Kidnapped Nigerian schoolchildren call for video help

“Please, sir, you have to send all the soldiers, armies and planes,” says one boy, visibly terrified, who seems to be referring to the Nigerian army’s rescue effort. “You have to close any kind of school except Islamiyah,” he says, referring to Islamic schools. “Please, sir,” said the boy again, his voice breaking with emotion, before a chorus of childish voices echoed his plea.

The video could not be independently verified, but two Boko Haram experts said it carried the group’s black and white flag mark along with a small audio clip of leader Abubakar Shekau to verify its authenticity.

The group, which has been at war with the Nigerian state since 2009, said for the first time on Tuesday that it had confiscated students from the Kankara government high school of science, a children’s boarding school in Katsina, in the northwest. Shekau, the most wanted man in Africa, with a reward of 7 million US dollars in his head, has repeatedly warned the Nigerian government to close all schools analysts say the video appeared to have been released, in part, to refute skepticism that Shekau fighters could mount a huge kidnapping operation northwest of Shekau. Nigeria, hundreds of miles from its fortresses in the northeast.

There was no immediate reaction from the Nigerian government. President Muhammadu Buhari, himself a native of the northwestern state of Katsina, where Kankara is located, has not made any comment since Saturday. The video was released on its 78th anniversary.

Local officials raised their estimate of the number of missing students to between 330 and 400, a figure that analysts say could mark one of the largest mass abductions of schoolchildren in history. Nigerian surveillance planes and American drones have been sent to the dense forest of Rugu, where survivors say the captors forced them to leave.

Many of the details about the kidnapping, in a remote agricultural area with poor communication, remain grim, including the true account of the missing.

But all over Nigeria, citizens react with horror and a horrible feeling of déjà vu. Kankara’s attack came six years after the abduction of 276 schoolgirls in the town of Chibok, a kidnapping that ignited the global #BringBackOurGirls campaign. Small street protests erupted on Thursday in the cities of Katsina and the capital, Abuja, which spread on social media with a new hashtag: #BringBackOurBoys.

Jacob Zenn, a Boko Haram specialist at the Jamestown Foundation think tank in Washington, said Thursday’s video was “tremendously similar” to the first the group released when it kidnapped the Chibok girls, suggesting the group follows the same ratchet strategy to increase media attention and gain influence in talks

“The Chibok girls were also interviewed in a life test video days after Boko Haram’s initial claim of her abduction generated publicity around the world,” she said. “With this video, the message is the same: it is Shekau who will decide his fate.”

In Kankara, dozens of grieving families reunited on Thursday on the school campus. Every day they have been asking for answers to how Boko Haram could have ventured so far from its strongholds in this remote corner of northwestern Nigeria and seized hundreds of its children.

Write to Joe Parkinson to [email protected]