Bring back our kids
Boko Haram has stolen thousands of children. It’s time for a new hashtag.
Boko Haram’s abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls two years ago from the town of Chibok, Nigeria, earned the Nigerian Islamist group global attention and an unprecedented spot on the social media scene.
Activists around the world, including U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama and Nobel Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai, united under the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. Other Twitter heavyweights, such as, ahem, Kim Kardashian and Chris Brown, endorsed it as well, bringing celebrity power to the social media campaign. The pressure led to political maneuvers: Within a month of the attack, the U.S. sent military personnel to West Africa to help locate and free the girls, while the U.K., France and China pledged assistance.
Yet Boko Haram’s largest kidnapping, in which more than 300 children were taken from the town of Damasak only a few months later, garnered little media coverage and public outcry. If the Chibok girls must be released from captivity, so must the Damasak kids.
Then there are the thousands of boys, including toddlers, the islamist group has kidnapped in the past three years (to train as jihadists in remote boot camps), and the hundreds of girls militants stole from the villages they ransacked. The girls become sex slaves and are forced into marriage; boys are beaten, made to participate in atrocities such as beheadings, and turned into child soldiers or left to die of starvation and thirst.
All those children must also be returned.
Boko Haram began in the early 2000s as a small militant group in northern Nigeria. Initially dubbed by locals as the Nigerian Taliban, they were disenchanted by the ruling class they saw as tainted with Western ideals. Yet its focus was local and its use of violence relatively minimal, though their restraint proved short-lived.
It’s interesting to note that the group didn’t call itself Boko Haram; it earned that nickname from neighboring communities that perceived it as fixated on rejecting Western education. (The term Boko Haram has been loosely translated as meaning “Western education is a sin,” yet there’s a bit more to it. “Haram” was borrowed from Arabic for “forbidden,” and in the local Hausa language, “boko” refers to “fraud” and “inauthenticity,” which is how some Muslims perceived the Western education brought by British colonialists.) Its entire name is Jamat Ahl al-Sunna li al-Dawa wa al Jihad (“People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad”), much too long to have caught on in the media.
Strangely enough, it was police enforcement of a motorcycle helmet law that helped catapult the group into full-blown terrorism. It started with altercations on the day of a Boko Haram member’s motorcycle funeral procession and intensified with a police crackdown. Members were rounded up and executed without trial—among them the group’s leader, Mohammed Yusuf.
While Boko Haram’s violence had been escalating to include the murder of a prominent cleric in 2007, it was this event in mid-2009 that led to riots in several states, destructions of public buildings and hundreds of deaths.
When the group resurfaced in 2010 with Yusuf’s deputy Muhammad Shekau as the new head, its assault tactics were eerily reminiscent of well-known terror groups.
On Christmas Eve, Boko Haram launched a series of attacks that culminated with the detonation of seven bombs near public gathering places and churches in Jos, Plateau State. Months later, in June 2011, the group bombed police force headquarters in Abuja and followed that with a suicide attack on the United Nations offices in August 2011.
Targets expanded from churches and public office buildings to schools and newspapers. Reports show that in 2014, Boko Haram killed more than 6,000 people—more than ISIS in the same year.
Boko Haram pledged allegiance to ISIS in early March 2015. But lately there has seemed to be trouble in the marriage: ISIS announced Abu Musab al-Barnawi as the new leader of Boko Haram earlier this month, which Shekau denied. It was Shekau’s faction that released a new video of the Chibok girls on Sunday, an apparent jab at the Islamic State.
It is believed that Boko Haram members have traveled as far as Afghanistan and Somalia to train as bomb specialists and learn suicide attack skills. Other fighters have made their way to the western Sahel region and studied under al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb militants who taught them abduction practices.
Kidnapping for ransom or in exchange for the release of its members became part of the group’s modus operandi. Before the abduction of the girls in Chibok, Boko Haram’s first kidnapping was a French family of seven in Waza, Cameroon, in early 2013. The family was released months later in exchange for prisoners and, according to some reports, a $3 million ransom. In the following months, Boko Haram kidnapped for ransom a French and two Italian priests, a Canadian nun and 10 Chinese engineers.
In the midst of these raids came the fateful night of April 14, 2014. Boko Haram fighters stormed into a Chibok boarding school and kidnapped 276 schoolgirls at gunpoint. About 50 girls escaped the same day, but more than 200 are still missing.
Information about their fate and whereabouts has been scarce. The video Boko Haram released Sunday claims that some of the Chibok girls have died in military airstrikes, while others have been married off. The video, which was posted on Twitter, shows a group of about 50 girls listening as a masked jihadist demands the release of some captured militants in return for the girls.
Seven months after the Chibok abduction, on Nov. 24, 2014, Boko Haram attacked the trading town of Damasak, sequestered more than 300 children for months, keeping women and men in different locations, before taking off with the youngsters and more than 100 women as news broke that Nigerian solders were advancing. There has been no word as to what happened to these children, nor has their disappearance (seemingly denied by the Nigerian government at first) elicited the same global coverage and response.
This latest video by Boko Haram has stirred mixed emotions of grief and hope for the Chibok girls, and will doubtless inspire renewed efforts to free them. Now it’s time to take into account all the children—boys and girls—who are suffering at the hands of the militant group and to finally broaden the hashtag to #BringBackOurKids.
