Tag: Boko Haram

The Guardian reports that the families of the enslaved schoolgirls are losing hope.

Hamma Balumai, a farmer whose 16-year-old daughter Hauwa was snatched, pooled his savings with other parents and ventured on a two-day trek into the forest this week. “Even my wife was begging to come as she is so disturbed she hasn’t been able to eat anything. Our daughter Hauwa is only 16 years old and she has been missing for 11 days now,” he told the Guardian.

The parents turned around only after being warned by communities in the forest that their rag-tag group, armed with machetes and knives, would be gunned down by the militants, who wield sophisticated weapons.

The ones who escaped are struggling too.

Godiya Usman, an 18-year-old finalist who jumped off the back of the truck, said she feels trapped by survivor’s guilt. She and her cousin huddled together as the insurgents stormed into their dorm room. “When my cousin Lami started crying, one of them pointed a gun to my head and said if she didn’t stop, he would shoot both of us. I held her and told her we had to just follow their instructions, but I was so scared I could barely even whisper the words.”

She began to panic as her cousin could not stop crying as they drove into the night. “They drove us into the forest and each time we got to a village, they stopped and started shooting and killing people and burning their houses. I told the girls in my truck that when we got to another village and they were busy attacking, we should all jump down and run into the forest.”

But the other girls, terrified by the dozens of armed men, were unable to keep to the plan. “When we got to another village, they started shooting. I jumped down and I was expecting my friends to jump too, but they didn’t. I just started crying and running into the bush,” Usman said, her voice breaking as she recounted the nightmare.

Hours later, she stumbled upon a group of other parents and local youths who were searching for the girls in the forest.

Is this a “fake”? I hardly think so. I hardly think Monica Mark would write all that if it were fake.

Kyari Mohammed, who is a teacher in north-east Nigeria – Boko Haram territory – writes in the Guardian about what it’s like to live in fear of Education Forbidden.

I live in fear of Boko Haram. The group’s insurgency began in Nigeria in 2009. Yola in Adamawa state, where I live and teach history, is relatively calm at the moment. But following the imposition of a state of emergency in 2013 many of my colleagues have fled.

The University of Maiduguri in neighbouring Borno state is in a worse situation. At least three of its professors have been killed and one abducted within this period. Many students have withdrawn, teachers relocated, and academic exchange even with other Nigerian universities has virtually ceased. During a one-year sabbatical that I took there in 2012, it was shut down for six months.

Following Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau’s reiteration that all schools are targets, we are all living in fear.

Marvelous, isn’t it? A movement to destroy all education in a developing country, and to do it via mass murder and terror.

The attacks on schools can be explained even though they cannot be justified. The Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Liddawa’ati wal Jihad, better known as Boko Haram, has not hidden its disdain and opposition to western education. Its name Boko Haram is often roughly translated as “western education is forbidden”.

The group ascribes the rot in governance, corruption, conspicuous consumption of the ruling class as well as their exclusion and marginality in contemporary Nigerian society to western education and the secular system it gave rise to.

The educated elites, especially in northern Nigeria, have not been good role models in the eyes of their uneducated compatriots. This is because they are living examples of corruption, conspicuous consumption and oppression of their unlettered compatriots and co-religionists.

There’s a lot of that here in the US, too, but destroying education isn’t the way to improve things.

The insurgency has set back education in an area with some of the world’s worst levels of education and human development. For many children in these communities, education remains their surest way out of poverty and destitution. The fear of Boko Haram has forced many parents to withdraw their children from schools, and this can only add to an already explosive mix of the large pool of uneducated and unemployed youth and debilitating poverty.

Boko Haram is energetically making things much much much worse.

So Boko Haram has won – Nigeria has closed down 85 schools in north-eastern Borno, affecting nearly 120,000 students, because of the danger of more murderous attacks by the Islamist thugs.

Islamic militants have burned down scores of schools in attacks that have killed hundreds of students. Other schools fearful of attacks have closed in Yobe and Adamawa states.

“We have run out of excuses for our failure to live up to our responsibility to protect our innocent defenceless children from gratuitous violence,” the speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Waziri Tambuwal, told legislators at a special session last week to mourn the latest victims – 59 students killed at a boarding school in neighbouring Yobe state on 25 February. Extremists locked some of the students into a dormitory and set it alight.

“Extremists” my ass – sadistic mass murderers, is what they are.

The school closures could have far-reaching consequences, including ending the education of some students in a region where few ever have the opportunity to get to high school, said the chairman of the Nigerian Human Rights Commission, Chidi Anselm Odinkalu.

“The average secondary school enrolment is slightly under 5% (in north-eastern Nigeria), so I think it’s easy to understand that you cannot overestimate what the consequences of this could be, given the parlous state of education in the region and the fact that, clearly, whoever is orchestrating this is focused on targeting schools, educational institutions,” he said.

It just makes you want to bang your head against a wall – people wanting to stop education and ensure more and worse poverty. Look at a very impoverished reason with a horrifically low rate of education, and bend every nerve to make it much worse. Pleasing “god” by making more humans more miserable.

The leader of Boko Haram has made a video in which he tells everyone that Boko Haram plans to go right on murdering as many people as it possibly can, in order to pay its compliments to God and to kill lots and lots of human beings. The loathsome piece of shit held a Kalashnikov and harangued everyone about reading the Koran. If anyone wants to know what the combination of hatred and pious stupidity results in, the leader of Boko Haram has made it easy to find out.

And that’s not even all; he also tells insulting stupid lies to the effect that Boko Haram doesn’t kill children.

The leader of Nigeria‘s Islamist militant group Boko Haram has called for more attacks against schools, describing western education as a “plot against Islam”, in a video released days after his fighters killed 46 students in an assault on a dorm.

In the 15-minute recording released at the weekend, Abubakar Shekau said schools would continue to be targeted “until our last breath”.

“Teachers who teach western education? We will kill them! We will kill them in front of their students, and tell the students to henceforth study the Qur’an,” he said, gesticulating energetically while dressed in military fatigues and a traditional hat.

Shekau denied that his fighters killed children. “Our religion does not permit us to touch small children and women, we don’t kill children,” he said, reading from sheets of paper as he cradled a Kalashnikov.

It’s disgusting and foul and horrible, but it works well for them.

A recent spate of attacks on schools is part of a two-pronged strategy that plays up the extremists’ ideology against western institutions while also providing a stream of potential new recruits as frightened parents pull their children out of education.

Unschooled and unemployed children are increasingly being recruited – sometimes forcibly – to fill the ranks of Boko Haram and unleash violence against their peers, the Guardian has learned.

Win-win, you see? They kill some students, then the others get pulled out of school and Boko Haram grabs them and makes them do more of the same. At that rate it shouldn’t take them long at all to either kill or ruin every child in Nigeria.

Just after dawn on 6 July,  a school dormitory was doused in petrol and set alight in north-eastern Yobe. Those trying to flee the flames were shot. The attack left 46 dead, mostly students. More than 300 classrooms have been torched in the remote, arid state since 2009, according to official counts.

Hundreds of families have fled the region. “This really shook us up. Students being attacked in their sleep is too disgusting for us to even imagine,” said Adam Mohammed, a textiles trader visiting neighbouring northern Kano state, where he relocated his family for safety reasons. “It was hard, but I feel I made the right decision to leave Yobe. I’m a father of three and when I think of what those parents must be going through …” He shook his head mutely.

A god that does nothing but hate. A god that hates children, teachers, education, peace, progress, happiness, kindness, generosity – all it wants is death and misery.

Mohammed, a gardener working in the economic capital of Lagos, said he had fled from his village of Dikwa, a few miles from a large Boko Haram camp. “The Boko Haram were everywhere. They collected taxes from us. They stripped one Muslim girl naked and beat her because they said she didn’t cover her ankles,” he said, looking nervous at the mention of the militants.

He said two men had turned up at his grass-roofed house in May. “They said the almajari [religious school] my son was going to was haram [forbidden] because the imam used prayer beads. They gave me all kinds of warnings. They said that I shouldn’t cross my arms when I was talking to them because crossing the arms is haram too.”

The final straw had come days later when his family were awakened by a neighbour’s wailing. “[Boko Haram] told her they took her son to their camp to fight for Allah,” Mohammed said. “They said the boy’s family is now the Boko Haram. My wife said we should leave that very day.”

How to create hell on earth.