When shots are fired, and villages are burning, they are Nigeria’s front line. Young men carrying single-shot guns made by local blacksmiths are the first to charge into combat against bandit gangs on fleets of motorbikes or jihadist insurgents driving gun trucks. Increasingly, the vacuum left by conventional military has been filled by armed civilian volunteers dubbed vigilantes, or neighborhood watchmen. Yet, the vigilantes often form the only effective line of defense for villages and towns under attack by bandit militias, an Epoch Times investigation has learned. Civilian vigilantes were tested in the early morning hours of Feb. 21 in an unprecedented attack with improvised explosive devices in the embattled county of Shiroro on the border between Niger State and Kaduna State. “The use of IEDs by terrorists is strange and has created panic among inhabitants [of Shiroro],” according to a text to The Epoch Times from state vigilante leader …