Nigerian girl describes kidnap, 276 still missing
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| FILE - In this Monday April 21, 2014, file photo, four female students of government secondary school Chibok, who were abducted by gunmen and reunited with their families, walk together in Chibok, Nigeria. They are among the 53 girls who escaped abduction by Islamic extremist kidnappers. The girls did not want to be identified by name and refused to speak to reporters when they were photographed in Chibok, the town from which the mass kidnapping of more than 300 girls took place on April 15. |
LAGOS, Nigeria
(AP) -- The girls in the school dorm heard the sound of gunshots from a
nearby town. So when armed men in uniforms burst in and promised to
rescue them, at first they were relieved.
"Don't worry, we're soldiers," one 16-year-old girl recalls them saying. "Nothing is going to happen to you."
The
gunmen commanded the hundreds of students at the Chibok Government
Girls Secondary School to gather outside. The men went into a storeroom
and removed all the food. Then they set fire to the room.
"They ... started shouting, `Allahu Akhbar,' (God is great)," the 16-year-old student said. "And we knew."
What
they knew was chilling: The men were not government soldiers at all.
They were members of the ruthless Islamic extremist group called Boko
Haram. They kidnapped the entire group of girls and drove them away in
pickup trucks into the dense forest.
Three
weeks later, 276 girls are still missing. At least two have died of
snakebite, and about 20 others are ill, according to an intermediary who
is in touch with their captors.
There were
reports Tuesday that another group of 11 girls had been kidnapped in the
villages of Warabe and Wala in northeastern Borno state. State police
officials at first denied to The Associated Press that the abductions
had taken place. But later in the day the state police commissioner,
Tanko Lawal, confirmed the kidnappings. A resident said the girls, ages
12 to 15, were dragged into the forest Monday night by men armed with
AK-47s, according to local journalists.
The
plight of the kidnapped girls - and the failure of the Nigerian military
to find them - has drawn international attention to an escalating
Islamic extremist insurrection that has killed more than 1,500 so far
this year. Boko Haram, the name means "Western education is sinful," has
claimed responsibility for the mass kidnapping and threatened to sell
the girls. The claim was made in a video seen Monday.
Amid
growing outrage at the girls' prolonged captivity, Nigerian President
Goodluck Jonathan Tuesday announced he has accepted a U.S. offer to help
in the search, including security personnel and unidentified assets.
The
British government has also expressed concern over the fate of the
missing students, and protests have erupted in major Nigerian cities and
New York.
The 16-year-old was among about 50
students who escaped on that fateful day, and she spoke for the first
time in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. The AP also
interviewed about 30 others, including Nigerian government and Borno
state officials, school officials, six relatives of the missing girls,
civil society leaders and politicians in northeast Nigeria and soldiers
in the war zone. Many spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing that
giving their names would also reveal the girls' identities and subject
them to possible stigmatization in this conservative society.
The
Chibok girls school is in the remote and sparsely populated northeast
region of Nigeria, a country of 170 million with a growing chasm between
a north dominated by Muslims and a south by Christians. Like all
schools in Borno state, Chibok, an elite academy of both Muslim and
Christian girls, had been closed because of increasingly deadly attacks
by Boko Haram. But it had reopened to allow final-year students to take
exams.
At about 11 p.m. on April 14, a local
government official, Bana Lawal, received a warning via cell phone. He
was told that about 200 heavily armed militants in 20 pickup trucks and
more than 30 motorcycles were headed toward his town.
Lawal
alerted the 15 soldiers guarding Chibok, he said. Then he roused
sleeping residents and told them to flee into the bush and the nearby
hills. The soldiers sent an SOS to the nearest barracks, about 30 miles
(48 kilometers) away, an hour's drive on a dirt road.
No help arrived.
When
the militants showed up two hours after the warning, the soldiers
fought valiantly, Lawal said. Although they were outnumbered and
outgunned, they held off the insurgents for an hour and a half,
desperately waiting for reinforcements. One was killed. They ran out of
ammunition and fled for their lives.
As dawn approached, the extremists headed for the boarding school.
There
were too many gunmen to count, said the girl who escaped. So, even
after the students realized the men were Islamic extremists, they
obediently sat in the dirt. The men set the school ablaze and herded the
girl's group onto the backs of three pickup trucks.
The
trucks drove through three villages, but then the car of fighters
following them broke down. That's when the girl and her friend jumped
out.
Others argued, the 16-year-old
remembered. But one student said, "We should go! Me, I am coming down.
They can shoot me if they want but I don't know what they are going to
do with me otherwise."
As they jumped, the car
behind started up. Its lights came on. The girls did not know if the
fighters could see them, so they ran into the bush and hid.
"We
ran and ran, so fast," said the girl, who has always prided herself on
running faster than her six brothers.
"That is how I saved myself. I had
no time to be scared, I was just running."
A
few other girls clung to low-hanging branches and waited until the
vehicles had passed. Then they met up in the bush and made their way
back to the road. A man on a bicycle came across them and accompanied
them back home.
There, they were met with tears of joy.
"I'm
the only girl in my family, so I hold a special place and everyone was
so happy," the girl said. "But that didn't last long."
The
day after, the Defense Ministry put out a statement quoting the school
principal, saying soldiers had rescued all but eight of the girls. When
the principal denied it, the ministry retracted its statement.
With
confidence in the military eroded, the residents of Chibok pooled their
money, bought fuel for motorcycles and headed into the dangerous
Sambisa Forest. The forest sprawls over more than 23,000 square miles
(59,570 sq. kilometers), nearly eight times the size of Yellowstone
National Park in the United States, and is known to shelter extremist
hideouts.
Mutah Buba joined the search party
hoping to find his two sisters and two nieces. They got directions from
villagers along the way who said they had seen the abductors with the
girls on a forest path. Finally, an old man herding cattle at a fork in
the road warned them that they were close to the camp, but that they and
their daughters could be killed if they confronted the militants.
The
searchers returned to Chibok and appealed to the few soldiers there to
accompany them into the forest. They refused, point blank, Buba said.
Parents in Chibok ask why they came within a couple of miles of their
daughters, yet the military did not.
"What was
strange was that none of the people we spoke to had seen a soldier man
in the area, yet the military were saying they were in hot pursuit,"
said Buba, a 42-year-old drawn home to Chibok by the tragedy from
Maiduguri, the Borno state capital 130 kilometers (80 miles) to the
northwest.
The military says it is diligently searching for the girls, with extensive aerial surveillance.
"Every
information relayed to security agencies has so far been investigated,
including the search of all places suspected as a possible hide-away of
the kidnapped girls," Information Minister Labaran Maku said Friday.
Many
soldiers have told the AP they are demoralized, because Boko Haram is
more heavily armed and
better equipped, while they get little more than a
meal a day.
Some of the kidnapped girls have
been forced into "marriage" with their Boko Haram abductors, sold for a
nominal bride price of $12, according to parents who talked with
villagers. Others have been taken across borders to Cameroon and Chad,
they said. Their accounts could not be verified, but child marriage is
common in northern Nigeria, where it is allowed under Islamic law but
not the country's Western-style constitution.
In
the meantime, the parents are frantic. Through sobs and jagged gasps
for air, the mother of a missing 15-year-old said she had lost
confidence in the authorities.
"I am so very
sad because the government of Nigeria did not take care of our children
and does not now care about our children," said the mother, who spoke on
condition of anonymity to protect her daughter. "All we have left is to
pray to God to help them and help us."
The
mother of six wondered what would happen to her daughter's lofty
ambition to become a doctor. She said the girl spent her time caring for
the family, and would cook whatever her mother wanted to eat.
"She
is my first-born, the best," said the mother, who broke into a scream
followed by wails of sorrow.
"What am I to do as a mother?"
The
only way to get the girls back is through negotiation, according to an
Islamic scholar who has mediated the release of previous hostages. The
scholar, who remained anonymous because his position receiving messages
from Boko Haram is sensitive, said the militants are willing to free the
girls for a ransom, but have not specified how much.
The
16-year-old who escaped keeps thinking of her friends, and wondering
why she was able to get away while they are still captive. She is at
times afraid and at times angry.
"I am really
lucky and I can thank God for that," she said. "But God must help all of
them ... Their parents are worrying. Every day, everyone is crying."
