Exclusive: Our Abduction By Boko Haram Was Accidental – Chibok Girls | The Precision

Some of the Chibok girls who spent three years in the brutal captivity of Boko Haram say their mass abduction by the militant group was the accidental outcome of a botched robbery.

The
Chibok girls made the surprise revelation in secret diaries they kept
while held prisoner and a copy of which has been exclusively obtained by
the Thomson Reuters Foundation. 

Recalling the
night of their kidnapping in April 2014, Naomi Adamu described in the
diaries how Boko Haram had not come to the school in Chibok to abduct
the girls, but rather to steal machinery for house building. 

Unable to find what they were looking for, the militants were unsure what to do with the girls.

Arguments swiftly ensued. 

“One
boy said they should burn us all, and they (some of the other fighters)
said: ‘No, let us take them with us to Sambisa (Boko Haram’s remote
forest base) … if we take them to Shekau (the group’s leader), he will
know what to do'”, Adamu wrote. 

She was one of
about 220 girls who were stolen from their school in the northeastern
town of Chibok one night in April 2014 – a raid that sparked an
international outcry and a viral campaign on social media with the
hashtag #bringbackourgirls. 

Championed by
former U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama – along with a diverse cast of
media celebrities – the campaign won international infamy for Boko Haram
and helped galvanise the Nigerian government into negotiating for the
girls’ release. 

Adamu was among 82 of the
Chibok girls released by Boko Haram in May – part of a second wave after
21 of them were freed in October. They are being held in a secret
location in Abuja for what the government has called a “restoration
process”. 

A few others have escaped or been rescued, but about 113 of the girls are believed to be still held by the militant group. 

The
authenticity of the diaries, written by Adamu and her friend Sarah
Samuel, cannot be verified, nor their intended role as the government
negotiates with Boko Haram for more releases.

The
diaries shed light not only on the horrors the girls endured under Boko
Haram, but their acts of resistance, and their staunch belief that they
would one day go home. 

The girls said they
started documenting their ordeal a few months after the abduction, when
Boko Haram – whose name loosely means ‘Western education is sinful’ in
the local Hausa language – gave them exercise books to use during
Koranic lessons. 

To hide the diaries from their captors, the girls would bury the notebooks in the ground, or carry them in their underwear. 

Three
of the other Chibok girls also contributed to the undated chronicles,
which were written mainly in passable English, with some parts scribbled
in less coherent Hausa. 

“We wrote it together.
When one person got tired, she would give it to another person to
continue,” Adamu, 24, said from the state safe house in the capital,
where the girls are being kept for assessment, rehabilitation and
debriefing by the government.

Life in the Sambisa involved regular beatings, Koranic lessons, domestic drudgery and pressure to marry and convert. 

The girls’ spirits remained intact, as they devised amusing and mocking nicknames for the fighters, the diaries show. 

Yet cruelty and brutality were ever present. 

When five girls tried to escape, the militants tied them up, dug a hole in the ground, and turned to one of their classmates. 

The jihadists handed her a blade and issued a chilling ultimatum: ‘cut off the girls’ heads, or lose your own’. 

“We are begging them. We are crying. They said if next we ran away, they are going to cut off our necks,” Adamu wrote. 

On
another occasion, the militants gathered those girls who had refused to
embrace Islam, brought out jerrycans and threatened to douse them in
petrol then burn them alive. 

“They said: ‘You want to die. You don’t want to be Muslim,(so) we are going to burn you,” read the diary entry. 

As fear set in, the militants cracked into laughter – the cans contained nothing but water, the girls wrote.

One
of the most striking excerpts illustrates the pervasive fear spread by
Boko Haram in northeast Nigeria, where the group has killed 20,000
people and uprooted at least 2 million in a brutal campaign that shows
no signs of ending soon. 

During their captivity
in the Sambisa forest, some of the Chibok girls escaped, and ended up
in a nearby shop where they asked the owners for help, as well as food
and water. 

“The
girls said: ‘We are those that Boko Haram kidnapped from (the school)
in Chibok,'” Adamu wrote. “One of the people (in the shop) said: ‘Are
these not Shekau’s children?'” 

The shop owners let the girls stay the night. 

But the next day they took them back to Boko Haram’s base, where the girls were whipped and threatened with decapitation. 

Despite
being flushed with relief at her own freedom, Adamu worries about her
closest friend and co-author, Samuel, who is still with the group,
having married one of its militants. 

“She got married because of no food, no water,” Adamu said from the government safe house in Abuja. 

“Not everbody can survive that kind of thing,” she added. “I feel pained … so pained. I’m still thinking about her.” (Reuters).

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