Missing Nigeria girls: Other kidnappings are met with silence

Kano, Nigeria: The children had gone off to school and the traders were still arranging their goods at the village market in the remote fishing town of Damasak when the militants swept in, shooting as they pushed straight for the schoolhouses.

By the time the Boko Haram invaders were done, more than 400 people had vanished, many of them children.

The Monday morning invasion in November 2014 was reminiscent of the attack seven months earlier when the militant group stormed the village of Chibok, kidnapping hundreds of girls, shooting residents and burning homes. When the savagery of that attack became known, it sparked a sense of global urgency and drew worldwide condemnation.

But this time, after the children of Damasak were whisked away and the survivors were left to bury the dead, there was only silence.

Now, on the eve of the second anniversary of the attack on Chibok, the raw details of what happened in Damasak are emerging in interviews with survivors, village leaders and government officials, most so afraid of reprisals that they refuse to be named.

“I’m in agony because those children taken, especially my 16 nephews, are like my own children,” one local chief said. “I feel like a bereaved father.”

As with Chibok, most of those kidnapped in Damasak have not been found.

The similarities between the two raids, however, would seem to end there. Backed by the US, efforts have been made to find the children of Chibok. But a new Human Rights Watch report concludes that there’s little evidence Nigerian security forces even made a serious effort to locate the Damasak victims.

The Chibok abduction generated so much heat that local officials and leaders in Damasak kept quiet about what happened there, even denying the incident when contacted by journalists at the time.

“My 7-year-old child was among the children kidnapped,” a government official in a Maiduguri camp for displaced people said in a phone interview. “The Boko Haram abductors struck nine days after I enrolled my child in the school.”

For years, Boko Haram has rampaged across northeast Nigeria, occupying towns and villages, taking advantage of the weak government and an army that was often unwilling to fight. Beyond the mayhem, its stated mission is to impose Islamic rule and oppose all Western influence, from banks to secular education. It draws its fighters and support mainly from Kanuri people, an ethnic group in northeastern Nigeria, northern Cameroon and southeastern Niger who have long felt marginalised by governments.