Paraded by a bood-crazed fanatic, the terrified schoolgirl captives
ClEARlY terrified and forced to cover their bodies in Muslim garb — black and grey full-length hijabs — the girls abducted by Islamic terrorists were shown yesterday for the first time in a deeply disturbing video.
Made to recite the Koran for the cameras at a secret camp in the dense forests of northern Nigeria, the unimaginable strain of their ordeal was etched into their unsmiling faces. It made the jovial demeanour of their deranged captor all the more shocking.
Wearing trademark military fatigues and orange bobble hat, Abubaker Shekau, the leader of the Islamic terror group Boko Haram, chuckled and confirmed his prisoners — the vast majority of them Christians — had been forced to convert to Islam. They would remain as his hostages unless jailed terrorists were freed, he said.
His offer was rejected by the Nigerian government which has two army divisions searching for the seized girls. Interior Minister Abba Moro said: ‘The issue in question is not about Boko Haram . . . giving conditions.’
In the video, which shows about 100 of the missing 276 girls, the gleeful terror leader sniggers: ‘These girls have become Muslims. We will never release them until after you release our brethren.’
His previous video, placed on YouTube last week, was also full of taunts. Shekau, with a Kalashnikov slung round his neck, had sneered that: ‘Just because I took some little girls, everyone is making a noise.’
Fidgeting with the bobble on his hat or his uniform, prompting speculation he may be on drugs, he ranted: ‘let me tell you — I took those girls, who were in Western education. Girls — go and get married.
‘I repeat: I took the girls and I will sell them off. We are against Western education and I say stop Western education. There is a market for selling girls.’
There is no reason to suppose this is an idle threat — some of the girls have reportedly been sold as sex slaves for as little as £8 each to fellow Islamic terrorists in neighbouring Cameroon, Niger and Chad.
The Nigerian government’s sluggish response to the kidnapping has been widely criticised, but the horrific truth is that such atrocities are not uncommon. Many Nigerians felt this was just one more episode in a campaign of violence that has no end in sight.
There is also mistrust between local leaders and central government which hampered a co-ordinated response.
But Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan has said that assistance from abroad had made him optimistic about finding the girls.
Yesterday, David Cameron said the latest video underlined ‘the horror and the barbarity of the actions in the kidnapping of these girls’. The Prime Minister told lBC radio: ‘It’s an absolutely hideous, vicious, cruel, evil act.’
And former premier Gordon Brown, who has been visiting Nigeria as UN special envoy for global education, said of Boko Haram: ‘It is urgent that all religious leaders in every part of the world speak out against their perverted and twisted version of Islam.’
The girls were roused from their beds in a school dormitory in the northern state of Borno four weeks ago when men dressed in army uniforms told them they were being evacuated due to an unspecified threat. After being herded into the back of trucks, the teenagers realised something was dreadfully awry when the ‘soldiers’ set the school building ablaze and drove off, firing weapons in the air and shouting: ‘Allahu Akbar’ (‘God is great’).
Some of the girls hurled themselves from the trucks, but the rest were spirited away.
These girls, aged from 12 to 18, face a life of sexual bondage. They will be expected to move from terror camp to terror camp as the military hunt the
They face a life of sexual bondage
extremists, and are currently believed to be in the Sambisa Forest.
Amina Tsawur, 17, who is among the few who escaped, has described the moment of their capture.
‘We all started crying and begging for help, but they ordered us to keep shut or they would kill us. They kept insulting us and saying that we must stop going to school, that they were going to marry all of us to their people; that our teachers and government are unbelievers whom they would all kill.’
Women previously held hostage by the group say brutality is the norm, rape is widespread and sexual diseases, including HIV, are a constant threat as wives are ‘tried out’ by different so-called rebel fighters.
‘Women are slaves,’ Shekau said in another video. ‘I want to reassure my Muslim brothers that Allah says slaves are permitted in Islam. I will marry off a woman at the age of 12. I will marry off a girl at the age of nine.’
With the fate of the girls dominating i nternational headlines, David Cameron had at the weekend joined the growing numbers from the worlds of politics and the arts keen to demonstrate the depth of their feelings to the world via social media.
On the BBC’s Andrew Marr show, the Prime Minister was asked by Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s respected chief foreign correspondent, if he would hold up on live television a sign bearing the Twitter hashtag #BringBackOurGirls — an online petition spread on social media.
Mr Cameron adopted a suitably solemn expression and posed alongside the petition slogan. He later posted on his own Twitter feed that ‘he was proud’ to support the campaign.
Michelle Obama, the U.S. First lady, posted a sad-faced selfie, and she took the unique step, on Saturday, of delivering her husband’s weekly presidential address. She said: ‘In these girls, Barack and I see our own daughters.’
The model Cara Delevingne, singer
Leona Lewis, actresses Angelina Jolie, Reese Witherspoon and Anne Hathaway and — inevitably — Kim Kardashian are among others to have joined the movement.
However well-meant — and clearly it has helped highlight the crisis — the #Bring Back Our Girls campaign still seems a profoundly inadequate response. Certainly, it is unlikely to cut much ice with Boko Haram’s blood-crazed leader or his followers. While the West tweets, Shekau uploads videos exhorting followers to ‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’ — and they obey.
The followers of Boko Haram — it means ‘Western education is forbidden’, and it regards itself as Al Qaeda’s ‘little brother’ — need little encouragement to murder and sexually brutalise.
They have been responsible for at least 10,000 deaths across Nigeria, with more than 1,500 killed this year alone. Churches and schools have been targeted by suicide bombers and gunmen.
A raid on a market in a town near the Cameroon border last week killed 300 people. Fifty schoolboys were slaughtered earlier this year as they fled a blazing school building set alight by the terrorists.
Boko Haram and terror groups such as Al-Shabaab and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb, render huge
The terrorists have killed 10,000
parts of Africa ungovernable and a haven for error training camps.
Nigeria, a former British colony, is the continent’s most populated country, with 170 million people. Boko Haram emerged in 2002 in the Muslim north amid claims that government spending was focused on the Christian south.
Corruption is rife in Nigeria and systemic. Police take bribes. The army is poorly paid, unskilled and brutal.
Despite the government making almost £47 billion a year from oil revenue, all parents in Nigeria have to pay for the education of their children. But Boko Haram offered to provide free Islamic schooling — with an extremist interpretation of Islam, which sanctions beheadings for murderers, and the stoning of homosexuals and adulterers.
At that time, the group was led by Mohammed Yusuf, an Islamic scholar, who poured money into poor areas. Well-known to government officials, having once worked as an adviser to the administration, Yusuf, a university graduate, spoke perfect English and lived a life of luxury.
He was arrested by Nigeria’s security services in 2009 and died within hours, supposedly while trying to escape. His position was swiftly filled by Shekau, his firebrand deputy, who married one of his predecessor’s four wives before launching a series of horrifying attacks on civilian targets.
Born in Niger, Shekau’s age is unknown, though he appears to be between 35 and 45. Described as part gangster, part holy man, he has amassed a vast arsenal, and struck a deal with the leadership of Al Qaeda for weapons and funds.
He rules by terror, killing anyone suspected of disloyalty in the vast territory he controls in the north.
He is, his followers say, an ‘intense’ individual with a photographic memory. Some claim he spends much of his time in quiet reflection, others say he suffers violent mood swings.
There have been attacks on police stations as well as an attack in 2011 on the headquarters of the UN in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital.
Shekau was shot in the thigh during a battle three years ago, which experts on the group believe radicalised him still further. Martin Ewi, of the Institute for Security Studies think tank, which specialises in Africa, says: ‘He was in the mouth of the crocodile — now he’s coming back to kill the crocodile.’
He has repeatedly avoided capture. On several occasions Nigerian military sources have announced that he has been killed during military operations, only for him to reappear on YouTube, unharmed.
Shekau, who believes it is not ‘the will of Allah’ that he die yet, is the most wanted Islamic terrorist in Africa, with the U.S. offering a reward of $7 million (£4 million) for information leading to his capture, dead or alive.
Meanwhile, British and American ‘technical experts’ were yesterday arriving in Abuja, to help co-ordinate the hunt for the missing girls.
We can only hope their assistance will make a difference.