Residents return to ruined town
Nigeria drives Boko Haram from Michika
MICHIKA, NIGERIA — The first sign that one is entering Boko Haram’s self-declared “caliphate” in northeast Nigeria is that there are no signs. All around the town of Michika, which fell to the sect in September, gunmen have daubed black paint over signs written in English, be it advertising a local church or simply giving directions to the next town.
For a group whose motto is “Western education is sin,” all foreign scripts are deemed “haram” or forbidden — except for the Qur’anic Arabic with which it writes its own fundamentalist logo. One such logo can be seen on a captured Nigerian army tank, a black circle bearing the inscription “There is no God but Allah,” painted just beneath the business end of the tank’s gun.
Today, though, the tank serves not as a symbol of Boko Haram’s triumph, but its defeat. The rusting, Sovietera T72 now lies abandoned by the road, just one of many wrecked and burnt-out vehicles left by Boko Haram now that the Nigerian army is finally pushing them out.
Set amid dusty copses of baobab and birch trees, Michika was part of a large chunk of Nigeria’s Adamawa state that was seized by Boko Haram last autumn. In the language of the local Kamre tribe, the town’s name means “creeping in silently.” Boko Haram’s arrival, one Sunday last September, was anything but.
“The day beforehand, a group of soldiers came running past our homes, saying: ‘Get out of here, Boko Haram are coming,’” said resident Matthias Andrew, 42, who fled first on foot and then by cattle truck.
“The next day, just half an hour after Sunday church service, they arrived in a convoy with their headlights on in full daylight, and when people ran away they shot at them.”
“They slaughtered people like goats,” added Immanuel Gabriel, 34, whose wife and five children were kidnapped by the group. “My wife and kids were released by them four months later, but they killed my father and stepbrother and his two children.”
Now, with Boko Haram cleared from Michika and several other towns near Nigeria’s mountainous border with Cameroon, some of the 400,000 locals who fled south to the city of Yola are coming back, returning to burnt-out houses, ransacked banks and desecrated churches and cemeteries.
Most though, are not going home because they think it is safe, but to plant the crops ahead of the rains that provide their only livelihoods.
The threat from further attacks remains high, and when The Telegraph visited Michika with an army escort on Sunday, a local imam who acted as a guide, Dauda Bello, prayed for safe passage before departing. Even with a pickup truck full of soldiers armed with AK47s and a beltfed machine gun, it was not considered safe to linger anywhere for long.
On the potholed road north from Yola, the destruction grew greater with every passing town. Barely a single town hall, school or hospital remains intact. Market places and bullet-ridden shop fronts still stand largely deserted, even though four months have now passed since Michika was liberated. Most of the road’s bridges have been blown up by Boko Haram to halt the army’s advance, forcing traffic to forge rivers that will become impassable during rainy season.
“People have no choice but to come back, but there is a real risk that they will be cut off,” said Bello, as a group of farmers pushed an aging truck stuck in the riverbed.
The prospect of being isolated from outside help explains the nervous looks on the faces of local soldiers, who man a series of sandbagged checkpoints outside each town. Some have tanks parked out of sight, but others have help only from the Civilian Joint Task Force, the polite name for the local vigilantes, who are armed with sticks, machetes and homemade firearms made by a local gunsmith.
The challenge now is stopping that vigilante force from turning into a sectarian revenge squad.