Boko Haram

by Mike Smith

  Njoku and others inside the bank on the same floor were thrown to the ground by the impact. Something heavy had fallen on his leg, but he did not notice the pain as panic set in and he and the others began figuring out what to do. They could not see the area where the bomber had crashed into the building from where they were, but it was by then obvious that something terrible had happened and they had to escape. The entrance to the bank had collapsed and was blocked, so they were forced to look for another way out. They made their way to a back door, Njoku somehow moving under his own steam despite his injury. When he and the others finally arrived at the back of the building where everyone was gathering, he collapsed on the grass and could not stand again, his leg now swelling. While waiting to be evacuated by an ambulance, he sent a text message to his wife, telling her ‘we’ve been attacked and I’m injured, but I’m OK’. He was unable to make calls, possibly because of network congestion since so many people were trying to phone out, but the message had reached his wife, who tracked him down at a hospital in the area.

  On the first floor where Adeniyi was holding a meeting, parts of the ceiling crashed in, windows shattered and the fire alarm rang out. Adeniyi, then 44, sensed it was a bomb and told colleagues to get under the table, worried there could be a second blast. He manoeuvred himself despite his broken leg as they all took cover. As they did so, they could hear people wailing and crying for help from the room next door, the main auditorium, located just above where the car bomb detonated and the site of some of the worst suffering. They waited briefly under the table – Adeniyi estimates it was between three and five minutes – until they heard the sound of voices from UN security workers calling out from downstairs for everyone to evacuate to the back of the building. Adeniyi was able to get a signal on his phone, so before evacuating, he called the director of search and rescue from Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency – someone he knew through his work – and spoke to him briefly. He was assured that the fire service was on its way. He and the others then began determining how they could get out. The partitions surrounding them had collapsed, and they had to clear one out of the way. A glass door was stuck, so Adeniyi used his crutches to break through it, and they made their way to the stairs past a gauntlet of debris. They arrived at the evacuation point at the rear of the building about 10 to 15 minutes after the explosion, everyone from Adeniyi’s meeting having made it out alive. He repeatedly sent text messages to his entire contact list, telling everyone he was fine, and received calls for about an hour from those hoping to confirm with him, including his wife, before his phone battery died. He also went back into the building to try to help and document what had happened. He remembers people yelling; he took pictures and video and directed arriving rescue workers to where victims were trapped. He later found out that two of his close colleagues were among the dead on the ground floor, and he wondered what could have happened if his meeting had wrapped up earlier. ‘It would have been more disastrous for us, because maybe by then some of us may have been in the lobby or in the lift’, he said.

  Alkari, further up on the third floor, described a surreal series of events, followed by tense moments where it had seemed more lives were at stake if help did not arrive. Windows along with their frames collapsed inside the room, scattering glass everywhere, and ceiling tiles fell. One of the frames crashed on to the table between him and his colleague, lightly scraping Alkari’s head and drawing a small amount of blood. The lights went out, and then there was ‘a sudden silence, the kind of silence one rarely encounters’.

  ‘We both say “it is a bomb”,’ Alkari wrote later in a personal account of what happened that day. He said subsequently: ‘The threats have come true.’3

  Based on Alkari’s experience in Iraq and Shalini’s in Afghanistan, they decided, like Adeniyi, to take cover temporarily under the table – a procedure taught in emergency drills in case a second blast hits and to avoid being caught up in falling debris. They heard others scrambling to evacuate, but decided to wait a few minutes longer to be sure. While sitting there, Alkari managed to think to collect his laptop and his bag, and they then decided to leave, moving a window frame out of their way. Everyone from their division had already gone. When they arrived at the central atrium on the same floor, Alkari recalled that ‘everything that was on the ceiling was now on the ground, as if the whole building was turned upside down [...] Lift doors were blown off and could not be seen anywhere. There were two big gaping holes where the lift doors used to be. The lift frame was twisted out of shape as if made of paper. At the central atrium level where the lift opens, every glass panel was blown out. A wall had collapsed.’

  It was then that they heard cries for help. The collapsed wall had crashed into an area occupied by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, trapping two staffers underneath tables. Two others who were not trapped were scrambling to move the collapsed part of the wall, but it was too heavy. Alkari could not be of much assistance, either, since he had suffered a slipped disk in his back, so they decided the best option was to seek help from elsewhere. It would not be so simple. Alkari moved to a window, its frame blown out, and shouted and waved repeatedly at those below. They noticed him, but seemed not to understand amid the chaos. Some waved back, signalling for him to come down. His urgent message not getting through, Alkari asked his colleague Shalini to go downstairs to find help, and in the meantime he continued to shout from the window as well as make phone calls to colleagues. Most did not answer their phones, but he reached one man, who told him he was on his way to the hospital. By this point, Alkari could see Shalini from his spot next to what used to be the window as she pleaded with people outside.

  ‘They were dazed and confused to the point that nothing registered’, Alkari wrote later. ‘Finally I see Shalini waving at me saying no one is coming up. She is trying to tell me that there is fire on the ground floor. I am not able to get that message. She sends me an SMS but my mind is occupied with finding help. I did not look at my mobile.’

  He then saw a man in the distance down a corridor on the same floor, but the nightmare would only continue. Alkari shouted, and when the man looked his way, he tried to signal to him that people were trapped and needed help. The man stared for a moment from about 20 metres away, and Alkari later wondered if he was debating in his head whether to put himself in further danger or simply get out while he still had the chance. ‘He just turned and left’, Alkari remembered. ‘I do not blame him, but feel like a person left to fend for himself.’

  Shalini returned with the bad news that no one had come with her, while the UNODC staffer leading the effort to dislodge the collapsed wall was growing angry and frustrated. Alkari decided he would go downstairs himself to recruit help, and it was while moving down the steps that he began to get a more complete picture of the devastation.

  ‘Stairs are littered with broken glass, blown-off wood panels, light fixtures and electric wiring. From the second floor down, the stairs have blood stains everywhere. Ground floor was a complete mess. As I step on to the ground, I am in two inches of water. The sprinkler system seems to be working and most likely some water pipe had burst. And there was acrid smoke.’

  An ATM machine had been thrown towards the door by the force of the blast, partially blocking Alkari’s way, but he managed to slip past and make it outside, where he saw ‘several people badly hurt, lying on ground crying for help. There is one ambulance taking in someone and another is entering the area to carry others. Some people were lying lifeless, soaked with blood, either dead or in shock. Sirens are wailing, adding to confusion [...] I approach the first person I see and ask him to come with me to the third floor. He is in another world. What I am saying does not make any sense to him.’

  He eventually saw two people he knew and they agreed to follow him, along with a third ‘Good Samaritan’ he was not familiar with. The four of them went back into the building, squeezing past the ATM, but saw fire burning on the ground floor with flames Alkari said looked t
o be five feet high. They decided to push on towards the third floor anyway, Alkari reasoning that the blaze would not spread quickly because the water sprinklers were on, the building’s electricity was off and the first floor was reasonably high up from the ground. As they reached the third floor, they joined one of the UNODC staffers and, finally, lifted the collapsed part of the wall. One of the two women who had been trapped had no injuries, but she seemed to be in shock, shaking and crying. Debris was cleared from a sofa so she could sit and Alkari ran to his office to grab tissues and water. The woman drank and began to calm down, but they realised she had somehow lost her shoes – a problem since broken glass covered the stairs. ‘I suggest to Shalini that she clean up every step for the rescued lady to put her foot. A laborious task, but Shalini is up to it’, Alkari wrote.

  The condition of the second trapped woman was the complete inverse. She was calm, so much so that she was able to warn her rescuers before they moved her that her leg was broken. There was also another problem: a second piece of the wall was in situ and had to be moved to get her out, but it was too heavy even for the five people who remained. Finding help proved to be far less complicated this time. Alkari turned to look around and immediately saw two UNDP staffers who had come up from the second floor. They instantly agreed to assist, but even with seven people, it was a struggle to move the wall. They worked together with ‘one, two, three – heave’, and eventually succeeded. They lifted the woman out carefully, keeping in mind her broken leg, and carried her over to the sofa, allowing the team to catch their breath before bringing her downstairs. Alkari and one of the UNDP staffers decided to climb to the fourth floor to check if anyone else was there. They called out, but heard nothing in response, then headed back down to inspect other areas of the third floor. It was there that they would see Ingrid Midtgaard, a 30-year-old Norwegian lawyer who had been working for the UNODC, and Alkari described a heartbreaking scene, with the young woman ‘sitting lifeless in a chair’.

  ‘Her face is calm’, Alkari wrote. ‘The Good Samaritan climbs back and checks her pulse [...] She was gone. We are not sure if we should move her to the ground floor. We decide not to move her because by then we had seen several ambulances ferrying people to hospital. Paramedics had arrived. With heavy hearts we leave her behind. If you believe in God, then the God had taken her to be with him.’

  Returning to the task of evacuating the woman with the broken leg, they began the journey downstairs. Arriving on the bottom floor, they were greeted by two inches of water, with the sprinklers still working, but no fire. They could not squeeze past the ATM while carrying the woman to use the same exit, so they decided to manoeuvre her through a broken window, rescue workers on the other side helping to make sure she was not cut on the remaining jagged glass. She was put in an ambulance and taken to a hospital, and Alkari then told a doctor on the scene about Midtgaard on the third floor.

  As the day wore on, rescue workers pulled people out from the damaged front of the building with stretchers. The damaged front gate that the bomber drove through sat on the ground. At least 23 people were killed, including 13 UN staffers. Immediately, suspicion fell on the Islamist extremist group that had become known by the name Boko Haram, which would later claim responsibility for the attack in the suicide bomber video and through a spokesman. It was the first time the group had struck at a foreign or international target, setting off a scramble to determine who or what could be hit next. There was a problem, however: apart from the tense, bearded face of Abubakar Shekau, the group’s new leader, who had appeared in videos with an AK-47, few knew what Boko Haram was.

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  One of history’s most successful armed jihads occurred in what is today northern Nigeria. It was more than two centuries ago, when a revered Islamic cleric, the son of a learned preacher who had built a fast-expanding following, found himself on a collision course with the kings who ruled at the time. One of the many tales and legends surrounding his life describes a meeting at the palace of the sultan of Gobir, a former student of the cleric who now feared his authority was threatened by his growing influence. The cleric, an ethnic Fulani named Usman Dan Fodio, along with a group of other Muslim leaders, visited the palace after being summoned by the sultan, Yunfa, who had sent signals that he was interested in making peace with them. He had apparently changed his mind. Once there, the Shehu, or Sheikh, as the preacher would later be known, found himself confronted with a musket cradled by the sultan himself, apparently prepared to kill the man who had caused so much trouble for him and his court. As he pulled the trigger, however, the musket misfired and burnt Yunfa, though not fatally.4 He lived long enough to see the tables turned, when the Shehu’s army, after having routed their Hausa opponents in key battles, collecting their horses and weaponry, marched into the Gobir capital of Alkalawa. Yunfa and his men put up a final fight, but by then there was little hope for him and his court. The Muslim fighters killed him, and the Shehu and his allies across a wide expanse of what had been known as Hausaland were on their way to forging an Islamic empire. It would come to be known as the Sokoto Caliphate.

  The Shehu would turn out to be one of Islam’s greatest messengers in what we now call Nigeria, leaving a legacy of Muslim practice, thought and law still very much alive today, but he was by no means the first. Long before that, in the centuries after the Archangel Gabriel appeared to the Prophet Muhammad in a cave near Mecca and revealed to him words of the Qur’an, the Islamic faith had begun to filter across into sub-Saharan Africa. It would be a gradual process, sometimes involving conquest, though it was mainly the result of trade and the innumerable aspects of society that interact with and depend upon it. As camels began to replace donkeys for journeys in the Sahara from around the second century, making it easier to traverse the desert and its forbidding conditions, fleets of caravans began plying its routes, trading gold and salt, among other items, and, of course, slaves. A new world would slowly trudge across it, and the societies it came into contact with would be changed for ever.5 Many of those societies were prepared to profit from the opportunities the increasingly busy trans-Saharan trade routes offered. In today’s northern Nigeria, they included two separate regions in particular: one the Kanem-Bornu Empire, the other a collection of states led by kings in Hausaland.

  Bornu would come to be centred mainly in today’s north-eastern Nigeria near Lake Chad. It was not founded until the fourteenth century, but its roots lie much further back in Kanem, near Lake Chad’s north-east. The Sefawa dynasty came to power there possibly as early as the ninth century or perhaps later, towards the end of the eleventh century, enduring war, societal upheaval and religious change, its power and influence at one point extending, as one historian wrote, from ‘the Niger to the Nile’.6 The dynasty would last until the nineteenth century.

  It is difficult to pinpoint when Islam first arrived in Kanem, though some of the religion’s initial messengers seemed to have been Ibadi gold traders.7 Travelling Muslim scholars who sought lucrative jobs in the royal courts of the day would also play an important role in sub-Saharan Africa, with their advanced knowledge and literacy seen as particularly impressive. The kings of West Africa, including in Kanem, would have seen great benefits in cultivating links with their Muslim visitors as well as the states from where they came. Trade relationships with the Arab world and northern Africa brought considerable wealth and knowledge, not to mention useful allies.8 It was through these initial contacts that the long, slow journey toward Islam began.

  Islam’s influence became official in Kanem by the late eleventh century, possibly in 1085, under a king, or mai, known as Hummay, who went on pilgrimage to Mecca perhaps twice or even more.9 While Kanem was officially Muslim by then, much of the population remained pagan or animistic and would have known little about Islam. The new religion had been mainly confined to the elite, and even among those who did convert, a hybrid version of the faith developed, mixing Muslim and ancestral beliefs, as was the case throughout
West Africa.10 It was in the thirteenth century that Kanem would rise to become the most powerful state in the region and see its influence extend into the Arab world.

  Civil wars would gradually intrude on Kanem’s prosperity and force the Sefawa dynasty to flee. They moved south-west of Lake Chad and established a new capital at Ngazargamu in an area known as Bornu11 – where Boko Haram would wreak havoc centuries later. The Kanuri people had come to dominate, and they are still the largest ethnic group in the area today. Both Muhammad Yusuf, the first Boko Haram leader, and Abubakar Shekau, his successor, are considered Kanuri. Bornu would establish a reputation by the eighteenth century as an important centre of Islamic learning.12 Some 300 years later, Boko Haram would take root amid the remnants of that former empire, by then part of the nation of Nigeria.

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  The tale begins with the son of a king of Baghdad, or so one of the many different versions of the legend goes, who fought with his father and fled to Bornu before later arriving in Daura, located in today’s north-central Nigeria. When a villager there told him he could only draw water from the well on Fridays because it was guarded by a snake, this wandering prince, named Bayajida, refused to listen. He went to the well anyway, and when the snake appeared, he cut off his head with his sword, freeing the people from the serpent’s tyranny. The queen of Daura – it was ruled by a matriarchy at the time – was naturally impressed with this man’s skill and bravery, and she decided to marry him. The queen and Bayajida had a boy, named Bawo, whose own sons would go on to found the seven states of Hausaland, which took shape west of Bornu. Another seven states, known as the Banza Bakwai, or Bastard Seven, would also be founded.13

  The story is obviously a myth, rich in symbolism – a heroic man from Arab royal stock freeing Daura from its older, traditional ways. Some have pointed to the similarities with Islamic traditional stories and suggest it may have been a useful way of describing the arrival of North African newcomers, who mixed with the local residents and formed what we now call the Hausa people.14 The Hausa were not a distinct ethnic group, with the label given to the combination of people who spoke the language and who gradually coalesced.15 Today, Hausa is the lingua franca of northern Nigeria.