“Kankara’s students have been released, but now who will free them from fear?” Mohammed Ali is still dealing with it, a sad look and 13 years old: like his classmates – he hasn’t been to school for two. Ever since Boko Haram militiamen razed his classroom to the ground and seized his future. With fire and sword they put Furi, his village, in Yobe, the Nigerian state of the Northeast stronghold of the Islamist rebels. This time, however, in the raid on the Kankara Institute, the terror moved further west, out of their usual range of action. Local authorities speak of “bandits”, despite the jihadist group having claimed responsibility for the attack. Objective and modus operandi are the usual: the night assault on a boarding school by fake soldiers, the kidnapping of hundreds of pupils, the escape to the nearest forest. So it was with the girls of Chibok in 2014. The ending was fortunately different: the agony this time lasted “only” six days. They were released without shoes, wrapped in blankets, some still wearing their school uniform. . “They beat us day and night. They fed us once a day. We have suffered a lot, ”one of them told a local TV.
A happy ending drama with many obscure points. It is unclear whether all abductees were released and a ransom paid. What is certain is that Kankara’s kidnapping took place in a context of widespread banditry, fueled by competition for land and water between Fulani shepherds and Hausa farmers, both protected by militias of “bandits”. The fear is that the jihadists are exploiting criminal groups already present on the ground and are trying to expand to the whole of Northern Nigeria, well beyond the traditional strongholds.
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But Boko Haram, which makes the fight against education its flag, has already achieved a great victory: for fear of new attacks, schools in the North-West regions have been closed. “And who knows if they will reopen,” 13-year-old Mohammed Ali considers via Skype. His school, in Furi, was rebuilt last year thanks to WFP funds but no students have returned to attend it.. “We are afraid – he says – it has been deserted for months, now the displaced people live there.” It was difficult to overcome the shock of his close encounter with terror: “I was playing in front of school with other classmates when they came shooting wildly, I ran away, someone ran after me, with my heart in my throat I took refuge in the forest, I I slipped into a hole, I spent the night hiding there: the next morning my parents found me still curled up inside. For months I continued to have nightmares, I dreamed that they would catch me ». TOnext to him, his teacher, Yusuf Adamu, 36, shakes his head: “We are a target, without agents to protect us, how can we leave?”. Even in Kona, in the state of Taraba, there are schools used as shelters, there against the threat of Fulani shepherds, says Alda Gemma of the NGO Loving Gaze.
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Even Aisha Mohammed, 15, no longer goes to class: his school in Ngabrawa, a village in the state of Yobe, was set on fire in 2018 and has since been a dilapidated building, all rubble and weeds. «During the day I sell dry branches brooms and help my mom around the house, and at night I sleep badly, I often wake up in fear of sudden raids. Our parents after the attack of Kankara told us not to go out and stay at home ». His professor Salamatu Bala intervenes: “We retire and Boko Haram wins, but we are terrified.” His four children let them study in the city, in Damaturu, more controlled than the villages. To get there, however, you have to grind kilometers of dirt roads and paths. “To them like to go to school but they tell me they are afraid so they run to get there as soon as possible ».
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A kiss to the mother, the door that closes and then away the great race with the satchel on his shoulder also for the elementary school children of Bindigari, another village in the Yoba. “They come out of breath and a sigh of relief,” says teacher Mustafa. In the movie “I’m going to schoola »by Pascal Plisson the greatest threat in the long journeys of children in the southern hemisphere are elephants. But for the little Nigerians, the Boko Haram monster is much scarier.
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18 December 2020 (change December 19, 2020 | 07:28)
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