"If humanitarian agencies are kicked out of north-east Nigeria then
thousands of Nigerian civilians will needlessly die, including many
children – it will be a humanitarian disaster"
"{Someone needs to ask the Nigerians and the UN some serious questions
about how the government of Nigeria is getting away with this while it
sits on stage in New York, presiding over the UN general assembly and
preaching about ending conflict and fighting poverty in the drive to
reach the sustainable development goals." Aid Agency Worker
"Action Against Hunger delivers neutral, impartial and independent
humanitarian aid to millions of people in Borno and Yobe states by
providing basic services to the most vulnerable people, especially women
and children." Action Against Hunger
Soldiers block the entrance of the aid agency Mercy Corps’ office in Maiduguri after closing it down.
Photograph: Audu Marte/AFP/Getty Images
Nigeria, the most populous of African countries and the most wealthy in natural fossil fuel resources, with its population split between Christians and Muslims has been incapable of defending its people and ridding itself of the dominating, murderous curse of Boko Haram, Islamist jihadists. Its military has been underfunded, foot soldiers using decrepit old weapons, corruption in both the military elite ranks and the government itself at every level is legendary. And ordinary people suffer.
For ten years Nigerians have been victimized by the brutality of the Islamists and the fecklessness of the government. The Islamist extremists have declared war and the government has responded half-heartedly. Allocating more funding to the military, acquiring newer weapons, all the while that Boko Haram is arming itself with even better weapons. Some, in fact, from abandoned armouries looted by the vandals when troops retreat, anxious for their own safety, abandoning their posts.
It's a strategy-without-honour seen played out years ago in Iraq when Islamic State marched on Mosul, the Iraqi defence forces scurried off, allowing ISIL to loot the national treasury of almost a billion dollars and take possession of the hastily departing Iraqi military's weapons caches and vehicles, courtesy of U.S. generosity in the fight against terror. President Muhammadu Buhari's re-election had him boasting about making spectacular progress in defeating Boko Haram; "technically defeated".
A term that has little meaning to the farmers and villagers whose livelihoods have been destroyed, villages emptied, men killed, women kidnapped and raped. Despite the government having 'defeated' Boko Haram, they have now control of four of the ten areas in northern Borno State close to Lake Chad. From their jumping off spots they continue to mount raids on an almost daily schedule. So the people living there don't think much of the defeat of Boko Haram.
The Nigerian military is in a congenital state of demoralization. Initially it was because the military was underfunded, the soldiers not well trained or armed. Now they're on the defensive as well as being demoralized, as though they realize they aren't capable of winning in a fight against the terrorists. Some in the military point out their vehicles and weapons have fallen into disrepair; their organizational skills leave much to be desired.
But a new tactic has gained sway, with the military announcing plans to pull back troops from isolated outposts to gather them within fortified settlements called "super camps" installed inside garrison towns where tens of thousands of civilians have been settled. They're there because either Boko Haram ousted them or soldiers burned their villages, rounding them up with claims this would secure the countryside. Trenches ring the garrison towns in hopes of deflecting invasions by the terrorists.
The end result of this bold new direction in military tactics has been to give Boko Haram free reign in the countryside, barren of its inhabitants. When President Buhari was first elected there was headway made against Boko Haram by the Nigerian military, with fighters routed from the state capital of Maiduguri and small cities taken by Boko Haram, pushing them back toward their forest barricades.
The military commanders in the face of criticism over strategy now say the super camps represent a more effective way of dealing with an insurgency whose attacks against the military are more complex. Among some officials the super camps represent an outright retreat, with one federal official characterizing the new strategy as jeopardizing the situation even further with soldiers barricading themselves out of harm's way.
Giving Boko Haram the opportunity to raid the gear soldiers leave behind them while abandoning their posts for the security of the super camps. According to locals, some soldiers have been seen to flee in the face of attacks, preferring not to remain in fighting mettle. Outside the military's reach, people tolerate the presence of militants because they can do nothing else after returning to their farms, preferring to earn a living rather than submit to crowded camps where cholera and other diseases lurk.
The government itself has turned its attention on the presence of humanitarian groups in the country, doing their utmost to provide medical care and food to Nigerians living in dreadful straits. Inexplicably, the government has charged these charitable groups with using their funding in support of Boko Haram. Aid offices have been closed down after being charged with aiding and supporting Boko Harm or Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP).
This is a country totally at the mercy of an ineffective government with little idea how to cope with the threats within, and turning instead to outside agencies to blame them for the hopeless inadequacy of their responses to the terror within.
"Nigerians in their thousands have been gruesomely dispatched to the Great Beyond by armed Fulani herdsmen who are being protected by the powers that be." Emmanuel Onwukibo, coordinator, Human Rights Writers' Association of Nigeria
"The reverend fathers [Christian priests killed along with parishioners during Mass] were not farmers." "The armed herdsmen have moved the narrative of the current crisis from search for grass to other obvious motives [promoting Islam through jihad to the detriment of Christianity]." Christian Governor Samuel Ortom, Benue State
"[President Muhammadu Buhari is running out of time to convince Christians that a] grand mischievous plan for territorial conquest, ethnic cleansing and religious imposition] by Muslim Fulanis is not in the works]." "The very survival of our nation is now at stake." Catholic Archbishop of Abuja John Onaiyekan, Abuja, Nigeria
A Fulani herdsman waters his cattle (file picture)AFP/GettyImages
Nigeria is special; it is Africa's largest, wealthiest country and its most populous. It is divided by Christianity and Islam. And it has its very own special deadly radical Islamist terrorist group defying authority and stalking and murdering Nigerian villagers, abducting young girls and creating countless homeless people desperate to escape their depredations. It had a Christian president and now has a Muslim president, both of whom pledged to rout Boko Haram and neither of whom succeeded.
And though Nigeria is one of those rare African countries with great natural resources and has considerable income from petroleum, there isn't much of a trickle-down effect to ensure that the country's wealth is equally shared. There are, throughout Africa, droughts impacting on agriculture and cattle-raising, and since the two enterprises are diametrically opposed, there is great tension between the herdsmen wanting to graze their herds, and the agriculturalists who want their fields unmolested.
Climate change has impacted Africa, bringing stress and deadly hostility between herdsmen and agriculturalists to the fore in South Sudan and the Central African Republic. Muslims and Christians have turned against one another in confrontations for that very same reason in Nigeria. Armed cattle herders, Muslims of the Fulani tribe, have raised militias in Nigeria, just as has occurred in northern Kenya where farmers both white and black have been killed.
In Nigeria, hundreds of thousands of people have vacated farms and villages, leaving their homes to abandonment. Where crops are not being raised, hunger, economic collapse and disease spreading in camps for the displaced looms on the near horizon. Aggression on the part of semi-nomadic cattle herders from the Fulani ethnic group, some 20 million in number, their territory spread across west and central Africa, threatens stability.
Traditional pasturage in the north of Nigeria has collapsed as it has elsewhere in some northern African states where up to 75 percent of grassland has been transformed through desertification. Water sources have been disappearing alongside attacks by Boko Harm to combine circumstances thrusting the Fulani and their herds into the fertile central farmlands of Nigeria; the Middle Belt, home to a Christian majority population.
Local authorities and farmers' attempts to protect crops and farmland has resulted in reprisals where farmers tending their crops have had their hands severed, stuffed into their pockets as examples meant to terrify other farmers to abandon their fields. Fulani gangs on motorcycles attack villages and the terrorized inhabitants flee as the gangs open fire, set fire to homes, hack children to death. In a village in Kaduna state last month 71 people were killed.
Even some Fulani have been slaughtered by their fellow tribesmen in this battle between agriculture and herding. But it's not solely herders involved in these attacks. Young gangs of Fulani have organized kidnapping camps in the vast Rugu forest, emerging on their motorcycles to prey on pedestrians walking isolated nearby pathways. As many as a hundred people were kidnapped in two days last month in Kaduna state.
One attack on a church in Benue state in April saw two priests and 17 of their parishioners killed during Mass, persuading many Christian Nigerians that the real intention of the Fulanis is to dispossess them through territorial acquisition and the expansion of Islam through ethnic cleansing of Christians. The result has been that Christian tribesmen felt compelled to form armed vigilante groups to battle the herders during attacks, and to implement reprisal attacks themselves.
Muslim President Muhammadu Buhari, accused of turning a blind eye to the attacks has ordered the military to restore order. Nigeria's armed forces have been dispatched to do just that, finding their opponents in possession of arms superior to their own, the very situation that prevailed when they went out to rout Boko Haram terrorists.
Nigeria: 86 dead in reprisal attack by Muslim herders on Christian farmers The long-running battle for land and resources is threatening to become the worst security risk in Nigeria 25 June 2018, South China Post
"Her story give[s] us hope, that's why we, too, want to go to school and become something in life." "We have to bear all pains like hunger to go to school.
We barely eat once a day here. We have not eaten since morning because
government people no longer bring us food for about two months now." "I want to become a soldier so that I could help my community to fight and kill Boko Haram, because they are not good people." Fatima Ali, schoolgirl, 15, Maiduguri, Nigeria
"This
is part of my girl power trip, visiting many parts of the world. I am
here now because of the Nigerian girls. Fighting for them and speaking
up for them." "They have lived in the period of extremism." "[I
hope they will] live with their family, live a normal life. And the
government must unite so that they should make sure that these girls are
released [those schoolgirls remaining in Boko Haram captivity]." "Boko Haram themselves should learn that in Islam, such things are unacceptable. This is against humanity, this is against Islam." Malala Yousafzai, Pakistani Nobel Peace laureate
Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai seen in a group discussion with some of the students of Yerwa Girls school in Maiduguri, Nigeria Reuters/Afolabi Sotunde
The young woman whose experience of being shot in the head by Taliban
tribesmen intending to silence her and make an example of a young girl
whose outspoken criticism of their violence and their misbegotten Islamist determination to keep girls and women out of sight, wearing dark burqas and niqabs
to cover their faces, keeping them in their homes, disallowing music
and celebration, destroying their schools and killing their teachers
became a symbol of heroic resistance in her struggle, championed by the
West.
She has since as she grows into adulthood, become a
spokesperson for the need to see that girls and women in the world of
Islam and where poverty and ignorance resides, receive an education. She
recently toured internally displaced camps in and around the Nigerian
city of Maiduguri, sheltering thousands from the violence that Boko Haram strikes in the country. Their abduction of hundreds of young schoolgirls from Chibok made world headlines.
Some of those girls in their mid-teens were 'married' to Boko Haram militants and bore their children. Some, managing to free themselves and appearing with their children in their villages, have been spurned and isolated and threatened, spurring them to find haven in the refugee camps. Boko Haram
had used some of the schoolgirls as suicide bombers, leading their
former neighbours and family members to view them all with suspicion and
abhorrence.
Malala Yousafzai
is no longer the defiant schoolgirl of 15 who had to undergo emergency
surgery to save her life. She is now a advocate for educating girls and
women, herself now a celebrated young woman of 20. She is intelligent
and forward-looking, courageous and determined. Yet she fails to
recognize that the Taliban who tried to murder her and Boko Haram
which has tormented poor villagers, torching their homes, slaughtering
the men, abducting the women and girls are indeed symbolic in their
actions of Islamic values.
Meeting with over a hundred
girls who were rescued and must remain for their own safety in the
capital in internment camps, she informed the media she was unhappy the
girls have not been permitted to fully reunite with their families.
Their families no longer trust them, their families are shamed that
their village neighbours consider them to be Boko Haram converts, and have defiled tribal and religious dictates that girls remain virgin until marriage.
The normal life that Malala Yousafzai
envisions for these girls has been destroyed by Islamic heritage,
culture and values; they are outcasts. And the government which
administers Africa's largest, most populous country, with an abundance
of natural petroleum resources has failed its population, both Christian
and Muslim whose futures have been darkened by Boko Haram predation.
Nigeria's northeast is home to three million children where 1,400 schools have been destroyed by the Boko Haram insurgency. Over 2,295 teachers in the region were slaughtered by Boko Haram since 2009, according to the United Nations children's agency.
All
the grievous ills, the mass slaughter, the rapes, the dislocation and
the crisis in food scarcity and refugees represent the handiwork of Islamofascists loyal to the core to Islam, the Koran and the Hadiths.
And the governments, like that of Nigeria, whose response is insipid to
the threat of their people are in effect, colluding with the terrorists
by default.
"Poorer countries hosting huge numbers of refugees for many years, such as Kenya, Pakistan and Turkey, have recently pushed back hundreds of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers." Gerry Simpson, migration expert, Human Rights Watch
"I think host governments are getting sort of fed up that a very large proportion of the burden is falling on them, without enough international assistance." Kathleen Newland, co-founder, Migration Policy Institute, Washington
Many returnees are ending up in camps in Borno state AFP
Thousands of Nigerians who crossed the border into Cameroon to find respite from the attacks by Boko Haram were living in crowded refugee camps in the impoverished country that allowed them to find haven, and struggled to support their needs. More recently they were exposed to a concentrated effort on the part of Cameroon authorities to persuade them to return to their own country, with the assurance by those authorities that the situation had returned to normal, their former homes awaited them and peace reigned.
Some, suspecting nothing awry, did return only to find their lives were still endangered, and to discover that little food was available. In the past several months some five thousand Nigerian refugees were summarily rounded up from where they were sheltering in villages in Cameroon and in refugee camps and expelled, forced to return to an area remaining under frequent insurgent attacks. The United Nations feels the number is double that, that in fact ten thousand refugees have been forced to return to the danger from which they had originally fled.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had been arranging agreements to persuade countries sending refugees home, that they only be returned voluntarily. This followed the mass eviction from Cameroon, one of the world's most indigent nations, inundated in recent years to host over 300,000 people crossing their border from wars in the Central African Republic and Nigeria. Many other refugees bowed to pressure to return to northeastern Nigeria where they were greeted by no housing, severe overcrowding and little food and water.
There are areas of Nigeria that Doctors Without Borders discovered to be close to famine conditions. When they entered Banki last summer once Boko Haram was driven out by the Nigerian military, Doctors Without Borders found a crisis, with over ten percent of children suffering acute malnutrition, and people dying of preventable diseases. While back in Cameroon, residents of northern Cameroon placed the cause of their own food shortages on refugees, even as the Cameroonian government struggled to provide for the refugees.
Refugees are seen gathered at
Minawao Refugee Camp in northern Cameroon, April 18, 2016. The U.N.
refugee agency has called on Cameroon to stop forcibly repatriating
Nigerians refugees on its territory.
"In the beginning, there was no problem. Hunters and insurgents met in the forest and everyone was doing their own business." "We decided right then [when Boko Haram first took its deadly revenge], they won't stop until they kill all of us." "Once you meet it [your prey, as a hunter], there are only two options: you kill it or it kills you." "If you climb a tree you might be safe from an elephant. But not with Boko Haram. If you climb a tree, they'll shoot you." Bunu Bukar, Nigerian hunter
Aisha Gombi Bakari, 38, is one of only a handful of female Boko Haram hunters.
Photograph: Rosie Collyer
Bunu Bukar was throughout his life as a hunter familiar with hunting big game. Hunters traditionally went off in groups, sometimes as many as a hundred people all together, for a major hunt when the bush would be tramped through, on the hunt for prey. More latterly, some Nigerian hunters have been absorbed for their skills in hunting and their intimate knowledge of the bush, by the Nigerian military. Their induction has been useful in the determination to roust the Boko Haram terrorists from bush hideouts.
And while the hunters useful in plying their trade, more accustomed to dealing with the habits of the animals they traditionally hunt, familiar with those who readily succumb, and those like elephants who can be ferocious in fighting back, they recognize there is little comparison with the terrorists who now comprise their prey for they are, like the hunters, armed and dangerous and fully capable of fighting on the same unforgiving terms of either kill or be killed.
The forests of northeastern Nigeria represent the traditional hunting grounds of those now being deployed to rout out the terrorists in Nigeria. Where, as children those hunters were trained to track the prints of wild pigs, antelopes and elephants through thick brush, they now hunt a different prey, one whose spoor is the exhaust of fuel and the tracks of motorcycles. The hunters are members of a century-old association of hunters.
10,000 hunters gather in Nigeria’s North-East, seek clearance to confront Boko Haram in Sambisa Forest
Boko Haram themselves began in their Islamist zeal as hunters, shooting, kidnapping, burning down villages in a wholesale destructive campaign of regional murder. And while large battalions of soldiers have been dispatched in operations to attack the terrorists, their predations continue, even while they retreat to hideouts in remote forest locations. The lack of success in stopping their deadly raids has convinced civilians to involve themselves in forming vigilante groups.
Now the Hunters/Vigilante Association in Borno State has become engaged. A week ago the military managed to release 82 girls from captivity with Boko Haram, who had been abducted among several hundred schoolgirls from the village of Chibok, attending a finishing school for girls, writing their final exams. The forests are familiar territory for the hunting group. Where once they tracked game, occasionally coming across Boko Haram militants, neither bothered the other.
But then the military began entering Boko Haram's forest fastness and followed them, chasing them as they set out on their countryside missions of devastating slaughter. In the unfamiliar terrain, the military asked for assistance of the hunters to guide them to where water could be found. When Boko Haram understood that the hunters were aiding the military, they decided to teach them a lesson. To that end they abducted a village leader of the hunters' group, decapitating him and placing his head neatly on his back.
The hunters responded by moving their families out of the rural villages to the capital, Maiduguri where they would be safe. And then the hunters decided they would integrate their hunting skills in tracking down Boko Haram with the military's missions to do the same. They now on occasion lead the military into battle, using their own long-barrelled guns they are skilled in manufacturing. When the hunters prepare for a forest mission they rub herbs on their bodies to mask their human scent. And they wear a number of protective spirit amulets.
Hunters are doused with a secret potion to grant them immunity to bullets. Photograph: Rosie Collyer
Some of the hunters arm themselves with knives made by their grandfathers, with designs etched on the blades. They have discovered that the winning strategy begins with carving out a hole in a tree to act as a shield to wait for the entry of Boko Haram groups to pass by. Ambushes distinguish themselves by success. Sometimes the hunters recover war booty, taken from Boko Haram hideouts such as mobile phones and cash.
Sometimes the hunters use primitive-appearing weapons on their patrols. For example, a traditional gariyo, a cross between a farmer's sickle and a sword, a long hooked blade, deadly in the hands of someone expert in its use. They carry cellphones so they can be alerted when Boko Haram fighters are travelling in their direction on their motorcycles. When the ambushes succeed, the hunters block their progress, confront and kill the terrorists. To the terrorists, the hunters doubtless have become themselves terrorists.
"I was there when my husband was killed." "We told them [Boko Haram] we would give them whatever they wanted. They didn't want anything." "They wanted his life." "This [tent camp beside Niger's National Route 1] is not like a village. It's just an empty space." Kiari Yamangou, widow, Niger "We can sleep now. Because no one is shooting." Fati Fougou, 40, mother of seven, Niger
"If we live by the road, people will pass by." "If anyone wants to give us something, they'll know we're here, at this first spot." Hadiza Mani, 60, widow, Niger
"They come in the afternoon. They come all night." "It's so hard. Many people come with so many children. But I'm obliged to give them something to eat." Shettima Fougou, village chief, Garin Wanzam, Niger
Lucas Destrijcker, Al Jazeera
In desperation, they flee Nigeria to enter Niger, hoping to place distance between themselves and the terror that Boko Harm has brought to their country. Over 130,000 desperate refugees have found an improbable home away from home, beside a highway cut straight through the Niger desert. It is a highway that was left unfinished. But to the desperate, the desolate sandy area is their new home, where they imagine themselves to be safe, finally, from the depredations of Boko Haram.
There are not any actual travellers on the highway, since it has a sudden end at nowhere, with the desert all around. A Chinese oil company planning to create a short cut from Niger to its oil fields close to the border with Chad, still has 130 kilometers to go to complete its journey. But construction stopped two years ago after ongoing attacks by Boko Haram. The Chinese are no longer to be seen; in their place are tens of thousands of Nigerians living in huts comprised of grain stalks, fabric scraps, torn flour bags and tarps.
"Sometimes I think they'll come again, even here. I have nightmares -- they're coming to kill me, they're coming to kill me", said 13-year-old Atcha Mallam for whom the roadside has been home for the past year and a half. Boko Haram may have suffered lost battles diminishing their presence, persuading hundreds of thousands of Nigerians to return home to their villages, but there is nothing left of the villages to return to. At least four million people have no access to aid, and an estimated
475,000 children across Lake Chad will suffer from severe acute
malnutrition this year [Lucas Destrijcker/ Al Jazeera]
Over 200,000 people left homeless by the violence have found what they identify as safety in the Diffa region of Niger alongside the border with Nigeria, where National Route 1 was built. A paved highway in the middle of a desert. There are regular patrols by the Niger military along the paved stretch of highway, but thus far Boko Haram is nowhere to be seen, and the refugees living there feel a sense of security.
UNICEF trucks water into the highway community while the International Rescue Committee gives out bags of rice, tins of sardine, and powdered milk, and Doctors Without Borders run medical clinics. The refugees have transformed small roadside villages into refugee towns overwhelming the ground wells in an area of scarce water and where crops cannot endure brutal heat. Some of the refugees arrived with herds and flocks of cattle, goats, donkeys and chickens, all needing food and water.
Former fisherfolk and farmers were forced to leave their livelihoods. Away from the desert, a fertile area exists close to Lake Chad, but this is where Boko Haram has established itself, despite several nations' militaries having made major advances in destroying their territorial gains. The small village of Garin Wanzam where Shettima Fougou is chief, had 20 people twenty years ago, and now tries to provide food and shelter to 13,000 people.
By Oxfam International's estimates 80 percent of the displaced in the area around Diffa adjacent the highway are being fed and sheltered by local communities, communities even in peace that are considered to represent the continent's most indigent. Aid groups offer a number of activity centers in an attempt to alleviate boredom, since labour in the desert is a thin affair with few growing fields. Markets sell wood, fabric, vegetables yet many people have no means of purchase.
More than 150,000 children found safety in Diffa after they were
uprooted from their homes, but they lack education as schools are closed
[Lucas Destrijcker/ Al Jazeera]
More than 150,000 children found safety in Diffa after they were uprooted from their villages by Boko Haram. Less than half the 137,000 children in the region attend school since village schools scarcely operate as teachers haven't been paid for months by the government, leaving UNICEF to set up 27 small schools along the highway. Children are sent by their families to search among acacia trees for firewood, carrying what they find home on their heads. Soon all the trees will have been depleted.
Displaced Nigerians seek some shade in Assaga
settlement. During the dry season, temperatures climb up to 48C [Lucas
Destrijcker/Al Jazeera]
"Questioning suspects is a lengthy process. It is better to take time to screen them out than to allow a single terrorist to go free and carry out a suicide bombing." "[The Nigerian military follows] international best practices." Colonel Sani Kukasheka Usman army spokesman
"These women can kill. They are used to killing and slaughtering people." "You can't be absorbing people into your communities without deradicalizing them." Ann Darman, director, Gender Center, northeastern Nigeria
"Most of the camps have become centres of hunger, malnutrition and communicable diseases." The Daily Trust
"The camp officials have been restricting some of us who are strong from going out." "We have been living as prisoners, and the food meant for our care is being sold in the open market." Umar Abdulsalam, refugee spokesman, Borno state, Nigeria
Nigeria accounted for more than half the worldwide killings of Christians in 2015.
Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Nigeria is Africa's largest, most populous country. And just incidentally, endowed with the most valuable natural resources. When oil revenues reflected high revenues per barrel, the-then Christian led government in a country equally divided between Christianity and Islam, tended to give short shrift to the needs of the Muslim portion. Now that a Muslim government is in place and oil revenues are down it is the Christians who are deprived and the Muslim demographic that is benefiting.
But it is from among the Muslim part of the country that Boko Haram arose and began its marauding, looting, raping, killing spree as a dedicated jihadist terrorist group claiming affinity first to al-Qaeda and more latterly connection to Islamic State. The new Nigerian president, an orthodox Muslim and former general, vowed to eradicate Boko Haram, but the underpaid, under-armed military is almost as ineffective as under the previous administration.
There have been some successful battles against Boko Haram, though it is far from being eliminated. But the incidence of arresting civilians looking for protection with the military from the terrorist group has increased; detention centers and barracks where civilians are supposed to be interrogated to ensure they are not Boko Haram sympathizers have become death traps for those placed in them. And those in the camps include women who have escaped their captivity by Boko Haram.
Officials are suspicious of all such people given the success of Boko Haram in transforming captives into bombers. Children as young as eight, mothers, boys, girls, have become suicide bombers, killing hundreds of people, trained to strike at crowded markets, schools and refugee camps alike. President Muhammadu Buhari instructed the military that corruption would no longer be the order of the day, spurring the military to routing the terrorists from remote villages.
The Chibok schoolgirls, though a more recent video highlighting their presence still with Boko Haram, have never been retrieved after two years of bondage. Screening by the military of men and boys can take on miserably violent dimensions. If the interrogators feel that those they question are withholding information the legs and hands0shackled people are beaten unmercifully; some never seen again. Hostility between Christians and Muslims results in violent clashes and deaths.
The refugee camps holding thousands close to Maiduguri in the north-east are short of food. Children are starving; there is no potable water, and temperatures soar into the 40s. Camp inhabitants are forbidden from leaving the camp precincts and there is nowhere they can access food. Humanitarian aid meant to be delivered to the malnourished disappears, looted and sold freely on the black market. An estimated 1.2 million to 2 million refugees are being held in the camps.
The state government of Borno is supposed to provide cooked meals to the refugees, but it fails to materialize. International aid workers trying to feed the malnourished children speak of starvation deaths. The bleak failure of the country to protect its own and provide safe haven for the vulnerable speaks of an enormous lack of will and dedication to the barest provision of human needs for survival.
"All those women who lived with Boko Haram are also Boko Haram soldiers. The military should not make the mistake of releasing them." "If they can't execute them, they should figure out what to do with them." Hazida Ali, Nigerian refugee camp
"I didn't like him. He told me to have his baby, then I'll forget about my other husband [murdered by Boko Haram]." "Sometimes they look at me in that way, but it's not the baby's fault. If I didn't have her, I'd have no children [left] at all." Hafsat Ibrahim, Dalori refugee camp, Nigeria
Perhaps it is not fair to judge a culture as primitive when it views victims as enemies and wishes to destroy them rather than welcome them back from captivity as people to be nurtured back to health within their communities. On the other hand, young girls who have been abducted, have endured dreadful ordeals of repeatedly being raped, being forced to live among Islamist terrorists who have embarked on sprees of slaughter, of burning down villages, of looting, of abducting and raping, now suffer the humiliation, loss of dignity and fear instilled by the hostility of former villagers.
These are, of course, all people who have fled the desperately vicious depredations of Nigeria's jihadist groups taking inspiration from the caliphate of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Boko Haram celebrates the same freedom to instill fear in the populace as they rampage into villages, killing most of the men and boys refusing to join them. They take the women with them to have them cook for the terrorists and train them as suicide bombers.
Other women become "wives" in terrorist Boko Haram "marriages" that result in children being borne by the helpless women. It is their status as former 'wives' that provokes outrage by others who have managed to escape, through sheer good fortune, being taken captive by the terrorists. They view all those unfortunate enough to have been abducted, as having been tainted and corrupted by Boko Haram, becoming one themselves among them; the enemy.
If they had their way vengeance would be struck against girls of 13 and 14 and 15 who have been repeatedly raped, who manage somehow to return to their tribal villages, pregnant, only to discover they are loathed where they were once loved. One woman described Boko Haram invading her village, killing her husband and abducting her and her four-year-old daughter, into the jihadists' stronghold of a vast forest.
She gave birth to a child, as the "wife" of a Boko Haram jihadi, but then he fled when the Nigerian military was closing in, and he took with him her little girl. Now her 15-month-old baby faces the hatred of people in the refugee camp, and so does she; she has become a social outcast. And her baby, the result of misery and rape, is all she has left in her world.
Other young girls offer the fiction that the father of their child had been killed by Boko Haram, not that a Boko Haram jihadist had fathered the child they keep close to them, strapped to their young backs. "If they knew my baby was from an insurgent, they wouldn't allow us to stay" in the refugee camp, explained Zara.
The deep suspicion raging against helpless victims forced to live among the terrorist group though they were hostages and tormented daily, has resulted in their torment following them even as they broke free of Boko Haram. Northeastern Nigeria represents a festering wound of privation, fear and hatred. Dozens of women and girls were used by Boko Haram as suicide bombers.
Nigerians have been called to embrace all former Boko Haram captives.
Hundreds of people have died in attacks that have taken place on markets and schools, and refugee camps. Everyone views people with any links however tentative as victims, with suspicion, and that suspicion is returned by the victims, with a sense of dread and foreboding. Thousands of captives freed by the military have streamed into camps only to discover their freedom comes with the price of detestation by those who were spared abduction.
"This isn't something you can defeat or eradicate outright. You don't know who is who. When you see a young girl moving toward you, you don't know if she's hiding a bomb." "They [Boko Haram] know where we have the Achilles heel [incapable of firing on any woman or girl who appears suspicious as a potential suicide bomber]." Issa Tchiroma Bakary, Cameroonian minister of communications
Mr. Bakar knows of what he speaks. In his country, since the start of 2016, 22 female suicide bombers were identified. Although Boko Haram may have assembled themselves in Nigeria, their dreaded presence goes well beyond Nigeria's borders, into Chad, Cameroon and Niger. Boko Haram fighters have specialized in rampaging brutality. In this, they are merely following the order of original Islam as exemplified by the revered Prophet.
They attack mosques, churches and schools, and specialize in mass killing of civilians. They sweep into a village, leaving it in ruin, massacring the men and kidnapping the women for sex slaves. They're considered, along with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant -- to whom they have pledged allegiance, planning to build a regional caliphate of their own -- to represent one of the deadliest such extremist groups in the world.
They have captured and held prisoner as sex slaves, thousands of women. Of that number roughly one hundred stand out as having become women and girls used in suicide attacks. the first one, in 2014, blew herself up at a Nigerian army barracks. Women and girls since then, with bombs hidden under their clothing or held in baskets have killed hundreds of people, in attacks on markets, schools and refugee camps.
Abducting, imprisoning and raping girls and women, the Boko Haram fighters give their victims the option if they are Christian, to convert to Islam. A denial sparks their immediate death. Christian-turned-Muslim or originally Muslim, the women and children are deeply indoctrinated in the Koranic principles of Islam. Once they have succeeded in passing that Koranic indoctrination they are then passed into other classes, one of which is skills in killing and in detonating explosive devices.
Rahila
Amos, a Nigerian grandmother who said she was abducted by Boko Haram
and forced to take classes on how to carry out a suicide bombing, in
Minawao, Cameroon. Photograph: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
It was described by Col. Didier Badjeck, a spokesman for Cameroon defence, that after soldiers had routed Boko Haram out of villages they discovered homes used as prisons for women and girls. That the women reported having been trained during their captivity in the Koran and in violence. "They are training them to maximize the number of victims. We are sure about it."
A female suicide bomber in March dressed to represent a man waited for morning prayers to set off her explosives. Outside waited another woman to time her detonation as people outside the mosque fled the first blast. Altogether. about 24 people were killed in the double blasts. Humanitarian groups are reconsidering the manner in which food, water and other aid is distributed ... what if one of the women they try to serve is hiding a bomb?
In February three girls dispatched with bombs were sent to a camp for Nigerians attempting to escape Boko Haram's predations While two of the girls detonated their bombs, the third saw her parents among the people in the camp and threw her explosives into the bush. On that occasion 60 people were killed. The female bombers are able to tuck explosives under their dresses, but young boys have also been used as suicide bombers.
One of the abductees, now rescued, a 47-year-old Nigerian mother and grandmother spoke of her experiences and the young girls who carried out suicide missions because they saw it as "a direct path to heaven", which was what their captors indoctrinated them to believe. I seems plausible that to a young girl being repeatedly raped the misery of her existence could be halted by agreeing to become a suicide bomber. Their training was initiated, a six tiered daily exposure to Koranic training.
Once the first two levels were complete, based on training in the Koran, the one that followed was to be trained in suicide bombing and beheading. "How to kill a person and how to bomb a house", explained Rahila Amon, the 47-year-old. "They told us if we came upon a group of ten to twenty people to press this (a detonator)." Along with advice to hold the bomb under the armpit to keep it steady. And to sever your enemy's head from behind to minimize the potential of a struggle.
"They started shooting, shooting, shooting. They took our livestock." "They took everything and they left." Matte Bama, Amchide, Cameroon "They need food. They need to eat. They're stealing everything." Midjiyawa Bakari, governor, Far North region, Cameroon "Their supply routes are blocked. They're hungry. They have nowhere to go." Brigadier General Rabe Abubakar, Nigerian military spokesman
"We're looking at a large-scale crisis in very remote areas." "This is not a today problem. This is a tomorrow problem and a next year problem unless it's contained, and I don't see it coming to a halt soon." Denise Brown, West and Central Africa regional director, World Food Program
A loaded truck waits to carry people fleeing from Boko Haram from the village of Mairi near the capital of northeast Borno State on February 6, 2016 .. Photo by Stringer/AFP:Getty Services
Boko Harm's terror raids have succeeded in helping to turn the Sahel region in north Africa into a deserted wasteland; where crops and livestock once existed, none do now. The villages are emptied of their residents, burned out and in ruin. Temperatures are rising, there is little rainfall and hunger at this time of year visits grimly as a threat to subsistence farmers and herdsmen traditionally.
They have fled, though, thanks to the predations of Boko Haram, and whatever they had been able to produce is no longer possible, leading to the threat of widespread starvation.
That condition has touched Boko Haram as well. So successful in terrorizing the villagers that 70 percent of the local farmers have left, the land abandoned, and nothing being grown, no food in prospect for anyone, much less members of Boko Haram. Representing enough of an incentive for starving members of Boko Haram to turn themselves in to authorities in complete surrender to their condition, hoping to be fed.
Other Boko Haram gangs storm the depleted villagers to kill, and to pillage whatever is left.
Their five-year regional rampage has resulted in over two million people forced to leave homes and farms. Farmers have left fallow fields, herdsmen taken their cattle on drives avoiding the terrorist violence. A series of ghost towns with few people left represent all that can be plundered, and that is very little. Northeastern Nigeria has seen trade falter and halt, with tens of thousands of people facing famine, according to the United Nations. There are no markets since no one has anything to sell.
The crowds of people that used to attend markets no longer do, not only because the markets have disappeared, but because even if they hadn't the favoured tactic of Boko Haram to send suicide bombers into crowded venues like markets would keep people away in any event. Hunger has pushed Boko Haram deeper into Cameroon, resulting in a multitude of attacks. The military campaign led by Nigeria and joined by its neighbours pushed the terrorists from onc-controlled villages.
Boko Haram militants scrounge for food in the Sambisa Forest where they had taken hundreds of abducted schoolgirls, or they venture out for raids. Emaciated fighters for Boko Haram surrendered to military officials, no longer capable of carrying on. From raids thousands of heads of cattle have been stolen by Boko Haram in Cameroon. They secure sheep and goats, and then abduct people to help lead the animals back to Nigeria. Hostages are forced to raid cattle from other villages.
Suicide belts, weapons and equipment for making mines have been collected through joint operations conducted by the Cameroonian and Nigerian militaries while capturing and killing Boko Haram fighters. The move is intended to push the fighters from both sides of the border leaving them nowhere to turn to. Chad and Niger, with the U.S. military advising, fight alongside Cameroon's and Nigeria's forces to squeeze out Boko Haram.
Left without food supplies there is an estimated 1.4 million people displaced and facing starvation. Drinking water is in short supply particularly at refugee camps where new arrivals converge on a daily basis. Cameroon is burdened by the presence of thousands of refugees seeking refuge from the religious war in nearby Central African Republic.
Africa is imploding, joining parts of the Middle East in total dysfunction, looking to the world at large for rescue. So much for Islam, the religion of peace. The deadly confluence of tribalism and Islam wreak their inhumane malice.
The Boko Haram terrorist group has been a scourge of unfettered religious dementia viciously embarked on carnage in the name of Islam, intent on reviving 7th Century Islam as a marauding, entitled horde of scimitar-wielding Bedouin tribesmen in their murderous spree of conquest. Invested with fanatical religion-inspired zeal, they attack villages, slaughter inhabitants, torch their homes and their farms, abduct the women and girls to enslave them.
Like other terrorist groups for whom martyrdom simply means a personal blessing, an advance ticket to Paradise where fulsome praise for their courage in slaughtering human beings by the means of explosives strapped to their bodies entitles them to the divinely ordained services of a harem of virgins, Boko Haram enslaves captured girls, converts them to Islam, and trains them to become living slaves to be bartered.
Some of them can be useful in additional ways, persuaded to surrender their lives for the greater good of the jihadists' vision of terror-induced submission to their rule. Teenage girls whose lives have been turned inside out and rendered unlivable have been dispatched, explosives plastered to their chests, to be detonated when they are in the midst of crowds of people.
In Maiduguri, northeast Nigeria's largest city which also happens to have given birth to Boko Haram, now a faithful ally of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant whose demented ideology they share, two teenage girls conducted a twin suicide bomb attack near a crowded mosque located in a busy market. At least thirty people died, and many more injured in the suicide blast involving Boko Haram captives.
On an increasing basis young girls are being used to do the work of Boko Haram, carrying explosive vests strapped to their bodies, and forced to blow themselves up. These girls wearing those vests don't decide how and when the explosives will go off; that choice is not given them, since they don't represent willing converts to martyrdom. The explosives they carry are remotely detonated, leaving them no option but to be torn to shreds and in the process carry innocent others with them.
This double suicide attack represented the fourth such suicide bombing in Maiduguri in the past three weeks. A witness explained that one of the girls blew herself up as she approached the crowded mosque nearby the Baga Road fish market. People were performing afternoon prayers for the holy month of Ramadan The second girl seemed to remove herself from the area, and when she exploded only she alone died.
Nigeria's new President Muhammadu Buhari announced that he has ordered the military command center to be moved from the capital Abuja to Maiduguri. Simultaneously Boko Harm stepped up its attacks, just as Nigeria and its neighbours prepare plans for a multinational army to be expanded based on its success earlier in the year driving Boko Haram from towns and villages where it had set up its Islamic caliphate.
Attacks continue apace, along with cross-border raids and bombings. Earlier a group of jihadis attacked two towns in Niger. Two buildings, including the national police academy in N'Djamena, Chad were attacked by suicide bombers last week, killing 33 people. Abubakar Shekau, Boko Haram's leader, swore formal allegiance to ISIL, with the result that the terrorist group now has what is considered an 'official' presence in Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon.
The second teenager appeared to run away from the scene and exploded alone, killing only herself
In Syria, where Islamic State's presence comprises the major portion of its 'caliphate', jihadists indulged in their usual savagery by tying two young boys to a beam by their wrists to be left hanging for hours as punishment for breaking the Ramadan fast. According to the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights this punishment happened in the village of Mayadeen in Deir Ezzor province.
A sign was put in place beside where the boys hung, to inform passersby that the pair was receiving due punishment for eating during daylight hours. The ISIL religious police force known as the Hisbah seized the boys on the weekend, suspending them from a pole, leaving them in a public square as a living warning not to disobey the tenets of Islamic State Sharia law.
The notice read: "They broke the fast with no religious justification."
"The processing is continuing; it involves a lot of things because most of them [rescued Nigerian village girls and women] are traumatized and you have got to put them in a psychological frame of mind to extract information from them." "Sambisa Forest is a large expanse of land, so what we were able to get is four out of several terrorist camps in the forest." Col. Sani Usman, Nigerian Armed Forces
In
this file photo taken Wednesday, April 8, 2015, Nigerian Soldiers man a
check point in Gwoza, Nigeria, a town newly liberated from Boko Haram.
Nigeria's military says it is moving 200 girls and 93 women from a
northeastern forest where they were rescued from Boko Haram extremists.
(AP Photo/Lekan Oyekanmi,File)
There is a new president of Nigeria, one who promised to take a hard line with the terrorist group Boko Haram that has pledged its allegiance to Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. That may be one reason that the Nigerian military is at last rousing itself out of its disinterested lethargy on display when it did nothing to rescue any of the countless Nigerian girls and women taken in mass kidnappings like the 219 missing from their boarding school in Chibok, a year ago.
Amnesty International claims that at least two thousand women and girls have been abducted since the beginning of 2014, many of them forced into sexual slavery, and also trained to fight for the Islamist terrorists. An intelligence officer described that many among the women and girls rescued in recent days, used weapons against the Nigerian army. As they were trained to do by Boko Haram, which used them both as human shields and as first-line defenders, armed and trained.
Military MASS RESCUE of 200 girls and 93 women from Boko Haram
allenwestrepublic.com
By later accounts, the soldiers subdued the women firing at them, removed their weapons and rounded them up for rescue, while other troops destroyed four Boko Haram camps. The army that had laconically stood by as Boko Haram marauded the countryside, indulging in mass killing and looting and taking over towns, in northeastern Borno State for their Islamist caliphate, is now asserting itself as an armed force dedicated to defending the interests of their country and its citizens.
It's been a month since the Nigerian military began their air raids in the Sambisa Forest, representing an assault it had earlier said it had avoided in fear of killing kidnapped women and girls, or inciting their captors to kill them in revenge for the onslaughts. Now the military claims it has driven the jihadists out of all the towns they captured, albeit with considerable assistance from Chadian and Niger troops. Cameroonian soldiers have guarded their borders in prevention of Boko Haram fighters escaping.
The rescued girls and women are being evacuated, with plans afoot to evaluate their psychological and physical well-being. Disappointingly, none of the Chibok schoolgirls appear to be among those whom the military has rescued.
Military evacuating girls, women rescued from Boko Haram
"There is a copycat element at work here. If ISIS can declare a caliphate, then so can we. Boko Haram want to be seen by their peers as grown-up jihadists. They want to show 'we can control territory, we can control a caliphate'." "Success, and they have had success, creates a different kind of requirement. You need a place where you can base yourself and keep equipment and supplies and, indeed, captives. It means that you've got to hold territory." Andrew Pocock, British High Commissioner to Nigeria
And territory is what Boko Haram has created for itself in its proud new caliphate now the size of Belgium where the black flag of jihad proudly waves over towns and villages scattered across Borno and Yobe states. The fishing town of Baga on Lake Chad knows well what it's like to bear the brunt of a Boko Haram attack. The scourge of Nigeria strikes at will, for though there are local militias there is no defence from the nation's military, too busy to be concerned about the plight of thousands of Nigerians who were slaughtered. in the latest attacks.
A soldier and government officials inspects the bridge that link
Nigeria and Cameroon following an attacked by Islamic militants in
Gambaru, Nigeria, May 11, 2014. Thousands of members of Nigeria’s
home-grown Islamic extremist Boko Haram group strike across the border
in Cameroon, with coordinated attacks on border towns, a troop convoy
and a major barracks. Further north, Boko Haram employs recruits from
Chad to enforce its control in northeastern Nigerian towns and cities. Jossy Ola/AP/File
Perhaps the most recent successes in the atrocities taking place in Nigeria have gone to Boko Haram's Emir's head, leading Abubakar Shekau to order his militias over the border into Cameroon. Where they met up against resistance from Cameroonian soldiers who fought in a manner that Goodluck Jonathan's military appears incapable of doing. The reality was the killing of over a hundred Boko Haram jihadists on Monday, the result of attacking a military base near the Nigerian border.
Issa Tchiroma Bakary, Cameroon's minister of communications stated that the Boko Haram failed assault lost the terrorist group 143 of its fighters. In addition they lost "important warfare equipment made up of assault rifles of various brands, heavy weapons and bullets of all calibers". In the fighting one Cameroonian soldier was killed, and four wounded at the military base in Kolofata, in the far northwest of Cameroon.
So while Nigeria, the most populous, the largest territorially and the most wealthy of African nations is incapable of securing the defence of its population largely out of disinterest and political corruption, its neighbours are more than capable of fending off terrorist attacks. President Goodluck Jonathan cancelled the third of the training sessions between his military and the United States; after all, his country has no need of self-defence capabilities.
The raid last week on the garrison town of Baga in northeastern Nigeria represented a huge success for Boko Harm in terms of numbers of victims, held by local authorities to be as many as 2,000 killed. The Nigerian Defence Ministry claims that the number of those killed at Baga were no more than 150, consolidating their reputation for underplaying such numbers rather than face the reality of having to admit the threat that Boko Haram represents.
This represents a general opinion site for its author. It also offers a space for the author to record her experiences and perceptions,both personal and public. This is rendered obvious by the content contained in the blog, but the space is here inviting me to write. And so I do.
![More than 150,000 children found safety in Diffa after they were uprooted from their homes, but they lack education as schools are closed [Lucas Destrijcker/ Al Jazeera]](http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdmegaxxlarge/mritems/Images/2016/9/22/f79933d465d54e9fa9e3737f3e198503_9.jpg "Boko Haram refugees in Niger find safety, but lack aid")
