by Isha Sesay
The sun was almost gone by the time I got back to my room. I tried to tamp down my anxieties, reminding myself that there were no other journalists traveling back to Chibok with the girls. My journey would be a world exclusive, the kind of assignment that journalists live for. Turning back to look at the contents of my bag strewn across the bed, I noted that the question reverberating at the back of my mind was far simpler: But is it actually worth dying for?
Chapter Two
BEING HOLED UP IN A YOLA HOTEL WITH THE TWENTY-ONE CHIBOK girls felt quite surreal. Having covered their disappearance since the very beginning, I now found their physical presence a little jarring. Just as disconcerting was the sight of soldiers everywhere. The military had failed to protect the hundreds of girls back in 2014 on the night they were swept away by terrorists. Now at least, the Nigerian authorities seemed to be taking no chances with their security. The girls themselves showed no outward signs of fear or discomfort. They had eyes only for one another, constantly nudging, giggling, and whispering among themselves. And even though the reunion with their families was meant to be just for Christmas—at the end of the holiday season, they were supposed to return to the government-run rehabilitation center in Abuja, the nation’s capital, where they’d been living—their excitement for this first visit home was plain for all to see.
But after more than two years in captivity, much had changed. These weren’t the same girls returning to Chibok who had been stolen under the cover of darkness; they were older now and far removed from their sheltered, preabduction lives in their secluded Christian community. At the same time, Boko Haram was also different. In the intervening years, the terror group had morphed, in tandem with the shifting dynamics in the global war on terror.
As you read this, there may well be a part of you wondering why you should care about this story, about these twenty-one girls, after all this time. The world has moved on, you say. You’re probably thinking I should do the same.
But pause and listen to me, just for a moment: I’m not asking you to care about the girls simply out of tenderhearted humanitarianism. I am also asking you to care about these girls out of pure self-interest. If you view what happened to these girls through the lens of national security, you’ll see inherent in this tale the potential threat to you, your loved ones, and the global strategic interests of the United States.
Nigeria isn’t some far-flung, insignificant, or forgettable nation. With Africa’s largest economy and a population of more than 180 million people, it is arguably the most powerful country on the continent. “As Nigeria goes, so goes the rest of Africa” is the commonly held view among most political analysts. The country’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, was one of only two African leaders known to have spoken by phone to President Trump in the early days of his new US administration; the other was South Africa’s Jacob Zuma. Put simply, the United States and Nigeria enjoy a broad and deep strategic partnership dating all the way back to 1960, the year the latter gained independence from Great Britain. In spite of US concerns about governance, corruption, and human rights abuses, the relationship has survived through the decades and is largely held in place by a host of mutual interests, including trade and the global war on terror.
In fact, the United States is the largest foreign investor in Nigeria, primarily in the petroleum, mining, and wholesale trade sectors. It’s worth noting that the nation was also the second largest US export destination in sub-Saharan Africa, to the value of $2.2 billion in 2017. Nigeria, for its part, is well known as a significant exporter of oil to the United States; less publicized is the West African nation’s shipments of cocoa, cashew nuts, and animal feed to the States. The two-way trade in goods between the two countries topped $9 billion in 2017.
Meanwhile, Nigeria’s leadership role in West Africa and the continent as a whole has made this young nation a critical ally in Washington’s battle to beat back the global threat posed by jihadist forces. It took the events of September 11, 2001, to bring that threat into sharper focus. In the days that followed this national tragedy, many of us learned for the first time about the concept of “ungoverned spaces” and how these under- or poorly governed areas open up vacuums that, more often than not, go on to be filled by terrorists. In Afghanistan, for instance, decades of warfare throughout the 1990s reduced the central Asian nation to a failed state. Amid the broken infrastructure and shattered people, Osama bin Laden was able to take refuge. From this safe haven, the al-Qaeda mastermind plotted in staggering detail the events of 9/11, which claimed the lives of nearly three thousand people, the largest loss of life from a terror attack on US soil.
The availability of “ungoverned space” made that possible.
Turning to North Africa, we see how a local Islamist militant group borne out of the 1990s fight against Algeria’s secular government aligned itself with al-Qaeda to become al-Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb (AQIM). In the years since 9/11, this Al Qaeda affiliate expanded to Mali, Mauritania, and Niger, entrenching itself in large tracts of land in the Sahara and the Sahel, that wide, ungoverned space in northern Mali and southern Algeria. From there, the group and its local affiliates launched attacks in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Ivory Coast, and Senegal.
Fast forward to December 25, 2009, when the threat posed by “ungoverned spaces” once again stole the global spotlight. The 278 passengers and eleven crew members boarding Northwest Airlines Flight 253 in Amsterdam bound for Detroit had no idea Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a twenty-three-year-old Nigerian student, was in their midst with explosives tucked away in his underpants and a goal of bringing down the plane. As the Airbus A330 descended toward Detroit, its passengers described hearing what sounded like a firecracker and watched in horror as the young man went up in flames, a fire that quickly spread to the wall and the plane’s carpet. Four quick-thinking passengers overwhelmed Abdulmutallab, put out the fire, and ensured he could be taken into custody by US authorities the moment the plane landed. In the days that followed, we learned that the “Underwear Bomber,” as he became known, was a young man from a wealthy northern Nigerian family. He had attended posh boarding schools in England, grown up in luxury, and traveled the world. Initially, details of how and when Abdulmutallab became radicalized were unclear, but the role of the Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was quickly established. Al-Qaeda’s links to Yemen go all the way back to the Afghan jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s. But it was Yemen’s fractious civil war that cleared a path for the offshoot AQAP to flourish. Safely shielded within the borders of the poorest country in the Middle East, the group’s senior leadership, including the US-born militant cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, hatched a plan to bring down a US-bound jetliner. Abdulmuttalab traveled to Yemen to receive his training, and by the time he said goodbye to al-Awlaki, he was convinced it was his religious obligation to carry out jihad. On the second day of his trial in Detroit, in October 2011, this attempted bomber suddenly pleaded guilty to all charges. At no point during the brief proceedings did he express remorse or regret. Instead he delivered this message to the court, from a prewritten statement:
I attempted to use an explosive device which in the US law is a weapon of mass destruction, which I call a blessed weapon to save the lives of innocent Muslims, for US use of weapons of mass destruction on Muslim populations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and beyond . . .
Abdulmutallab’s failed bid to murder the 289 people aboard Flight 253 earned him an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole. It gave the rest of us traveling through the nation’s airports the full body X-ray scanner, which allows officials to see through passengers’ clothes and erodes yet more of travelers’ sense of privacy. Before that Christmas Day attempt, only a small number of airports had deployed such machines on a trial basis. Thanks to what happened in the skies above Detroit, the US Transportation Security Administration decided in November 2010 to make the scanners, officially known as advanced imaging technology (AIT) machines, the primary screening method in
many airports around the country.
This attempted attack was possible due to ungoverned spaces.
By all accounts, the young Nigerian felt confused, disgruntled, and lacked a sense of belonging to his social surroundings. Boko Haram has similarly been able to successfully exploit a sense of alienation among northern Nigeria’s youth ever since the group burst into view in the early 2000s. At that time, the Nigerian terror group’s grievances were decidedly local, its focus on the inequities and economic hardships facing the people of Maiduguri, the capital of the northeastern state of Borno. However, a series of increasingly violent clashes with security forces triggered a change in Boko Haram’s agenda. It evolved from local to regional ambitions, before arriving at a national mission, of which establishing a caliphate, or an Islamic state, became the central goal.
Widely dismissed at the outset as no more than a band of murderous fanatics, Boko Haram declared such a caliphate in 2014 in the aftermath of its capture of Gwoza, a town with a population of 265,000 not far from Chibok. This state spanned the towns and villages under its control in Borno, as well as those in neighboring Yobe and Adamawa States. By some estimates at one point the group controlled an area of twenty thousand square miles—roughly the size of Belgium. By that time, theirs was a transnational agenda, with violence spilling across Nigeria’s porous borders to disrupt life in Cameroon, Niger, and Chad. In 2015, a year after the girls disappeared, Boko Haram pledged allegiance to ISIS. In a released audio message posted on the Internet, the group’s wild-eyed leader, Abubakar Shekau, purportedly declared, “We announce our allegiance to the caliph . . . and will hear and obey in times of difficulty and prosperity.” The pledge was accepted in a separate audio recording, in which a supposed ISIS spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, hailed the expansion of the caliphate to western Africa and congratulated his “jihadi brothers” there.
In 2016, ideological differences led to the splintering of Boko Haram into two distinct jihadist movements, with the longtime leader Shekau retaining control of one faction and the ISIS-endorsed Abu Musab al-Barnawi taking the helm of the other. At this stage the terror outfit also suffered a host of setbacks, thanks to hard-won military gains by the Nigerian military. This left the militants with ever-shrinking territorial control and their nascent caliphate in ruins. President Buhari has said over and over that Boko Haram is defeated. But it would be folly to declare victory and simply write it off. Let’s not forget that between the two factions, the group still controls hundreds of miles of bushland that make up the vast Sambisa Forest in Borno State, and from this stronghold they still launch attacks in Nigeria’s north and across the border in neighboring Cameroon, Chad, and Niger. According to BBC Monitoring, in 2017 the militant group targeted all four countries in 150 attacks, which ranged from armed assaults to suicide bombings. This is a significant step up from the 127 attacks Boko Haram reportedly mounted in 2016, and in both years the majority of the strikes occurred in northern Nigeria. On February 19, 2018, the ISIS-allied Barnawi faction, Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), stormed the northeastern Nigerian town of Dapchi in Yobe State and abducted 110 schoolgirls, some as young as eleven, from their all-girls boarding school. A few weeks later, the group returned more than a hundred of them, but refused to release fifteen-year old Leah Sharibu, the lone Christian among them, because of her refusal to convert to Islam. At the time of this writing, Sharibu remains in captivity, despite the widespread pleas for her release. On March 1, 2018, Boko Haram attacked a military outpost in the remote town of Rann in Borno State. The site housed tens of thousands of people displaced by the group’s unending rampage. Dozens were killed, including three UN staff members, and the attackers made off with three aid workers: Sifura Khorsa and Hauwa Mohammed Liman, who worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and Alice Loksha, who’d been helping the needy in a center supported by UNICEF. The twenty-five-year old Khorsa was executed on September 16. At the time of her killing, ISWAP warned it would also execute Liman, Loksha, and Leah Sharibu if its demands—which have never been made public—weren’t met within a month. On October 16, the ICRC received word that Liman had been executed. The group also threatened to keep Alice and Leah as “slaves for life.”
The reality is that even though the militants have been pushed back in Nigeria, the world is now dealing with multiple entities, and the chaos and accompanying bloodshed continues. There is also no indication that the split means that these terrorists have abandoned hopes of establishing a caliphate in Nigeria. It’s in this group’s DNA to disappear from view, regroup, and bounce back with devastating effectiveness.
It remains to be seen what the alliance between Abu Musab al-Barnawi’s Boko Haram faction and ISIS will become. Back in 2015, when Shekau orchestrated the initial union, a number of experts were quick to write it off, dismissing the move as no more than a propaganda coup for ISIS, and evidence of Boko Haram’s weakened position in its fight against the Nigerian state. Today, the standing of ISIS is much different. Coalition forces in Iraq have driven ISIS militants from Mosul. Meanwhile, across the border, the Syrian Democratic Forces have routed them from their self-declared capital in Raqqa, liberating a civilian population long held hostage and the victims of unspeakable cruelty. ISIS is in disarray, and as it runs, the existence of ungoverned spaces and the threats they pose once again come into view. The group is now a death cult in search of new safe havens from which it can plot fresh murderous deeds.
Boko Haram’s mass abduction of the Chibok girls in 2014 deserves to hold our attention. It highlights not only the group’s audacity and tactical ability to pull off a spectacular act of terrorism, but also the precarious hold the Nigerian state has had on the northeastern part of the country, ever since the group rose up in the early 2000s. More than two million people have been displaced in the region and tens of thousands are eking out an existence in huge, overcrowded settlements. Food, water, and proper shelter are in short supply in these squalid camps, and there are numerous reports of women and girls being sexually assaulted and exploited by the very officials meant to protect them. Despite widespread longing to return to their homes, many of the displaced are too afraid to return to what’s left of their communities because of the continuing unrest. Sadly, this conflict is far from over.
Many Americans are battle weary after years of fighting in Iraq and the seemingly unending war in Afghanistan. I understand why people in this country are more inclined than ever to want to stay focused on the domestic problems, which need to be tackled here in the US homeland. President Trump’s shrieks of “America First,” “Make America Great Again,” and his withdrawal of the United States from multilateral agreements such as the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris climate accord, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership soothes nerves frayed by years of foreign intervention and international deals that at first glance, it could be argued, have done little to improve the lives of ordinary Americans. Yet these campaign slogans and diplomatic reversals belie a simple truth: America cannot afford to turn its back on its friends and allies, because globalization has made the world smaller. We are more interconnected than ever before.
It is a fact that remains front of mind for those working in the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development, many of whom balk at the Trump administration’s repeated efforts to slash foreign aid budgets by up to 37 percent, though money sent abroad makes up a mere 1 percent of federal spending. If such a proposal were ever approved by the US Congress, the result would be even greater instability in the developing world, in places like northern Nigeria and a higher threat level for all of us living on US soil.
The interdependence of US national security and global security is a fact not lost on this country’s counterterrorism apparatus. At the time of this writing, there are 7,200 US troops spread across Africa. Their missions are conducted under the radar and come to the surface only when things go horribly wrong—as was the case in Niger back in October 2017, when four US
soldiers were killed and two others wounded alongside their Nigerien counterparts in an ambush by suspected ISIS militants. As demonstrated multiple times since 9/11, jihadist networks span the globe, and exporting terror is now easier than ever, thanks in part to the Internet, the low cost of travel, and myriad available routes. We can ill afford to ignore the actions of any terror group simply because its concerns appear to be entirely local, or its murderous activities are taking place far away. Terrorism in the twenty-first century has no borders. So with that in mind, I’m urging you to remove the boundaries on your thinking. What happened that harrowing night in Chibok wasn’t just Boko Haram triggering a slow-moving nightmare for the people of that quiet community. It was also a flare illuminating the path of a transnational terror group with mutating ambitions.
One last thing: what happened in northeastern Nigeria in 2014 also offers a microcosm of the clash between opposing forces fighting to reshape our world. The mass abduction brought into focus a larger global narrative unfolding at this very moment. We are in the midst of an epic power struggle between militant Islam and the West, between progressivism and conservatism, between globalists and nativists, between a hoped-for open future benefitting many versus a set-in-stone, closed-off past rewarding the few. Boko Haram’s actions in Chibok spotlight the efforts of regressive forces to deny an education and autonomy to huge swathes of people in an attempt to keep them underfoot and make them easier to control. The education advocate and Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, herself a survivor of the Pakistani Taliban’s violent efforts to thwart her education, has repeatedly spoken of the fear felt by extremists, saying, “They are afraid of books and pens, the power of education frightens them. They are afraid of women, the power of the voice of women frightens them.”