Saratu Dauda had been kidnapped. It was 2014, she was 16 years old and she was in a truck full of classmates heading to the mountains of northeastern Nigeria, with a member of the terrorist group Boko Haram at the wheel of her. The Chibok girls' boarding school, miles away, had been burned down.
Then he noticed some girls jumping out of the back of the truck, he said, some alone, others in pairs. They ran and hid in the bushes as the truck moved forward.
But before Dauda could jump, he said, a girl raised the alarm and shouted for others to “jump and run.” His kidnappers stopped, secured the truck and continued toward what, for Dauda, It would be 9 years of captivity that would change his life.
“If I hadn't shouted that, we would all have escaped,” Dauda said this month in the city of Maiduguri, the birthplace of the violent Boko Haram insurgency.
Kidnapped from her bedroom 10 years ago, The 276 captives known as 'the Chibok Girls' were catapulted to fame by Michelle Obamaby churches that embraced the cause of the students, mostly Christian, and by activists who used the slogan “Give back our girls.”
Since then, their lives have taken wildly different turns. Some escaped almost immediately; 103 were released a few years later, after negotiations. A dozen now live abroad, including in the United States. Until now 82 are still missing, perhaps murdered or even held hostage.
chibok It was the first mass school kidnapping in Nigeria, but it was not the last. Today, kidnapping – including that of large groups of children – has become a business throughout this West African country, with ransom payments being its main motivation.
“The Chibok tragedy is repeated again and again every week,” said Pat Griffiths, spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Maiduguri.
The Chibok Girls are just the most high-profile victims of a 15-year conflict with Islamist militants which, despite hundreds of thousands of people killed and millions uprooted, has been largely forgotten amid other wars. More than 23,000 people in northeastern Nigeria are registered as missing by the Red Cross — the second highest number of cases globally after Iraq. But that's an understatement, Griffiths said.
Before she was kidnapped, Dauda said, she was a happy teenager in a large, close-knit Christian family. She loved playing with dolls and dreamed of being a fashion designer.
For months after they were captured, Dauda said, the girls slept outside in the Sambisa forest, Boko Haram's hideout; they heard a constant stream of Islamic preachers and quarreled over limited water supplies. When two girls tried to escape, he said, they were whipped.
She said they were given a choice: marry or become slaves for housework or sex.
Dauda opted for marriage, converted to Islam and changed her name to Aisha. She was introduced to a man in his 20s whose job was to record videos of Boko Haram battles.
He was not cruel to her, she said, but after a few months, one day he came home and found her playing with a doll he had made out of clay and for which he had made a dress.
“Are you playing with idols? “Do you want to cause me problems?” she remembered him saying. She got angry and left her house and stayed with another girl from Chibok. When he realized that she would not return, he told him, he divorced her.
She soon married another Boko Haram fighter, Mohamed Musa, a welder who made weapons, and they eventually had three children. Although she was still hostage by Boko Haram's murderous leader, Abubakar Shekau, she said they were given everything they needed, they were surrounded by people “who cared for each other like a family” and that she was happy. The Chibok girls were treated much better than other kidnapping victims, other fugitives have said.
Over the years, Dauda tracked down friends of Chibok who died. Sixteen in airstrikes and bomb attacks. Two in childbirth. One as a suicide bomber, driven by Boko Haram. One from illness and another from a snake bite. She noticed that mainly women and children were killed in the air raids and wondered when it would be her turn.
And life became harder. When Boko Haram's leader died and his powerful branch, the Islamic State's West Africa Province, took power in Sambisa Forest, Dauda and her husband found themselves under suspicion. Late at night, in whispers, they talked about escaping. But Dauda wanted to act faster than her husband and she decided to get ahead of him. He refused to allow her to take her daughters, saying that he would follow her with them later.
One night, at 3:00 a.m., she prepared a small package of food, looked at the faces of her sleeping daughters, and said a short prayer for their protection. She walked for days through the bush, going from town to town, telling people that she was on her way to visit friends and always came out during morning prayer, when the men were in the mosque and did not see her. go out.
Along the way she met other women who were fleeing and, in May, they surrendered together to the Army.
“Is she a Chibok girl?” one soldier recalled marveling when he learned her identity. “Thank God”.
Dauda was taken to Maiduguri and enrolled in the Government's rehabilitation programme. A few months later, she found out that her husband had run away with her three daughters and they were reunited.
He said he had dreamed of seeing his parents again. One day, she was allowed to leave the government premises with her daughters to visit them in her village, Mbalala.
He hugged his father and mother. “She was crying and I was crying,” she said.
Her father offered her and her husband a place to stay if they converted to Christianity, she said. But she said that she had freely become a Muslim.
“I wasn’t brainwashed,” he said. “What they explained to me convinced me.”
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