Lagos, Nigeria: 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 on 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 on Monday night by men armed with AK-47s, according to local journalists.
The 16-year-old was among about 50 students who escaped on that fateful day. She spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing that giving her names would also reveal the girls’ identities and subject them to possible stigmatisation 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 11pm 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 kilometres) away, an hour’s drive on a dirt road.
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 realised 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 Defence 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.
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 kilometres (80 miles) to the northwest.
“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 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.”
