The Full Story of Chibok Girls' Release and Ransom Paid
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The Full Story of Chibok Girls' Release and Ransom Paid
Freedom for the World’s Most Famous Hostages Came at a Heavy Price
Two Bags of Cash for Boko Haram Long after the #BringBackOurGirls campaign faded, Nigeria paid a secret ransom of €3 million to free some of the kidnapped schoolgirls By Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw | Photographs by Glenna Gordon for The Wall Street Journal  Zannah Mustapha, a former barrister, served as lead mediator in talks that freed 103 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram
 Boko Haram released 82 abducted girls to Nigerian authorities on May 6, 2017, in exchange for five imprisoned commanders and two million euros in cash. PHOTO: ZANNAH MUSTAPHA/REUTERS  Boko Haram fighters embrace members of the insurgent group after their release from prison. PHOTO: ZANNAH MUSTAPHA/REUTERS
 The remote, rugged topography of northern Nigeria.  The extreme poverty of northern Nigeria has helped Boko Haram build an insurgency around an apocalyptic vision.
 Victims of a November 15 suicide bombing in Maiduguri. A young boy and a woman seven months pregnant were among the victims.  Residents gather to mourn the victims of a suicide bombing and prepare their bodies for burial. Since Nigeria paid Boko Haram for its kidnapped girls, the reinvigorated group has increased its terror attacks. Published Credit: Glenna Gordon for The Wall Street Journal  Bodies of victims from the Nov. 15 suicide bombing.
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The Kidnapping
Nearly three years earlier, close to midnight on April 14, 2014, the girls of the Chibok school sat up in their bunk beds. A group of men in pickup trucks were bearing down on the small town of Chibok, firing rockets and assault rifles. A dozen or so soldiers stationed nearby ran for their lives. There was no electricity in the single-story schoolhouse and the girls had only flashlights to guide them. Outside their dormitory windows, they could hear the rumble of approaching engines. Many of their parents and neighbors had fled to the nearby mountains, some wearing nightgowns. Hiding behind shrubs and in the crevices of rocks, the adults watched the fighters swarm toward their target—the Chibok school. Parents furiously dialed their children. Cowering in his boxer shorts on the side of the mountain, Samuel Yama saw his phone light up. It was his sister, Margaret, a student. “She could not even speak and I was telling her to flee,” he said; “She was in tears...then the call cut off.” Outside, the girls heard voices. “Don’t worry! We are soldiers. Gather!” The school’s elderly security guard had fled. The girls didn’t know what to make of the men ordering them to come into the moonlit courtyard. “Don’t worry, we are soldiers,” they repeated. The students, some carrying Bibles, tiptoed through their rooms toward the voices outside, swimming through darkness.  A view of the small town of Chibok, where militants abducted 276 schoolgirls from their dormitory in 2014.  A house in Chibok. Corruption, military coups and a limping economy have made northern Nigeria one of the world’s poorest regions.  The twisted metal frames of bunk beds are all that remains of the Chibok Government Secondary School. After abducting its students, Boko Haram burned it to the ground. For centuries, Chibok had been a place of refuge, remote and shielded by mountains. Families had settled there in the 1700s to escape the slave trade. It was among the last outposts to fall under British colonial rule. In 1941, a missionary couple arrived from the Illinois-based Church of the Brethren. Chibok became a majority-Christian hamlet in Nigeria’s Muslim heartland, a place where people of both faiths lived side by side. By the turn of the 21st century, corruption, military coups and a limping economy created a wave of unemployment across the impoverished north. Thousands of disillusioned young men—including jobless college graduates—began listening to the teachings of radical Islam.  In Maiduguri, a city of roughly one million people 80 miles from Chibok, a baby-faced cleric named Mohammed Yusuf built a following by declaring that Western education, or boko, was haram, sinful. The earth was flat, the cleric argued, and evaporation was a lie—Allah caused rain. Western education was a scam to distance Nigerians from their maker, he said, and democracy was an affront to God. As Boko Haram’s ranks swelled, Yusuf and his lieutenants toured the northeast in buses strapped with speakers, urging Muslims to sever their ties to the government and follow Shariah law. During a 2009 street battle between his followers and police, Yusuf was handcuffed and pulled into a station. A crowd watched as officers shot him in the chest. The leader who took charge after Yusuf’s murder pursued a more radical path. Abubakar Shekau, a bearded and bellowing cleric, burned with anger and wrath, propagating an apocalyptic vision.  A still from a video released in October, 2014 by Boko Haram’s commander, Abubakar Shekau. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS The Nigerian government sent envoys to reason with Shekau. They came back in disbelief. He demanded all of Nigeria adopt Shariah as a precondition for peace talks. Shekau redirected Boko Haram into the countryside, shedding its reclusiveness in favor of a full-blown insurgency. His army commandeered tanks and antiaircraft guns from the military and exacted revenge on communities that resisted them. In hourlong video sermons, Shekau threw tirades at Queen Elizabeth II and Abraham Lincoln, rambling, cackling and jabbing his finger into the lens. “We will kill whoever practices democracy!” he screamed. “We should decapitate them! We should amputate their limbs! We should mutilate!” “Kill, kill, kill!” By the early 2010s, Boko Haram was regularly slaughtering moderate Muslim leaders and dispatching suicide bombers to crowded markets. Kalashnikov-wielding militants hanging off the backs of scooters attacked villages, spraying bullets indiscriminately at adults and children and setting everything on fire. Tens of thousands died. Hundreds of thousands fled. Schools closed by the hundreds. Some were burned down by their own students, converts to Shekau’s army, now one of the world’s most deadly. To keep feeding its ranks, Boko Haram began kidnapping children. In their red-tin-roofed schoolhouse, the Chibok girls were learning that the earth was round. “PROOF THE EARTH IS SPHERICAL,” the students were told to copy in their notebooks. “Pictures taken from spacecraft at great height clearly show the curvature of the earth.” It wasn’t just this school’s curriculum that violated Shekau’s vision—it was the mixing of faiths. Its students included Muslims and Christians. Their parents were neighbors and friends. The students seemed destined to become northeastern Nigeria’s next generation of educated women. Hauwa Nkeki, a star volleyball player, was studying to be a nurse, or maybe an economist. Elizabeth Joseph read the Bible at night by lantern. Dorcas Yakuba passed the days writing love letters to a boy who had nicknamed her “the remote control of my life.” Naomi Adamu was one of the school’s more serious students, “a hardworking girl,” as her mother, Kolo Adamu, described her. She also had a goofy sense of humor she shared with a few close friends. As she prepared for final exams, she was looking forward to the next stage of her life.  Photos of the Chibok girls taken before their kidnapping. The girl in the yellow dress is Naomi Adamu, one of the 103 captives released. PHOTO: GLENNA GORDON Outside the school grounds, Chibok had come to feel less safe. Earlier that year, Boko Haram torched six nearby villages. Distant gunfire sometimes thundered. One day, a school administrator found a piece of paper on the ground warning of a Boko Haram attack, but dismissed it as a prank. The girls didn’t live in fear, but understood the gathering threat. Families seeking sanctuary in Chibok brought stories of the insurgents’ brutality. In March, three weeks before the attack, Shekau appeared on YouTube, threatening the region’s young women: “Girls, you should return to your homes…In due course we will start taking women away.” The night of the attack, when the girls emerged in the courtyard, they could see the men were not soldiers. They wore unkempt beards, flip-flops and tattered uniforms. Several were raiding the school cafeteria, stealing sacks of rice, beans and pasta. Others poured gasoline on the school to torch it. Boko Haram had not come to abduct the students. It had come to steal the school’s brickmaking machine. The insurgents had been on a kidnapping spree, and their camps faced a housing shortage. A commander fired his rifle in the air and demanded to know where the machine was kept. Once they found it, the fighters hoisted it onto a truck. As they prepared to leave, one militant, motioning to the students, asked a fateful question. What shall we do with them? A few weeks earlier, Boko Haram had barricaded dozens of schoolboys in their dormitory at the Federal Government College of Buni Yadi and burned them alive. At other colleges, they had tossed grenades into the dorms while the students slept. The unit’s commander turned to the girls. “Shekau will know what to do with them,” he said. The fighters ordered the students to climb into their trucks. The teenagers linked hands and arms as they stumbled through the dark.
 Oby Ezekwesili, second from right, at a recent meeting in Abuja. The former government official led daily protests on the girls’ behalf and popularized the famous #BringBackOurGirls Twitter hashtag.
 The cast of “The Expendables 3,” posing on the red carpet during the 67th Cannes Film Festival. PHOTO: VALERY HACHE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
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 A page of a secret diary kept by the Chibok girls during their captivity. PHOTO: ADAOBI TRICIA NWAUBANI/THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION
The Mediators In May 2014, American intelligence officers monitoring feeds from drones high above the Sambisa Forest had begun piecing together a picture of the militants’ whereabouts. The Nigerians, anxious for a breakthrough, decided to try a simpler approach. It began when a presidential aide placed a call to a security guard working the late shift at a grocery store in Dubai. Ahmad Salkida was a difficult person for Nigerian officials to petition for help. A Muslim convert from a poor background who had dropped out of grade school, he was a self-employed journalist, blogger and government critic who had fled Nigeria for his family’s safety. But by teaching himself fluent English and mastering social media, Salkida had become a widely known expert on Boko Haram who often scooped Nigeria’s journalists. He had built such a rapport with the insurgency that before it turned violent, the group had asked him to run its newspaper. Salkida wasn’t interested in the job or in being anyone’s mouthpiece. His business card said “INDEPENDENT JOURNALIST.” He was an avowed nonconformist down to the five-fingered toe shoes he wore under his Muslim robes. He avoided any situation where his advice could be ignored or his integrity compromised. “I have a set of values,” he said, “and it is these values that have allowed me to survive.” Nigerian officials felt leery about Salkida’s fixation with social media. “Everything he does has to be in the public domain. He has to tweet about it,” one official said. They weren’t sure if Salkida was loyal to them, Boko Haram or his own brand. They also knew that he, better than anyone, understood how to communicate with Boko Haram. The government invited Salkida to Abuja. He asked a Ugandan co-worker to cover his shifts at the grocery store. “I’m going to meet my president,” he explained. Alongside Salkida, another quiet effort to negotiate with Boko Haram was taking shape. For years, Swiss officials in Bern had been discreetly monitoring the conflict in Nigeria’s north, looking for an opportunity to bring the warring parties to the table. Winning the release of the girls struck them as an ideal place to focus. After years of inserting themselves into some of the world’s most intractable conflicts, the Swiss had learned that one key to successful negotiations was finding the right local person to kick-start it—an “inside mediator.” The ideal candidate was wealthy and prominent enough to engage in a protracted peace process and to be credible to both sides. In a civil conflict like Nigeria’s, it was crucial to find a mediator the insurgents couldn't ignore. To the Swiss, Zannah Mustapha’s long career as a lawyer, part-time professor and local luminary checked one important box. Boko Haram might not like his views on education and the law, but they had a compelling reason to listen to him. He looked after their children. In 1959, the year Mustapha was born, the northeastern city of Maiduguri was a British imperial garrison in the last year of colonial rule. Mustapha was the son of a prominent family who opened his own legal practice. Nigeria’s independence brought civil war and military coups. The economy was sputtering and the Sahara was encroaching, wiping out crops. As he rode through the streets in air-conditioned sedans, Mustapha would pass scores of young men unable to find work. Over time, he came to resent the corruption and inequity of the system he helped defend. He became obsessed with redeeming Maiduguri and leaving a legacy. “We realized that we weren’t models for our own children,” he said. In 2007, he left his law practice, took over an abandoned building and opened Future Prowess, a school and orphanage for children between 3 and 8. He bought uniforms, food and secondhand books. He persuaded a respected principal to run the school by buying him a car. The inaugural class welcomed 36 students. He bought each one a pair of shoes.  Future Prowess, a school founded by Zannah Mustapha, seated at center, took in the children of fallen Boko Haram fighters when no one else would.  One of 10 schoolrooms at Future Prowess.  Mustapha had to persuade the widows of Boko Haram that teaching subjects like English, math and science was in keeping with Islam. Two years later, a steady stream of orphans and widowed mothers from a strange sect began showing up at the gates. Mustapha had known the family of the group’s leader, Mohammed Yusuf, and had represented children of its members in inheritance cases. As he began enrolling the children of slain Boko Haram militants, their mothers took issue with his curriculum. Science, math and English were Western education, they protested. He reasoned with them. The children needed English to communicate with Muslims around the world, he argued, and science and math were subjects conceived of by Muslim scholars. In time, they relented. Six widows took jobs at the school as cooks and cleaners. Soon Mustapha’s 10 classrooms overflowed with 350 students. There were 1,000 more on a waiting list. The government was reluctant to support the children of Boko Haram, so he found supplies from another source: the Red Cross, the Geneva-based aid group, which donated food and counseling services for traumatized students. One day in late 2013, a visitor came to Future Prowess for a tour. It was Switzerland’s ambassador. The envoy had heard about the school that brought children of warring parties together and wanted to have a look. The Swiss entourage included a man whom Mustapha would come to know well: the operative from the Human Security Division. After settling on Mustapha as their point man, the Swiss diplomats invited him to spend two weeks in the Alps as a guest of the government. There, he would take a course on peacemaking taught by some of the world’s most experienced mediators. Just as Ahmad Salkida arrived in Abuja to open a dialogue with Boko Haram, Zannah Mustapha had traveled to a boutique hotel on the shores of Switzerland’s Lake Thun to begin his education. The class had roughly 20 students, all handpicked by the Swiss from warring nations. They began by role-playing different sides in a pedestrian scenario: a conflict involving two neighbors and a fence. The goal was to explain how to structure a negotiation. “The logic of a mediation is easier to show in that fence session than in Syria,” said Simon Mason, an organizer of the course. Several students had come from Colombia, which was close to ending a 50-year insurgency. The class studied those talks and discussed them over long walks around the Lake. Mustapha flew home two weeks later, ready to undertake the challenge of a lifetime.
 Ahmad Salkida, one of the first mediators to hold talks with Boko Haram for the release of the girls, shows a proof-of-life video shot by the insurgents. Back in Abuja, he brought the video to the president, who gave his blessing to cut a deal. |
