Boko Haram (23 page)

In a further sign of how out of control the insurgency had become, the Chibok assault that took place on 14 April 2014 was not the only horrific attack that day. During the morning rush hour, a bomb tore through a bus station on the outskirts of Abuja and killed at least 75 people.
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That, too, was a shocking attack, the deadliest yet in the capital and occurring only weeks before Abuja was to host the World Economic Forum event. However, the death and destruction left behind by the bomb would soon be overshadowed by concern over the fate of the Chibok girls.

According to some accounts, word began to spread that a band of attackers were on their way to Chibok. Amnesty International, citing local officials and two senior military officers, said warnings started to filter in shortly after 7 p.m., more than four hours before the attack.
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According to the rights group, vigilantes in the nearby village of Gagilam alerted authorities ‘when a large group of unidentified armed men entered their village on motorbikes and said they were headed to Chibok'. Nigeria's under-equipped and demoralised soldiers were apparently unable to respond effectively. One of the military officers told the group that ‘the commander was unable to mobilise reinforcements'. Amnesty quoted the officer as
saying: ‘There's a lot of frustration, exhaustion and fatigue among officers and [troops] based in the hotspots […] many soldiers are afraid to go to the battle fronts.'

A government official familiar with details of the investigation into the incident provided a similar account to me, saying local residents had relayed word of an impending attack far in advance. ‘They were told three to four hours before the attack', the official said of the military, adding that the response was hampered by ‘capacity problems'. Nevertheless, the military has strongly denied the claims. Defence spokesman Major-General Chris Olukolade said troops in the state capital, Maiduguri, were not given advance warning and were instead notified of ‘an ongoing attack on Chibok community' by troops in the town who fought the attackers and needed reinforcements. ‘As the troops on reinforcement traversed the over 120-kilometre rugged and tortuous road from Maiduguri to Chibok, they ran into an ambush by terrorists who engaged them in [a] fierce firefight and a number of soldiers lost their lives', the defence spokesman wrote in a statement. ‘Another set of soldiers also mobilised for the mission arrived after the terrorists had escaped due to a series of misleading information that slowed down the pursuit.'

Sometime between 11.30 and 11.45 that night, dozens of the attackers driving motorbikes and pick-up trucks stormed the town. The soldiers stationed there were no match for them and fled, and the Boko Haram members burned down houses and buildings. Enoch Mark, a pastor at a church in Chibok who had two daughters – one by birth, the other adopted – sleeping in the school dormitory, said he could hear the explosions and gunfire from his house. He decided to flee along with his other children. ‘Unfortunately, I have some little children at home. I tried to grab the little ones and rush with them to the bush', he said. Another Chibok resident, Lawan Zanna, who had one daughter sleeping in the dormitory, said that ‘we heard gunshots and bomb blasts [...] Some people are going out and leaving their houses.' Zanna told
me he could not say how many attackers had arrived in the town that night, though the government official said estimates had put it at around 100.

Either all or some of the Boko Haram members – no one seems sure – set their sights on the school where the girls were sleeping. When they arrived, they at first used deception to gather the students. ‘They are saying to us, “Don't worry, don't worry, come. We are security, we are soldiers, nothing can happen to you. We are here”', the 18-year-old girl, whose father did not want her name used, told me by phone. When the men began shooting and shouting ‘Allahu Akbar', they realised that they were not soldiers. By then it was too late for most, though a school official told me some of the girls managed to slip away. The girls were told to follow them to a spot less than a mile outside the school and were forced aboard pick-up trucks – estimates of how many vary between around 10 and 20 – while the extremists burnt down the school buildings, though by some accounts, they first sought to raid the food supplies. They were also said to have spoken in the Kanuri language, more common in other parts of Borno state.
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The 18-year-old's father said his daughter told him they spoke in various languages, including Kanuri, Hausa and Kibaku. The girls were then driven away from the town and toward the Sambisa forest. According to Chibok residents, the extremists remained in the town until around 4 a.m., possibly later, but military reinforcements were still nowhere to be found. One of them told me on condition of anonymity: ‘These people, they are coming around 11.40-something. They were still in Chibok up to 4 [a.m.] [...] So I think if the security men are serious, they would have sent security men to come and stop them.'

On the road out of Chibok, some of the girls decided to risk an escape and jump out of the trucks. The 16-year-old niece of Dauda Iliya, who lives in Abuja but whose family roots are in the Chibok area, was among them. ‘One of the trucks actually stalled, got into trouble, engine trouble, stalled, and when they tried to get it to
move, it wouldn't. So they abandoned it', Iliya told me. ‘So the convoy had to slow down and [...] turn away from that disabled truck.' When it did, the truck in which his niece was riding passed beneath a tree. ‘She held on to a tree branch and the truck drove off, and that was how she made her miraculous escape. She told me this', he said. He said she and others hid until they felt it was safe enough to walk back toward Chibok. His niece hurt her ankles during the escape, but has since recovered. Other girls escaped in a similar manner. Two of them told a
New York Times
reporter that they were among several who jumped out and ran through the bush when a truck of guards at the end of the convoy slowed down and fell behind.
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Either because they did not see the girls who escaped or because they did not care, the attackers pushed on, directing the convoy toward their camp inside what some of the girls and their parents believed was the Sambisa forest, a patch of about 200 square miles – some nine times the area of Manhattan – originally set aside as a game reserve by the British. Boko Haram had been using the forest, about 50 miles away from Chibok, as a hideout for some time along with the nearby Gwoza hills, which are close to the Cameroon border. After the government's state of emergency declaration in 2013, the military claimed to have cleared out extremist camps in the Sambisa reserve with the help of air power, though it was never clear whether soldiers had dropped bombs or fired machine guns from helicopters. Like much of the region's scrubby savannah, the reserve is not heavily forested or jungle-like, though it becomes more dense in its southern half, especially in the rainy season. At the time the girls were taken, it was the end of the dry season. As for wildlife, there is not much left there. A 2006 survey found no elephants and only a smattering of antelopes and warthogs, while noting that there was ‘extensive clearing of the reserve for farmland and charcoal burning'.
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The convoy drove on for some seven hours before reaching the camp, and after arriving there the Boko Haram members ordered
the girls to prepare their food for them. A few of the girls then thought they could slip away. Over a terrible phone line, the 18-year-old sought to explain to me how she escaped, but only some of her words came through. ‘I run, I run, I run', she said. ‘I run far [...] We are running, we are running, we are running in that bush.' Her father said she had been at the camp about two hours when the opportunity for an escape arose. ‘When the other students were chopping that food, that is how she escaped', he said, using a common Nigerian term for eating. He said she told them she was going to the bathroom and made a run for it. After running for some time, she encountered locals from the Fulani ethnic group who agreed to help her. ‘She said, “I am asking to show me the way to Chibok. They said OK.”' She travelled with them on motorcycles, arriving back home on Wednesday following the Monday night kidnapping. ‘I was very, very surprised how she escaped [...] She looked very very well', her father said. She was not alone on her journey; at least two girls, possibly more, managed to escape in that way.
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At daybreak, parents rushed to the school to check on their daughters and found burnt buildings. One mother described her anguish when she arrived and realised her 16-year-old daughter had been taken along with the others. ‘After reaching the school, I was scared. I was shaking', said the mother, who also asked that her name not be used out of fears for both her and her daughter's safety. ‘This school is our hope. This school is our hope [...] After reaching the hostel, I was shocked [...] I just burst out crying. I said, “Lord, why? Lord, why?”' Almost two months after the kidnapping, with no sign of her daughter, she lashed out at the government and military. ‘It is real', she said, referring to the conspiracy theories floating around the country. ‘Our girls were kidnapped and they did not do anything at all.'

Some of the parents decided to take matters into their own hands. On the day after the abductions, 15 April, they sought to follow what they believed were the girls' footsteps, but did not
make it far before they were persuaded to turn around and seek a security escort because it was considered too dangerous. Two days later, there still seemed to be little help, so they either hired motorcycles or used their own vehicles and sped off in the same direction again in search of the girls. This time, it was an estimated 300 parents, relatives and sympathisers on their trail. They made it to a village near the Sambisa forest, and it was there that vigilantes and others told them to turn around, that they were no match for the insurgents. ‘They told us it's better for us to go back', said Lawan Zanna, a 45-year-old Arabic teacher in a primary school whose 18-year-old daughter Aisha was taken in the raid. ‘We don't have anything to face these people. They have sophisticated weapons. They will gun us down.'

The parents returned home, their daughters lost somewhere in the savannah, held captive by gunmen and with no sign that Nigeria's military was prepared to find them. A range of reasons existed for why the kidnappings had occurred. Boko Haram was opposed to Western education in general, and Shekau would later claim that he believed he was justified in taking slaves. He would also say girls should ‘go and get married', and that he would marry them off as young as the age of nine. But there were also strategic reasons since the abductions would serve to embarrass the government, while a hefty ransom could also be demanded for the girls' release.

It seemed that the abductions at first barely registered on the world's radar. Part of the reason may have been confusion over what exactly had happened. School officials initially could not even say how many girls had been kidnapped. An early estimate of the total number of girls taken was 129, and school officials would say later that it took several days for them to establish a reliable count of the missing and confirm it with parents. The absence of a clear explanation left a vacuum that was to a large degree filled by conspiracy theories. Some were spread by President Jonathan's supporters, who said that the kidnappings were a hoax perpetrated
by his northern opponents, designed to embarrass the president and perhaps force him to decline to seek re-election in polls less than a year away, in February 2015. As for the military, it claimed to be searching for the girls, but parents and activists said there was little evidence that soldiers were doing much at all.

An incident two days after the abductions would cut even further into the military's credibility. Despite the confusion and lack of verifiable information, the defence spokesman, Major-General Chris Olukolade, issued a statement on 16 April that claimed a major breakthrough. Unfortunately, anyone familiar with Nigerian military statements knew to treat it with caution. The statement said that, somehow, all but 8 of the 129 girls taken had been freed or had escaped, citing the school principal as a source. There were no details about how that may have happened, and it is worth asking whether military officials bargained that they could swiftly silence the embarrassing story emanating from an extremely remote area of north-eastern Nigeria by making such a claim. If so, the plan backfired. The principal immediately denied it, leaving the military brass with few options but to backtrack. The following day, Olukolade was forced to issue another statement in which he withdrew his earlier claim and essentially threw his hands in the air.

The statement sought to explain how the military had come to announce the girls' release, saying that ‘a report was filed in from the field indicating that a major breakthrough had been recorded in the search. There was no reason to doubt this official channel, hence the information was released to the public immediately. Surprisingly, however, the school principal, one of the sources quoted in the report has denied all that was attributed to her for whatever reasons. This is an unfortunate development indeed, yet the Defence Headquarters would not want to join issues with anyone.'

It bizarrely added later that ‘the number of those still missing is not the issue now as the life of every Nigerian is very precious',
before completely disowning the earlier claim. ‘In the light of the denial by the principal of the school', it said, ‘the Defence Headquarters wishes to defer to the school principal and governor's statement on the number of students still missing and retract that aspect of the earlier statement while the search continues.'

The principal, Asabe Kwambula, had called what seemed to have been the military's bluff, but she, too, was coming under increasing criticism for different, competing explanations being attributed to her for how the kidnappings occurred. At least, finally, after more than two weeks, authorities managed to establish what they said was a precise count of the number of girls taken, arriving at a figure of 276. Of those, 57 girls managed to escape in one way or another, bringing the number missing to 219.
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In other words, nearly 300 girls were taken from a school in north-eastern Nigeria and there was little understanding of how it had happened.