefore for their ability to reach the civilian populations who depend on them.

In Banki, Bama Local Government Area of Borno State, the deteriorating security situation in 2018 reached a point where local humanitarian staff could no longer safely remain in their designated location outside the military battalion headquarters. They relocated inside the battalion compound and continued operating by leaving each morning to the IDP camps and returning each evening. This arrangement kept them alive and kept operations running. But it came at a cost that practitioners should recognise honestly.

Even before they relocated inside the battalion perimeter, local staff were being targeted by Boko Haram. Moving inside made them physically safer and protecting them operationally more manageable. But it also blurred the lines of humanitarian neutrality in ways that are difficult to fully resolve in active conflict environments. National staff who operate under military protection, or who depend on armed actors for their physical safety, are perceived differently by the communities they serve and by the armed groups operating around them. That perception affects access, trust and in some cases targeting. Organisations withdrawing international staff should plan explicitly for this: who will protect national staff, under what arrangements, and what those arrangements will mean for the organisation’s perceived neutrality and operational reach.

Beyond safety, there is the deeper question of rights realisation. The humanitarian mission, ensuring that vulnerable civilians receive the assistance to which they are entitled, does not pause when international staff leave. But the capacity to deliver on that mission is significantly reduced when national staff are operating under greater risk, with less support and with a neutrality profile that has been compromised by the security arrangements they have been forced to adopt. The question of how national staff are cared for is therefore not only an ethical one. It is an operational one with direct implications for whether the humanitarian mission is fulfilled.

Negotiating access: what works and what fails

The blurring of neutrality that accompanies national staff integration with military forces is compounded by the access negotiation challenges those staff face when operating largely on their own. In conflict environments where state military forces control territory and movement, negotiating access is a precondition for rights realisation. Getting it wrong means vulnerable civilians do not receive assistance. Based on direct experience coordinating with humanitarian organisations in north-eastern Nigeria, four lessons stand out, lessons that apply specifically to negotiations with state military actors.

The first concerns who initiates contact. Negotiations were significantly more likely to succeed when the first person to hear the humanitarian request was the officer commanding the operation, whether a battalion, company or patrol commander. When aid workers approached a subordinate soldier first and expected that soldier to relay the request upwards, outcomes were consistently worse. Subordinate soldiers lack the authority to make access decisions and may frame requests poorly when passing them to their commanders. More problematically, commanders sometimes interpreted the approach through a subordinate as a breach of protocol and were more likely to decline, particularly when an operational pretext existed. Humanitarian organisations should invest in identifying who commands an operation before initiating any negotiation, and make every reasonable attempt to approach that person directly.

The second concerns who represents the humanitarian organisation. When commanders noticed that a junior staff member was presenting a request rather than someone with seniority and decision-making authority, this consistently reduced their willingness to engage seriously. The implicit signal, that the organisation had not sent its most senior available representative, was read as a sign that the organisation did not consider the negotiation a priority. The most senior staff member available in a given operational area should lead access negotiations.

The third concerns internal coherence. Negotiations failed or stalled when humanitarian representatives disagreed with each other in front of military counterparts, one person suggesting one course of action, a colleague suggesting another. Visible internal contradiction reduced commanders’ confidence in the organisation’s reliability and ability to follow through on any agreement reached. Organisations should align internally before entering any negotiation and designate a single spokesperson to lead the discussion.

The fourth concerns how field commanders understand their own authority. Among military personnel across sub-Saharan Africa, there is a widely held principle: ‘the ground will determine’. Commanders in the field bear direct responsibility for operational outcomes and are expected to make decisions based on what is actually happening around them. Humanitarian actors who gave the impression they could force a concession by threatening to escalate to higher command, or by referencing agreements made with officers far from the field, consistently undermined negotiations. Field commanders resented the implication that their authority could be bypassed. Building trust with the commander on the ground matters far more than any agreement reached at a distant headquarters.

The logistics of trust

The importance of trust in civil–military coordination extends beyond formal negotiation. During an escort mission moving humanitarian supplies to an IDP camp across dangerous territory in north-eastern Nigeria, one of the humanitarian trucks broke down. Some soldiers on the patrol immediately suspected sabotage. A rumour had circulated that humanitarian organisations sometimes included unreliable vehicles in convoys so that supplies would be left behind for Boko Haram to collect. The rumour had some basis: on previous occasions, escorts had left damaged vehicles behind and returned to find the supplies gone.

Rather than destroying the supplies, I and one other officer deployed an all-round defence and asked an army engineer on the patrol to assess the vehicle. He fixed it within an hour. The supplies reached the camp. But the incident illuminated a deeper problem: the soldiers’ suspicion was entirely plausible to them because they had no visibility into how the humanitarian organisation assigned vehicles or selected drivers. That information gap was the real security risk, not the broken truck. Joint logistical planning between military escorts and humanitarian organisations, sharing basic information about how convoys are assembled and vehicles maintained, could significantly reduce the kind of mutual suspicion that turns a mechanical failure into a security incident. Transparency of this kind does not compromise humanitarian independence. It builds the operational trust on which sustained access depends, and sustained access, in environments where national staff are often the last line of humanitarian presence, is what stands between vulnerable civilians and the complete collapse of their rights to assistance.

What this means for practice

Kidnapping, detention and physical harassment of aid workers should be treated as food security emergencies, not merely security incidents. Early warning systems for food crisis escalation should incorporate humanitarian security monitoring as a leading indicator. UN Security Council Resolution 2417, which links the obstruction of humanitarian access to targeted sanctions, should be more consistently enforced against parties deploying coercive non-fatal tactics. And humanitarian organisations should develop clearer protocols for how operations can continue through local partners or remote management while recovery efforts are under way, rather than defaulting to full operational suspension. They should also be explicit, in advance, about how national staff will be supported when international staff are withdrawn, what additional resources they will receive and how the organisation will account for the increased risk those staff are asked to absorb.

Conclusion

Armed actors who understand how humanitarian organisations function know that killing one aid worker generates a statement of grief and a security review. They know that kidnapping a team suspends operations across an entire region. Humanitarian protection policy and the operational practices that implement it need to catch up with that reality. Ahmed, the WFP worker who died in Houthi detention, deserved better. So did the civilian populations of Sa’ada who lost their food assistance when eight of his colleagues were taken. And so did the national staff who remained behind, absorbing risk, navigating access negotiations with limited support and maintaining the humanitarian mission largely without acknowledgement. Understanding the connections between those three facts is not just a research question. It is a humanitarian imperative.

Uchenna Hillprieston Okwara is a PhD Candidate in Security Studies at the University of Central Florida and a former Lieutenant in the Nigerian Army.