The convoy of Land Cruisers rattled down a dusty road near Nigeria’s border with Cameroon, plunging into the remote forest stronghold controlled by fighters from Boko Haram. If everything went to plan, they would arrive at the rendezvous point before 4 p.m.
Inside the trucks sat five captured fighters, freshly extracted from prison, the first piece of the government’s proposed bargain. In a separate vehicle, according to people involved in the deal, a security detail guarded Nigeria’s principal concession to the Islamist terror group, a black duffel bag containing €2 million in plastic-wrapped cash.
The journey had started under a drizzling rain in a town torched by insurgents and bombed by jets during a decade of war. Lookouts were charting their progress, the passengers assumed, and the road was notorious for improvised explosives. One misstep could derail months of planning.
The two men most responsible for engineering this moment had split up that afternoon. For nearly three years, they had roamed the world together, organising secret talks with Boko Haram. One of them was Zannah Mustapha, a former Nigerian barrister who had founded a school for orphans. He had listened to endless diatribes and broken up fights at the negotiating table. He had mourned when other deals collapsed in a hail of gunfire.
The other man was a Swiss government agent who had served as Mustapha’s partner and mentor during the talks. He monitored the scene from a staging ground a few kilometers behind. The man’s identity was such a closely guarded secret that even high-ranking Nigerians didn’t know his full name. As an operative for the Human Security Division, a little-known cog in Switzerland’s diplomatic machine, he preferred it that way.
Not far away, 82 young women cloaked in black veils stumbled through the tall grass toward the rendezvous point, flanked by masked militants with guns. Hours earlier, their captors had ordered them to pack their belongings and start walking. They weren’t told where. They had no idea they were the world’s most famous hostages.
Naomi Adamu had once been an ordinary student at the Chibok Government Secondary School. She was older than most of her classmates. She played soccer. She studied mathematics in her dormitory bunk bed. Now, as she shuffled through the wilderness at gunpoint after 1,102 days in captivity, her eyes were hollow, her skin drawn tightly over her cheekbones.
The Chibok schoolgirls carried only a few visible possessions: strips of colored cloth, flip-flops and small twigs for pinning their hair. Tied around Adamu’s waist, concealed from view, was something the men with guns didn’t know about—an article of defiance. It was a diary, one of the few surviving written records of the girls’ ordeal.
When the Red Cross convoy arrived at the rendezvous point, the drivers pulled to the side of the road. Hiding in the bushes and in branches of acacia trees, snipers were training their rifles.
Zannah Mustapha, 58 years old, stepped out of the truck. He wore a pair of Calvin Klein spectacles and, in honor of the occasion, a crisp gray Kaftan-style robe. From the scrubland opposite him, a group of wiry young fighters in tattered fatigues gathered, cradling Kalashnikovs.
Behind them stood Boko Haram’s end of the bargain: Naomi Adamu and 81 of her classmates, the subjects of one of the largest manhunts in world history.
The captives huddled close and stared ahead, their eyes fixed. Some linked arms, others held hands. Mustapha noticed that one girl’s arm was in a sling. Another was missing a leg.
Since their 2014 kidnapping, the Chibok students had faced every manner of hardship, dragged from one remote camp to the next. More than a dozen had died from illness or military airstrikes. For all the girls knew, this could be the moment their ordeal ended, or a cruel disappointment.
Mustapha began to read the girls’ names aloud from a list. As a sign of respect, he had practiced how to pronounce them. He did not make eye contact with the hostages, however. If the transaction unraveled, he did not want to be haunted by the memories.
One of the militants removed the lens cap from a battered camcorder and began filming. A Boko Haram commander asked each hostage the same two questions:
“Were you raped?”
“Were you abused?”
No, they all answered.
The trauma the Chibok girls had endured as Boko Haram’s captives was extraordinary, but not unprecedented. As a tenet of its ideology and business model, the insurgents had taken thousands of other young Nigerians, many of whom were raped or conscripted as fighters. Most of these abductions went unnoticed. This one didn’t.
News of this particular kidnapping caught fire as celebrities started a global outcry demanding their release. As it grew, it became the most prominent example of mass global activism on social media. The high point came on May 7, 2014, when then-First Lady Michelle Obama tweeted a photo of herself holding a placard with the hashtag: #BringBackOurGirls.
All at once, a desperately poor and warring region of Nigeria—and the hostages hidden there—became a central preoccupation of the global war on terror.
The story of the Chibok girls, as it is commonly understood, reflects a landmark moment in world history. A simple hashtag on Twitter spurred seven nations to dispatch billions of dollars in armed forces, drones, satellites and sophisticated surveillance equipment. That combination of digital activism and international cooperation cut through the battle lines of a near decade-long civil war and helped Nigeria bring the girls home.
The full story, never before reported, says otherwise.
In interviews, many Nigerians involved in negotiations for the girls, from cabinet ministers to soldiers at the front, expressed bewilderment that a series of tweets could so thoroughly distort the priorities of a conflict that had been grinding to a stalemate.
Nigerian officials complained bitterly of social media’s intrusion and the compromises it forced them to consider. Some believed the girls’ fame only prolonged their captivity. Others resented the lack of focus placed on tens of thousands of other children the insurgents had abducted or murdered.
Then there is the matter of the ransom, which has never before been disclosed. Nigeria’s government hasn’t publicly detailed what it offered Boko Haram, or where any funds came from. Several senior officials confirmed that the swap included the release of five captured militants and a total of three million euros, delivered in two drop-offs.
“We had no choice,” said one cabinet minister. “And if we had to pay the same price again, we would.”
To a threadbare insurgency that had been driven into the mountains, the two payments in 2016 and 2017 represented a timely windfall. Since they collected the money, the group has stepped up its terrorist attacks. The number of suicide bombs detonated in Nigeria, most strapped to children, has seen a fourfold increase from the previous year.
At the exchange point, as he recited the list of names, Mustapha had a different view on the potential consequences of the deal. Bringing back these girls was, for him, the crowning achievement of his second act—a humanitarian mission devoted to helping Nigeria’s children.
To analyze the cost of freeing the girls was to miss the central point. Their release, he thought, was a prelude to ending the war. “#Bringbackourgirls had become the lock to the conflict,” he said, in an interview after the girls were freed. “I am trying to pick the lock.”
When asked about the price paid for the girls’ freedom, he pointed a finger skyward: “That’s between me and God.”
The following account of the kidnapping of the Chibok girls, their captivity and Nigeria’s attempts to free them is based on dozens of interviews on three continents with West African, European and American officials, including intermediaries between the warring parties.
Details of the girls’ captivity come from their handlers, the officials who debriefed them, and Naomi Adamu, the first of the Chibok girls to talk so extensively about the ordeal.
The kidnapping
Nearly three years earlier, close to midnight on April 14, 2014, the girls of the Chibok school sat up in their bunk beds.
A group of men in pickup trucks were bearing down on the small town of Chibok, firing rockets and assault rifles. A dozen or so soldiers stationed nearby ran for their lives.
There was no electricity in the single-story schoolhouse and the girls had only flashlights to guide them. Outside their dormitory windows, they could hear the rumble of approaching engines.
Many of their parents and neighbors had fled to the nearby mountains, some wearing nightgowns. Hiding behind shrubs and in the crevices of rocks, the adults watched the fighters swarm toward their target—the Chibok school. Parents furiously dialed their children.
Cowering in his boxer shorts on the side of the mountain, Samuel Yama saw his phone light up. It was his sister, Margaret, a student. “She could not even speak and I was telling her to flee,” he said; “She was in tears…then the call cut off.”
Outside, the girls heard voices.
“Don’t worry! We are soldiers. Gather!”
The school’s elderly security guard had fled. The girls didn’t know what to make of the men ordering them to come into the moonlit courtyard.
“Don’t worry, we are soldiers,” they repeated.
The students, some carrying Bibles, tiptoed through their rooms toward the voices outside, swimming through darkness.
For centuries, Chibok had been a place of refuge, remote and shielded by mountains. Families had settled there in the 1700s to escape the slave trade. It was among the last outposts to fall under British colonial rule.
In 1941, a missionary couple arrived from the Illinois-based Church of the Brethren. Chibok became a majority-Christian hamlet in Nigeria’s Muslim heartland, a place where people of both faiths lived side by side.
By the turn of the 21st century, corruption, military coups and a limping economy created a wave of unemployment across the impoverished north. Thousands of disillusioned young men—including jobless college graduates—began listening to the teachings of radical Islam.
In Maiduguri, a city of roughly one million people 80 miles from Chibok, a baby-faced cleric named Mohammed Yusuf built a following by declaring that Western education, or boko, was haram, sinful. The earth was flat, the cleric argued, and evaporation was a lie—Allah caused rain. Western education was a scam to distance Nigerians from their maker, he said, and democracy was an affront to God.
As Boko Haram’s ranks swelled, Yusuf and his lieutenants toured the northeast in buses strapped with speakers, urging Muslims to sever their ties to the government and follow Shariah law. During a 2009 street battle between his followers and police, Yusuf was handcuffed and pulled into a station. A crowd watched as officers shot him in the chest.
The leader who took charge after Yusuf’s murder pursued a more radical path. Abubakar Shekau, a bearded and bellowing cleric, burned with anger and wrath, propagating an apocalyptic vision.
The Nigerian government sent envoys to reason with Shekau. They came back in disbelief. He demanded all of Nigeria adopt Shariah as a precondition for peace talks.
Shekau redirected Boko Haram into the countryside, shedding its reclusiveness in favor of a full-blown insurgency. His army commandeered tanks and antiaircraft guns from the military and exacted revenge on communities that resisted them.
In hour-long video sermons, Shekau threw tirades at Queen Elizabeth II and Abraham Lincoln, rambling, cackling and jabbing his finger into the lens. “We will kill whoever practices democracy!” he screamed. “We should decapitate them! We should amputate their limbs! We should mutilate!”
“Kill, kill, kill!”
By the early 2010s, Boko Haram was regularly slaughtering moderate Muslim leaders and dispatching suicide bombers to crowded markets. Kalashnikov-wielding militants hanging off the backs of scooters attacked villages, spraying bullets indiscriminately at adults and children and setting everything on fire. Tens of thousands died. Hundreds of thousands fled.
Schools closed by the hundreds. Some were burned down by their own students, converts to Shekau’s army, now one of the world’s most deadly. To keep feeding its ranks, Boko Haram began kidnapping children.
In their red-tin-roofed schoolhouse, the Chibok girls were learning that the earth was round. “PROOF THE EARTH IS SPHERICAL,” the students were told to copy in their notebooks. “Pictures taken from spacecraft at great height clearly show the curvature of the earth.”
It wasn’t just this school’s curriculum that violated Shekau’s vision—it was the mixing of faiths. Its students included Muslims and Christians. Their parents were neighbors and friends.
The students seemed destined to become northeastern Nigeria’s next generation of educated women. Hauwa Nkeki, a star volleyball player, was studying to be a nurse, or maybe an economist. Elizabeth Joseph read the Bible at night by lantern. Dorcas Yakuba passed the days writing love letters to a boy who had nicknamed her “the remote control of my life.”
Naomi Adamu was one of the school’s more serious students, “a hardworking girl,” as her mother, Kolo Adamu, described her. She also had a goofy sense of humor she shared with a few close friends. As she prepared for final exams, she was looking forward to the next stage of her life.
Outside the school grounds, Chibok had come to feel less safe. Earlier that year, Boko Haram torched six nearby villages. Distant gunfire sometimes thundered. One day, a school administrator found a piece of paper on the ground warning of a Boko Haram attack, but dismissed it as a prank.
The girls didn’t live in fear, but understood the gathering threat. Families seeking sanctuary in Chibok brought stories of the insurgents’ brutality.
In March, three weeks before the attack, Shekau appeared on YouTube, threatening the region’s young women: “Girls, you should return to your homes…In due course we will start taking women away.”
The night of the attack, when the girls emerged in the courtyard, they could see the men were not soldiers. They wore unkempt beards, flip-flops and tattered uniforms. Several were raiding the school cafeteria, stealing sacks of rice, beans and pasta. Others poured gasoline on the school to torch it.
Boko Haram had not come to abduct the students. It had come to steal the school’s brickmaking machine. The insurgents had been on a kidnapping spree, and their camps faced a housing shortage.
A commander fired his rifle in the air and demanded to know where the machine was kept. Once they found it, the fighters hoisted it onto a truck.
As they prepared to leave, one militant, motioning to the students, asked a fateful question. What shall we do with them?
A few weeks earlier, Boko Haram had barricaded dozens of schoolboys in their dormitory at the Federal Government College of Buni Yadi and burned them alive. At other colleges, they had tossed grenades into the dorms while the students slept.
The unit’s commander turned to the girls. “Shekau will know what to do with them,” he said.
The fighters ordered the students to climb into their trucks. The teenagers linked hands and arms as they stumbled through the dark.
The Hashtag
Hours after the attack on Chibok, the first intelligence reports flashed across screens at the White House. The details coming through were terrifying: More than 100 girls were missing from a school in northeastern Nigeria, making it one of modern history’s largest abductions.
It was Monday morning in Washington. President Barack Obama was scheduled to meet faith leaders to discuss immigration policy, then hold a strategy session to discuss the escalating conflict in Ukraine.
To the surprise of Obama’s Africa team, the abduction of an entire student body barely registered in the press at home or abroad. In Nigeria, the reaction was muffled by military leaders who informed their president the kidnapping seemed to be a hoax.
“We knew this was going to be big,” said Grant T. Harris, Obama’s Africa director. “But it was initially met with a deafening silence.”
On the afternoon of April 15, Oby Ezekwesili thumbed through her phone and found a short article from the British Broadcasting Corporation. More than 100 girls had been kidnapped in Nigeria the previous night.
At first, she figured it was an error. She walked through the office of the aid organization where she worked, in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, and checked the story again. What if it wasn’t?
When Boko Haram burned the schoolboys in Buni Yadi, Ezekwesili, a former Nigerian education minister and mother of three sons, felt she had failed them. That evening, her son found her in her bedroom in tears. “These people’s children are missing, and nobody is talking about it or doing anything,” she told him.
In the following days, Ezekwesili began leading daily protests at a decrepit fountain near the Hilton. “What are we demanding?” the few demonstrators chanted. “Bring back our girls, now and alive!” One day, police shot tear gas at them. On another, hoodlums ran through the crowd, whacking protesters with plastic chairs.
As a former government official who had worked at the World Bank, Ezekwesili had developed a following on Twitter. For nine days, she posted a series of hashtags aimed at needling the Nigerian government. None caught on. Then a lawyer who followed her account tagged a post with #BringBackOurGirls.
Ezekwesili had picked up a handful of celebrity followers during her trans-Atlantic travels. On April 30, in the space of five hours, recording artists Mary J. Blige, Common and Young Jeezy tweeted the hashtag. Actors Reese Witherspoon, Whoopi Goldberg and Anne Hathaway followed suit, while Harrison Ford held up a placard on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival. “#BRINGBACKOURGIRLS You crazy mothaf—ers,” wrote comedian Chris Rock.
By mid-May, the hashtag had been mentioned more than 3.4 million times. Ezekwesili’s Twitter account became so overwhelmed that she stopped checking her mentions.
While Obama was preoccupied, another resident of the White House embraced the cause. His wife, Michelle, asked the National Security Council for regular briefings on the hunt for the missing students. On May 7, to the surprise of her husband’s staff, she called a photographer into the White House’s Diplomatic Room.
Standing opposite a portrait of George Washington and wearing a somber expression, she held up her placard. The tweet was liked or retweeted more than 179,000 times.
The first lady’s photo would front nearly every Nigerian newspaper, blindsiding President Goodluck Jonathan, whose military still suspected the kidnapping had never happened. Facing an unprecedented form of public pressure from his most powerful ally, Jonathan had few options. He accepted the White House’s request to launch a rescue effort.
Days later, a rapid-response team of roughly 40 officials deployed to the U.S. embassy in Abuja, including CIA analysts, two of the FBI’s top hostage negotiators and a therapist to treat the girls upon their return. The team even brought its own receptionist.
Within days, a U.S. Predator drone was circling northeastern Nigeria, scouring the forest floor. U.S. and Nigerian officials began to gather regularly around a table at a so-called intelligence fusion center.
Other nations followed suit. The U.K. sent a spy plane. Canada deployed special forces soldiers as advisers, and China pledged to send satellite imagery. “The line that came down from Obama,” said a U.S. diplomat in Abuja, “was do everything you can to get those girls.”
Convert or die
At their camp in the forest, the Boko Haram militants lined up gasoline cans, rounded up the Christian girls they had taken from the Chibok school and told them it was time to choose. They could convert to Islam and marry a fighter. Or they could die.
Ever since the girls arrived, the insurgents had been pressuring them to embrace the group’s creed. “We were initially threatened that seven men would rape us if we refused to get married to their members,” Naomi Adamu said. “But we stood our ground.”
This tactic was new. “You don’t want to be Muslim?” the girls recalled the captors saying. “We are going to burn you.”
The girls were terrified. Still, they refused. The militants shook the cans menacingly. Then they broke into laughter. The cans were full of water.
For refusing to marry a member and convert, the girls became slaves. The militants assumed hard labor and deprivations would wear them down. The girls said it strengthened their bond. “Anything that happens, happens,” Adamu and her classmates told each other.
The road to captivity had been a two-day journey for the girls, often on foot. Several students had suffered gashes, broken limbs and scorpion bites. After passing through a labyrinth of backwoods tracks, they arrived at the beating heart of the insurgency: a thousands-strong encampment of mud-brick homes powered by stolen generators.
The Sambisa Forest, where the hideout was located, consisted of 250 square miles of forbidding wilderness. During colonial times, the forest had been set aside as a game reserve. Boko Haram saw advantages in its topography. Gunmen riding motorcycles and pickups launched deadly raids on military outposts, then retreated into scrubland only they could navigate.
On reaching the camp, Adamu said, she cried through the night. She and her classmates had no idea a worldwide social media campaign was being waged on their behalf. “We were just on our own,” Adamu said. “They are going to kill us, or even burn us—that was what I was thinking.”
For the Muslim students, and a handful of their Christian classmates who agreed to convert, captivity brought a different, though no less harrowing set of consequences. They were pushed into sexual bondage.
In the early days of captivity, two of Adamu’s closest friends succumbed to the pressure to marry. That night, Adamu said, she cried herself to sleep. She felt sick for a week. “I was thinking about what was happening to them,” she said.
Christian girls who refused to yield were denied tents and forced to sleep under trees and in the rain. They cooked beans, rice and yams for the militants, and ate little themselves, usually one meal near sunset. They were sent to repair roads, treat injuries and amputate the limbs of wounded fighters. They buried the dead in shallow graves.
To keep the girls hidden, their guards split them into small groups and relocated them constantly. “They were moved through every kind of terrain: desert, forest, mountain,” said one official who debriefed them.
One asset the Chibok hostages had was their bond, developed over years of sharing bunk beds and dorms. Many of their families were friends. They also had a common language, Kibaku, spoken almost exclusively in Chibok and understood by 0.1% of Nigerians. In captivity, it was an uncrackable code, allowing them to communicate privately.
To force the girls to study the teachings of Islam, the guards gave them flimsy notepads, some with cartoon characters on the cover, for transcribing recitations from the Quran. The girls were accustomed to copying lessons verbatim from the blackboard. Here, under the watchful eyes of violent captors, they turned the notebooks into diaries, to tell their own stories.
“We were hoping that we would eventually be released,” Adamu said. Or if they died, that the diaries might someday be found. “We wanted the world to see what we witnessed,” she said.
The girls continued to show no enthusiasm for their religious studies, and their captors decided to try a new tactic. They took Adamu and 21 others to meet Shekau.
The warlord who controlled their fate sat on a chair flanked by two deputies with guns, each of them shooting video of the meeting on tablet computers. Shekau was dressed in a Nigerian military uniform underneath a sweater, balancing a rifle and a Quran on his lap.
• Culled from The Wall Street Journal
|Sun
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