The Troubled Search for Nigeria’s Stolen Girls

Last Sunday, twenty days after the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram kidnapped more than three hundred girls from a school in Nigeria, President Goodluck Jonathan spoke at length about the abduction publicly for the first time. He admitted that he did not know where Boko Haram was holding the girls and proceeded to place some of the blame on their parents for not providing a “clear identity” for their missing daughters. He denied rumors that there were any ongoing negotiations between the government and the militants. Despite all this, he said that wherever the girls were, he would rescue them, and that the government was “succeeding” in its war against the terrorists. For those Nigerians who doubted his sincerity, he described how he would frown whenever he heard of Boko Haram attacks while attending church. Eight more girls were abducted on Sunday from a northeastern village, by gunmen believed to be Boko Haram.

Nigeria’s First Lady, Patience Jonathan, made a series of similarly dramatic and incoherent statements about the girls. She had announced her intention to join the rallies that Nigerians, including mothers of the kidnapped girls, had held in Chibok, Maiduguri, Abuja, and Lagos in recent days. (“If they don’t release our girls, then they should be ready to kidnap me,” she said.) She then told protesters to stop their marches. On Sunday, the First Lady met with protest leaders—who were then arrested the next day. The First Lady allegedly accused them of belonging to Boko Haram themselves, and fabricating the schoolgirl abductions to embarrass her husband’s government. The same day, Boko Haram released a video in which the group’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, said, “I have your girls. By Allah, I will sell them in the market.” Parents continue to hear rumors that members of the group are using their daughters as sex slaves. I spoke to a number of those parents, and to some of the girls who escaped. Their stories, unlike those coming from the government, have a painful consistency to them.

Sarah Lawan wants to be a doctor. She has a strong and energetic voice, even on a shaky phone line from the remote northeast. Her mother, Taditha, never had the chance to go to school because her parents could not afford to send her. Taditha wanted Lawan to “be somebody who could give a helping hand to the family after completing her education.” Lawan is already nineteen years old, a little older than most of her classmates. Still, she was a diligent student. She had reached her final year and was grateful to hear that education officials in her home state, Borno, had decided to reopen her boarding school in the town of Chibok for final exams, even though Boko Haram had forced most schools to close. The group has attacked several schools and killed scores of students in the northeast over the past year.

“I want to go to back to school but I am afraid,” Lawan told me. “Up until now, I can see those people with guns standing above me, forcing me to enter their vehicles. I don’t want to be at gunpoint again.”

She jumped out of a truck with a friend after she realized that she did not recognize the men who had taken them. She had never seen them around the town. “I thought I’d rather die by jumping out of the truck than from a gun,” she said. Her father had died five years ago, and she didn’t want her mother to have to grieve her, too.

“I’m still thinking of all the girls who have not yet returned,” Taditha, her mother, said. She told me that she nearly collapsed when she learned Boko Haram had kidnapped her daughter.

“There was no one protecting us,” Lawan said.


One soldier and one policeman died guarding the school that night. When Boko Haram has laid siege to other northern towns with sophisticated weapons like rocket-propelled grenades, according to eyewitnesses, the soldiers abandoned the battle and joined others fleeing to safety. In Chibok, Babangida Usman, a senior investigator with the National Human Rights Commission, told me that most of the soldiers that been stationed in the town were pulled out mere days before. “One cannot explain the actions of the military,” Usman said. There have been numerous reports of military collusion with the terrorists, and Jonathan has said that Boko Haram has infiltrated both the military and government. To top it off, as Borno state Governor Kashim Shettima pointed out recently, the group is more motivated and better armed than the country’s underpaid soldiers—explaining reports of soldiers simply running away during confrontations with Boko Haram.

Last year in Maiduguri I spent a day in Usman’s office. We spent hours talking about the corpses that he was counting daily at the city’s morgues; the military was dumping the bodies and claiming that they were terrorists. But, as we pored through his thick folder filled with the photos of boys and men that the military had taken during mass raids of northern neighborhoods to Maiduguri’s Giwa Barracks—where detainees have reported extrajudicial deaths—the corpses began to suggest a different story. Makmid Kamara, a Nigerian researcher with Amnesty International, has worked with Usman on documenting the abuses of Boko Haram and the military. “The majority of the victims, the majority of those who have been killed either by Boko Haram or the security forces, have been civilians not directly in any of the fighting factions,” Kamara said. Fifteen hundred people have been killed this year, the result of both Boko Haram attacks and government reprisals.

Kamara and I each spoke to Chibok residents who said that they had heard Boko Haram was coming to the town up to two hours before the kidnapping. They alerted security officials, but the military only sent more troops several hours after the abduction. “There is a big disconnect between the security personnel and the community. People don’t trust the military to give information to them because they fear that they will be arrested or seen as conspirators or suspects,” Kamara said. “It’s getting increasingly difficult for people to approach the security forces to provide valuable information on planned attacks or things like that.” If and when a Nigerian military operation takes place to recover the girls, observers worry that soldiers will continue to violate the human rights of northeastern Nigerians.

The U.S. State Department said on Tuesday that Jonathan had agreed to accept a team of U.S. military personnel and law-enforcement officials skilled in investigation and hostage negotiation. As of last year, the United States had already provided twenty million dollars in security assistance to Nigeria as it fought Boko Haram. It is not yet clear how things will be different this time.

The Nigerian police said last week that the number of kidnapped girls had risen to more than three hundred. Part of the reason why officials still do not have an exact number of how many girls are missing is that girls from surrounding villages had also gone to the Chibok school to take exams, and, once the militants burned down the school, all records of the students were lost.

Above: Mothers of kidnapped schoolgirls in Chibok, Maiduguri, Borno State. Photograph: Stringer/Reuters.