Boko Haram kidnaps hundreds of Nigerian students, six years after Chibok

One of the students who fled the captors – 17-year-old Usama Male – said the kidnapping began on Friday shortly after 10 p.m. Dozens of men in military fatigue shooting Kalashnikovs in the air dumped on the sand-covered school campus and ordered the entire student body to march into the woods. After nearly two days walking down a column of hundreds of people without food and little water, he was one of the lucky few to escape.

“They said they would kill anyone who tried to flee, but I stood near the back and waited for the opportunity to run,” he said, sitting next to his father, Aminu, in the city of Kankara. “Hundreds of my fellow students are still in captivity somewhere in the woods.”

“Only in Nigeria have we seen militants enter high school and kidnap the entire student,” said Bulama Bukarti, an analyst at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change based in London. “The security situation across the north is deteriorating rapidly. An attack on Nigerian children is an attack on the future of the country.”

Many of the details about the kidnapping, in a remote agricultural area with poor communication, remain grim, including the true account of the missing. School officials said at least 446 students were now with their parents, but were unable to reach dozens of families to confirm the boys’ safety due to the poor telephone network.

Boko Haram’s liability claim has surprised some analysts, marking the departure of the extremist group’s usual area of ​​operation in the northeast of the country.

“What happened in Katsina was done to promote Islam,” said Abubakar Shekau, the group’s leader and most wanted terrorist in Africa, with a $ 7 million reward in the United States. “Western education is not the kind of education allowed by Allah and His Holy Prophet.”

Shekau did not give any figures on the number of boys abducted in Kankara, but the mass abduction appears to be even greater than the 2014 Boko Haram abduction of 276 schoolgirls in Chibok City, which led to the global campaign # BringBackOurGirls and provoked US military intervention. A new hashtag, #BringBackOurBoys, began to evolve in Nigeria as new details spread. The United Nations has strongly condemned the abductions and called for the “immediate and unconditional release” of the children.

Boarding schools in several northern states have been closed and the governor of Katsina appeared on television crying. The local government has said the kidnappers have been in contact to discuss a rescue to free the boys, although Shekau said there were no negotiations.

Nigerian Defense Minister Salihi Magashi confirmed that a search and rescue operation was underway and pledged to do everything possible to ensure the return of the boys.

A Nigerian security official said the army has sent surveillance planes over nearby forests, a wide area of ​​dense canopy that stretches across four states. The United States also flew a reconnaissance aircraft sent from the drone base to Agadez, Niger, to provide intelligence support, the official said.

The attack has caused shock and anger in the largely poor and rural region near the border with Nigeria, which has been plagued by growing insecurity in recent months. Bewildered families have flocked to the school campus in recent days and have called on authorities to save the boys.

On Tuesday, the campus was tremendously quiet. Students’ belongings were spread across the dormitory floors; textbooks and lost soccer cleats sat next to bags that would soon have been packed for the year-end holidays.

The rising tide of violence in northern Nigeria comes amid the government’s faltering strategy to combat a decadent insurgency that has turned into one of the deadliest jihadist campaigns in the world.

The Kankara attack is particularly embarrassing for President Muhammadu Buhari, a native of Katsina, who has repeatedly claimed that Boko Haram and its affiliates have been technically defeated. But since last year, militants have advanced, outpacing dozens of smaller military bases and looting weapons. According to the U.S. Foreign Relations Council, the period since July 2018 has been more deadly for Nigeria’s security service personnel than at any other time in the decadent conflict.

Boko Haram’s claim for responsibility comes after two bloody weeks on the northern borders of Africa’s most populous nation. In late November, the group kidnapped and killed about 70 farmers in the village of Zamabari, in the state of Borno. Last week, the group killed 28 people and burned 800 homes in a border town in southern Niger.

Now, Shekau – a Boko Haram leader since 2009 – has demanded a much bigger prize: a mass abduction that could once again draw global attention to a conflict that rarely outweighs media coverage outside Nigeria.

Shekau, who swore allegiance to the Islamic State in 2014 and then split from the group in 2016 over theological disputes, has traditionally operated in northeastern Nigeria, but has been quietly building alliances in the northwest during the last year. Nigerian intelligence analysts say the Boko Haram leader has exploited the deteriorating security situation in the region to rebuild old networks and cultivate new alliances with criminal groups. In recent video messages, Shekau has claimed that Boko Haram has cells in the northwest and appears to be targeting possible new recruits in the regional Fulani language.

“Growing spread of Islamic State and al-Qaeda-related groups in northwestern Nigeria has pushed Shekau to build combat capability in rural northwestern areas, co-opting existing bandit groups and using pre-existing contacts in the region, ”said Fulan Nasrullah, executive director of the Conflict Studies and Analysis Project of the Global Initiative for Civil Stabilization, a Nigerian think tank focused on armed conflict. Nasrullah, who was an adviser to a Swiss-led effort to mediate talks between Boko Haram and the government, added: “From what we know of the details of the kidnapping, there are many similarities to the kidnapping of Chibok.”

Shekau led the kidnapping of Chibok government high school girls in 2014. After three years, 103 were released in agreements brokered by a team of Swiss mediators for a rescue and an exchange of Boko Haram prisoners. A total of 112 have never returned home and it is feared that many have died in captivity.

The testimony of Kankara survivors suggests that the kidnapping operation was terribly similar to that of Chibok’s kidnapping. Male and other witnesses said dozens of men armed with motorcycles surrounded the boarding school and opened fire on police before rounding up the students and telling them they were soldiers, the same technique used in the kidnapping. of Chibok.

Mr. Male and hundreds of his classmates were then asked to hand over their phones and enter the thickening forest for hours without food or water. “At one point we were counted and we were 520 hostages,” he said.

Another student, who refused to give his name for fear of retaliation, said at least two of the captives died during the march.

Mr Male said he walked more than 12 hours barefoot as he did not have time to pick up his sandals during the kidnapping. He suffers from anemia, felt weak and dizzy, but gunmen said anyone who escaped would die. In the dark, he realized that dozens of students had escaped from the crowds and disappeared into the woods.

While the militants ordered the group to rest near a village while discussing how to avoid being seen, it slipped and hid under a tree. He snuck into the woods and came to a nearby village called Zango, where the locals helped him home after a 36-hour ordeal.

“I thought I would never see my parents again … I hope to see my friends,” he said.

Write to Joe Parkinson to [email protected]