Despite having been Molested and dragged through the bush, they were alive – but only just – in the sweltering tropical heat and humidity. This grim scene was discovered by 15-year-old Baba Goni. 'They were seated on the ground at the base of the trees, their legs stretched out in front of them – they were hardly conscious,' says Baba, who acted as a guide for one of the many vigilante teams searching for the Nigerian schoolgirls abducted from their school last month by Boko Haram – and now at the centre of a concerted international campaign for their freedom.
The horrific scene he and his comrades encountered, a week after the kidnap early on April 15, was in thorny scrubland near the village of Ba'ale, an hour's drive from Chibok, where 276 girls aged 16 to 18 were taken from their boarding school dormitories – with 223 still missing. It was still two weeks before social media campaigns and protests would prick the Western world's conscience over the abduction.
In the days following their disappearance, rag- tag groups such as Baba's, scouring the forests in a convoy of Toyota pick-up trucks, were the girls' only hope. But hope had already run out for some of the hostages, according to Baba, when his group spoke to the terrified inhabitants of the village where Boko Haram had pitched camp with their captives for three days following the kidnap. The chilling account he received from the villagers, though unconfirmed by official sources, represents the very worst fears of the families of those 223 girls still missing.
Four were dead, they told him, shot by their captors for being 'stubborn and unco-operative'.
They had been hastily buried before the brutish kidnappers moved on. 'Everyone we spoke to was full of fear,' said Baba.
'They didn't want to come out of their homes.
They didn't want to show us the graves. They just pointed up a track.' The tiny rural village, halfway between Chibok and Damboa in the besieged state of Borno in Nigeria's north-east, had been helpless to stop the Boko Haram gang as it swept through on trucks loaded with schoolgirls they had taken at gunpoint before torching their school. Venturing further up the track, Baba and his fellow vigilantes found the two girls. Baba, the youngest of the group, stayed back as his friends took charge.
'They used my knife to cut through the ropes,' he said. 'I heard the girls crying and telling the others that they had been Molested, then just left there. They had been with the other girls from Chibok, all taken from the school in the middle of the night by armed men in soldiers' uniforms. 'We couldn't do much for them. They didn't want to talk to any men. All we could do was to get them into a vehicle and drive them to the security police at Damboa.
They didn't talk, they just held on to each other and cried.' For Baba, a peasant farmer's son who has never been out of rural Borno, it was shocking to see young girls defiled and brutalised by the notorious terrorists he knew so well. But his own life has been full of tragedy and he told how he had 'seen much worse' than the horror of that day in the forest clearing.
A bright-eyed Muslim boy from the Kanuri ethnic group, proud of a tribal facial scar and nicknamed 'Small' by all who know him because of his short, slim frame, he described a happy childhood with three brothers and two sisters in Kachalla Burari, a collection of mudhouses not far from Chibok.
Without electricity or running water, the children spent their days helping on their father's subsistence farm, planting maize and beans and millet. Baba and his friends used home-made catapults to shoot birds and in the rainy season fished in the river with bent hooks. But by his tenth birthday, the scourge of the radical Islamist Boko Haram was creeping up on everyone in Borno State.
Baba and his siblings attended a local madrassa, or religious school, where they learnt the Koran, but he had no formal teaching and cannot read or write to this day. By 2009, Boko Haram were becoming active in his area, peddling their message of hatred to Christians, but also turning on Muslims they branded as informers. Nigeria's chaotic military was incapable of defending itself or its citizens.
Baba's village life came under siege. There were attacks on the Christian population in the region, with bank robberies funding the gang. Disaffected, unemployed youths from local families were recruited and neighbours who once lived in peace now spied on one another. One night as he slept in his family's mudhouse in the village, the gunmen came door to door, looking for informers. 'I heard some noise, I woke up and saw men coming through the door, shooting at my uncle who was in the bed beside mine,' he said. 'That was the end of my childhood, the end of everything. I saw his body covered in blood, I backed away, and the men turned their guns on me. They grabbed me roughly and took me outside to a pick-up truck.
Baba, telling his story confidently and lucidly, wants to skate over the details of his two hellish years in the Boko Haram camp in Sambisa Forest. Today there are special forces soldiers swarming over the vast nature reserve and circling overhead in surveillance aircraft. For this slight boy, there was no such worldwide interest as he scurried back and forth at the command of a ruthless gang dug into woodland far from any help or rescue. He remembers many of them lived with women who had come voluntarily into the camp. He never saw any girls abducted.
This latest phenomenon is unknown to him. 'There were many abducted boys, but no girls,' he said. 'We were all scared to death and had to do whatever we were told – fetch water, fetch firewood, clean the weapons. 'We couldn't make friends – you didn't know who to trust. I was made to sleep next to the Boko Haram elders, the senior preachers. I had no special boss in the camp, I was ordered around by everybody'. The men prayed five times a day yet would leap on their motorbikes and trucks to carry out killing sprees.
'I knew they had started out as holy men but now I saw them as criminals, loaded with weapons and ammunition,' he said.
culled from gistplanets
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