Nigerians seek kidnap answers

Students missing after attack at girls’ boarding school.

It’s been more than three years since Nigeria’s government declared victory over Boko Haram, the Islamic militant group, but that assertion has been put to the test several times in the last few months.

In November, Boko Haram terrorists conducted bombings in Nigeria that killed dozens of people. The next month, the group attacked a Nigerian army convoy accompanying World Food Program trucks, killing four more. Then, this week, Boko Haram staged an attack on a girls’ boarding school, one that echoed the 2014 kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in the town of Chibok.

There are conflicting reports about exactly what happened, but here’s what we do know: On Monday, the Government Girls Science and Technical School in Dapchi, a village in northeastern Nigeria, was attacked.

NPR quoted several witnesses saying that 12 trucks carrying insurgents and mounted machine guns drove onto the school campus. As the militants approached and set off explosives, dozens of students and teachers fled into the surrounding bush, helping one another scale the compound fence.

Police initially said the militants had come to raid the school’s food supplies and that the girls had not been targeted. But when the attack ended, several girls were missing. School officials suggested at first that many of the local students had simply returned to their families on foot. Nigerian authorities claimed that no girls had been abducted and that at least 76 had been rescued. (Two bodies were also been discovered, though it’s not clear how they died.)

But witnesses reported at least some girls had been taken away in trucks.

One senior official told Al Jazeera that some of them were found beside a road inside a malfunctioning vehicle. “It had broken down and the terrorists panicked because they were under siege by pursuing soldiers,” he said. “The fear is that some of the other girls may have been taken along by the terrorists because the girls were not in a single vehicle. Only those in the broken-down vehicle were lucky.”

Only on Wednesday did Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari acknowledge that some students were missing. “I share the anguish of all the parents and guardians of the girls that remain unaccounted for,” he tweeted. “I would like to assure them that we are doing all in our power to ensure the safe return of all the girls.”

Days later, there are still conflicting reports about how many girls are missing. Reuters puts the number at 13 while other outlets, including the BBC and Al Jazeera, say more than 100 girls are still unaccounted for.

The government’s confused response left parents frantic. They said it echoed Nigeria’s botched response to the Chibok kidnappings in April 2014, when 276 girls were forced onto trucks at their boarding school and driven into the forest. Researchers and reporters found that local officials had been warned about the attack hours before it started but failed to send in military reinforcements. Then-President Goodluck Jonathan waited two weeks before addressing the attack and refused international help.

About 60 girls escaped soon after the incident, and another 82 were later released in exchange for five Boko Haram commanders. But about 100 others remain in captivity. Just last month, the terrorist group released a video purporting to show some of the Chibok girls in custody. The girls’ faces were covered, and they said on camera that they did not want to return home.

Meanwhile, the nearly decade-long war against Boko Haram continues. While the Nigerian government declared Boko Haram “technically defeated” in late 2015 after retaking much of the territory once controlled by the group, the insurgents’ deadly attacks haven’t stopped.

As Siobhan O’Grady wrote for the Los Angeles Times, it will take more than money and military might to defeat Boko Haram. “It isn’t just a matter of coming in with a stronger military presence,” said Joe Siegle, the director of research at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, to O’Grady. “What the government needs to be doing now is winning the trust of the local population . ... That’s the real battle, the next chapter here ... . That’s where they’ve failed.”

Incidents like this week’s school attack make that prospect even harder.