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| Victims Of Jos Bomb Blast |
The report you are about to read is scary and frightening, except from Newsweek correspondent Alex Perry's New book, "The Hunt for Boko Haram: Investigating the Terror Tearing Nigeria Apart
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The report is profound and offers insight on the monster that is Boko Haram and how mean and brutal they are.
Read the report below:
It’s several weeks since the Islamist militants of Boko Haram kidnapped more than 260 girls from a school in northeastern Nigeria and the general wants me to see what he’s up against. He invites me to his office in the capital, Abuja, and opens his laptop.
The general clicks on one folder titled Abubakar Shekau. A first clip shows the future leader of Boko Haram in his years as a preacher, in a white cap and white babban riga, the traditional Nigerian pajama, tunic and cape. A second clip is more recent, from 2013, and shows Shekau in a clearing, looking far bulkier, in full combat camouflage.
The next clip shows Shekau’s former No. 2, Abu Sa’ad, a few months before his death in August 2013. He is giving a speech to his men on the eve of an attack last year on an army barracks in Bama, Nigeria, a town on the Cameroon border. The fighters, who appear to be mostly teenagers, grin shyly at the camera. Abu Sa’ad says that the attack has been long planned and that most of its architects are dead.
“You should look for victory or martyrdom, which is victory in the eyes of God,” he says. “A martyr knows he is going to die, knows there are enemies, but goes to the battlefield anyway, without fear of death because he loves God and he knows God will smile on him.”
The attack begins at dawn.
Hundreds of Abu Sa’ad’s men are walking through the bush. They begin firing. When they start receiving return fire, they do not change pace or even look for cover. They keep walking almost casually into the fusillade. Bullets whistle over the cameraman’s head. “Allahu Akbar!” (God is the greatest) he shouts, over and over. “Allahu Akbar!”
All around him, fighters are being cut down. Ten make it to the base fence and take cover behind a toilet block. The cameraman films one shouting back at his comrades. “Stop firing from behind,” the man yells. “You’re hitting us.”
Suddenly the camera goes down on its side. “They’ve killed me,” says a voice.
The general whistles. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he says. “Just walking into death.”
Abu Sa’ad is standing in front of the black and white flags of Al-Qaeda, surrounded by 20 boys, all in headscarves, all carrying guns. The boys look as young as 4. The heads of the smallest just reach Abu Sa’ad’s waist. “You must wage war,” he tells them, his hands resting on the boys’ heads. “You must perform every violent act you can.”
“Allahu Akbar!” cry the boys. Abu Sa’ad turns to the camera. “You can kill us,” he says, “but these children will continue. Children are the future.”
After that clip ends the general selects another. In this video, two men in the black uniform of the Nigerian police are on their knees in the bush in front of a black and white banner held up by two militants, which reads in Arabic: “There is only one God and Muhammad is his prophet.” Abu Sa’ad stands to one side, holding a book.
The cameraman asks the two policemen to speak. The first gives his name as Corporal Mehmud Daba. “I know mine has ended,” he says. “My legacy is to ask my wife to please bring up our children in Islam. Let my mother hear this and pay all my debts for me.”
The second policeman says his name is Sergeant David Hoya, a Christian. He does not raise his head but mumbles into the ground.
“What is your message for your wife?” asks the cameraman.
“That she should take care of my children.”
“In Islam or as unbelievers?”
“I’m not an unbeliever,” says Hoya.
“How can they see you if your face is down like that?” asks the cameraman. “Lift your face up!”
The camera turns to Abu Sa’ad. “I want to give an explanation for what we are about to do,” he says. “We are punishing in terms of what Allah prescribes. I want to tell Nigeria and the world that we give them the gift of these two policemen, this sergeant and corporal. We want to give these men the judgment of Allah.”
Abu Sa’ad lifts up a book he is holding. “I am going to read from this book,” he says, showing the cover to the camera. It is an interpretation of the Kitab Tawheed, the Book of Unification, written by a conservative 13th century Saudi Islamist scholar called Sheikh Abdur-Rahman bin Hasan al Ash Sheikh.
Abu Sa’ad begins a long monologue, showing the pages as he quotes from them. “We are going to do things in accordance with the book,” he repeats. “We will do this to anybody we catch. In Kano, we entered the police headquarters, and we killed them as they shat themselves. We did the same in Damaturu and Maiduguri. Let the world know that we will never compare anyone to God. No government, no constitution, can compare to God.”
Ten minutes later, Abu Sa’ad finishes. “Let’s thank God and give him more bodies,” he concludes. He then pulls a knife from his combat vest, grabs Daba and lays him on his side. The crowd starts cheering: “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!”
Two men hold Daba’s chest and legs. Abu Sa’ad holds his head with one hand, and starts sawing at Daba’s throat with the knife. Blood jets onto the sandy ground. Abu Sa’ad keeps sawing. He can’t get through the neck bone. He switches to the back of the neck and starts sawing again. Still the head won’t come off. Abu Sa’ad drops the knife and twists Daba’s head around with both hands, trying to snap it off. It doesn’t work. He picks up the knife and saws again.
Finally, after half a minute, Daba’s head comes free. Abu Sa’ad lifts it up by the hair, shows it to the crowd. The eyes are closed. Flesh and ligaments are hanging loose. Abu Sa’ad places the head on the body.
Then he moves over to David Hoya, whom his men are already holding in place. This time Abu Sa’ad works ferociously. He takes Hoya’s head off in half the time. I say nothing. The general is silent, too. He clicks on another video. A woman is being held on the ground, next to a newly dug grave. “I didn’t pass on any information,” she says. “I didn’t tell anyone anything.”
“Allahu Akbar,” says the cameraman.
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| Victim of Jos Bomb Blast |
The men set to work. The woman shrieks, then goes silent. Her head is off in 15 seconds. The men try to arrange it on her body but can’t seem to balance it. They try propping it on her hair. Eventually one man loses patience and punts her head sharply into the grave. The others shove her body in.
The general clicks on another clip. This time it’s a young boy. I tell the general I can’t take any more, and he freezes the frame. We sit there, the two of us, silent for a while. Finally the general says: “We found over 200 graves like this in the area. All beheaded. A lot of them were young boys.”
THE BOY FROM MAIDUGURI
Just after 10:30 a.m. on August 26, 2011, Mohammed Abul Barra drove right up to the gates of United Nations House in Abuja, before anyone noticed him, ramming his gray Honda Accord station wagon through two security gates and crashing into the building’s glass lobby. Finally halted by a low wall, the car bounced back on its wheels. The dozen or so U.N. staff and security guards in the lobby froze. One guard, regaining his composure, walked up to the car and peered in. Another onlooker appeared to see something, grabbed the man next to him and ran. After waiting a full 12 seconds, Barra leaned forward.
Flying bits of car and glass shredded most people in the lobby to a bloody pulp. The rest of the 24 dead and 115 wounded had few visible injury marks. Instead, their insides were crushed by a blast wave so big that it crumpled a water tower 100 yards away as if it were cardboard.
When I met Nigeria’s then national security adviser, General Andrew Owoeye Azazi, a few weeks later, he was effusive about the professionalism of the attack. “They did thorough surveillance, they knew the weaknesses of the gates, and the [blast] material was very volatile, very specialized,” he said. “This was not just a local guy from Maiduguri.” What Azazi meant was: This was Al-Qaeda. Jonathan took a similar line. This was “just like other terrorist attacks in the world,” he said. It was Nigeria’s bad luck that it had become the latest battlefield in this global war.
The trouble was, as Azazi and Jonathan well knew, Barra was just a local guy from Maiduguri. Within days he was identified as a 27-year-old mechanic and father from Nigeria’s northeasternmost city. A month after the attack, the French news agency AFP was sent a video of Barra taken immediately before the attack. In it, he was shown holding an AK-47, but awkwardly, initially by the barrel, then folding it in the crook of his arm like a baby. As he talked, he smiled shyly at the camera and spoke so softly that the microphone hardly picked up his words.
“I’m going to shed my blood,” he said. “I am going there now. God willing, and I pray to Allah to make me steadfast. May he take me there safely.” Two men then embraced him. He beamed and nearly knocked heads with the second man. He looked like a boy setting off for camp.
The attack on the U.N. building in Abuja was Boko Haram’s first against a non-Nigerian target and suggested the group might have international ambitions.
I flew to Maiduguri a few weeks later. The statistics showed the city was about as close to the bottom as a human being could be in the 21st century. More than three-quarters of the population lived in absolute poverty. Just 3.6 percent of children were vaccinated against disease. Only 1 in 5 children went to school. The average girl managed three weeks of school in her lifetime. The residents had long ago figured they had very little to lose.
In the 1970s, a group of imams from a sect called the Izala blossomed in Maiduguri’s deprivation, preaching a purist morality in life and politics and denouncing the greed and corruption of Nigeria’s rulers. By 2005, a young preacher called Mohammed Yusuf, who said he had studied in Saudi Arabia, was beginning to steal the Izala mantle. Why bother with Western-style education, Yusuf would ask in his sermons, when there were no jobs even for graduates? Hadn’t money and oil given them a government that stole from its people?
Yusuf advocated going back to a purer age, before “so-called education, democracy and rule of law.” He called his group Jamaatu Ahlisunnah Lidawati wal Jihad (People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad). It soon became better known by the nickname given it by Nigeria’s journalists: Boko Haram, which translates loosely as “books are blasphemous” or “Western education is forbidden.”
By all accounts, Yusuf was a great speaker. Many of his ideas, however, were half-baked or inauthentic imports. He denounced such godless modern ideas as evolution, the roundness of the earth and even the evaporation of water. He set up a camp known as “Afghanistan” to instruct volunteers for his revolution against the evils of progress. Copying images of the Afghan and Pakistani mujahedeen, his followers began wearing the South Asian kurta pajama and asking their women to wear the full veil.
The spark for violence came in late July 2009, when police officers watching a Boko Haram funeral procession saw some mourners riding motorcycles without helmets. In Maiduguri, helmets had become a point of contention. The security services insisted on them. Boko Haram resisted, since wearing one required a man to remove his traditional Islamic cap. The police watched the helmetless funeral cortege pass, then they attacked. The mourners retaliated. Three people died. Riots erupted. A few days later, the army surrounded Yusuf’s compound in Maiduguri, arrested him, then executed him. A bloodbath ensued. By nightfall of July 29, around 1,000 people were dead.
The killings briefly halted Boko Haram’s rise. But within a year it was operating as a 5,000-strong rebellion across northern Nigeria that threatened to split the country in two. The rebels gave no quarter. They slaughtered whole columns of Nigerian soldiers, cleaved their way through Christian congregations with machetes, cut down moderate Muslim families as they left Friday prayers and staged coordinated attacks that wiped out small villages and devastated cities such as Kano and Damaturu. The U.N. bombing in Abuja was one of several climaxes in this bloodletting.
Nigeria’s army and police responded with equal cruelty, raiding villages and towns and rounding up young men, executing them—even gutting them—and dumping hundreds of bodies in trenches and mass graves. In Maiduguri I met a group of elders. One had a video on his cellphone of 20 uniformed Nigerian soldiers using truncheons and whips to beat a crowd of young men, stripped and on their knees, in Maiduguri’s market.
“They do this daily,” he said. “They can just take you and shoot you. Whenever there is a bomb blast, they just call the youth and shoot some of them.” One time, he said, they shot an entire wedding party of 20 people. “Does a young man need any other reason to rise up after this?”
Bodies are not counted in a dirty war. By now, the dead are estimated at close to 13,000, though nobody can be sure, even to the nearest few thousand. Terence McCulley, who was the U.S. ambassador to Nigeria in 2011, said then that several hundred Boko men had traveled to Mali for bomb-making and propaganda training by Al-Qaeda’s West Africa branch, Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM).
General Azazi said they had reached out to other militants in Somalia and Yemen. In 2011, the then commander of U.S. forces in Africa, General Carter Ham, warned of the emergence of a Pan-African Al-Qaeda merging Boko Haram, AQIM and al-Shabab in Somalia that had “very explicitly and publicly voiced intent to target Westerners and the U.S.” Security types began referring to the Sahel region as “Africanistan.”
In Maiduguri, Nigeria’s army enthusiastically backed this alarming analysis. When I asked the base spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Hassan Ifijeh Mohammed, whether he saw Boko Haram as local militants or international terrorists, the colonel was clear. “Here they call it Boko Haram, but Boko Haram is totally Al-Qaeda,” he said. “The name does not matter. The characteristics are the same. All the terrorists are in one group. They have one activity, one [way of] thinking. Al-Qaeda has no boundary. There are perfect links. It’s exactly the same as Al-Qaeda.”
The truth is that Boko Haram was, as the colonel initially described them before I mentioned global terrorism, “a bunch of nobodies from the countryside.” Their concerns were local: They hated the Christian president, and they hated the state government in Maiduguri even more. Boko Haram’s fighters wanted to be left alone in the purity of their poverty by an outside world that had long ago left them behind—but by taking up arms, they had forced the government to try to stop them.
The ebook The Hunt for Boko Haram: Investigating the Terror Tearing Nigeria Apart by Alex Perry is available now.
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