With information not readily available about the living condition of
Boko Haram members in the thick forests of North east Nigeria, a
15-year-old boy’s experience as a militant recruit and an escapee is
nothing but incredible.
Baba Goni, a young man who has lived all his life in rural Borno told
the Daily Mail how he was enlisted into the Boko Haram group, his
dangerous escape, saving two abused teenage girls and later joining the
vigilante groups searching frantically for the missing 276 schoolgirls
kidnapped in Chibok, Borno State.
Read his interview with Dailymail below:
Their faces scratched and bleeding, the
pitiful remains of their once-smart school uniforms ripped and filthy,
the two teenage girls were tethered to trees, wrists bound with rope and
left in a clearing in the Nigerian bush to die by Islamist terror group
Boko Haram.Despite having been raped and dragged
through the bush, they were alive – but only just – in the sweltering
tropical heat and humidity.This grim scene was discovered by
15-year-old Baba Goni. ‘They were seated on the ground at the base of
the trees, their legs stretched out in front of them – they were hardly
conscious,’ says Baba, who acted as a guide for one of the many
vigilante teams searching for the Nigerian schoolgirls abducted from
their school last month by Boko Haram – and now at the centre of a
concerted international campaign for their freedom.The horrific scene he and his comrades
encountered, a week after the kidnap early on April 15, was in thorny
scrubland near the village of Ba’ale, an hour’s drive from Chibok, where
276 girls aged 16 to 18 were taken from their boarding school
dormitories – with 223 still missing. It was still two weeks before
social media campaigns and protests would prick the Western world’s
conscience over the abduction.In the days following their
disappearance, rag-tag groups such as Baba’s, scouring the forests in a
convoy of Toyota pick-up trucks, were the girls’ only hope.But hope had already run out for some of
the hostages, according to Baba, when his group spoke to the terrified
inhabitants of the village where Boko Haram had pitched camp with their
captives for three days following the kidnap.The chilling account he received from the
villagers, though unconfirmed by official sources, represents the very
worst fears of the families of those 223 girls still missing.Four were dead, they told him, shot by
their captors for being ‘stubborn and unco-operative’. They had been
hastily buried before the brutish kidnappers moved on.‘Everyone we spoke to was full of fear,’
said Baba. ‘They didn’t want to come out of their homes. They didn’t
want to show us the graves. They just pointed up a track.’The tiny rural village, halfway between
Chibok and Damboa in the besieged state of Borno in Nigeria’s
north-east, had been helpless to stop the Boko Haram gang as it swept
through on trucks loaded with schoolgirls they had taken at gunpoint
before torching their school.Venturing further up the track, Baba and
his fellow vigilantes found the two girls. Baba, the youngest of the
group, stayed back as his friends took charge.‘They used my knife to cut
through the ropes,’ he said. ‘I heard the girls crying and telling the
others that they had been raped, then just left there. They had been
with the other girls from Chibok, all taken from the school in the
middle of the night by armed men in soldiers’ uniforms.‘We couldn’t do much for them. They
didn’t want to talk to any men. All we could do was to get them into a
vehicle and drive them to the security police at Damboa. They didn’t
talk, they just held on to each other and cried.’For Baba, a peasant farmer’s son who has
never been out of rural Borno, it was shocking to see young girls
defiled and brutalised by the notorious terrorists he knew so well.But his own life has been full of tragedy
and he told how he had ‘seen much worse’ than the horror of that day in
the forest clearing.A bright-eyed Muslim boy from the Kanuri
ethnic group, proud of a tribal facial scar and nicknamed ‘Small’ by
all who know him because of his short, slim frame, he described a happy
childhood with three brothers and two sisters in Kachalla Burari, a
collection of mudhouses not far from Chibok.Without electricity or running water, the
children spent their days helping on their father’s subsistence farm,
planting maize and beans and millet.Baba and his friends used home-made
catapults to shoot birds and in the rainy season fished in the river
with bent hooks. But by his tenth birthday, the scourge of the radical
Islamist Boko Haram was creeping up on everyone in Borno State.Baba and his siblings attended a local
madrassa, or religious school, where they learnt the Koran, but he had
no formal teaching and cannot read or write to this day.By 2009, Boko Haram were becoming active
in his area, peddling their message of hatred to Christians, but also
turning on Muslims they branded as informers. Nigeria’s chaotic military
was incapable of defending itself or its citizens.Baba’s village life came under siege.
There were attacks on the Christian population in the region, with bank
robberies funding the gang. Disaffected, unemployed youths from local
families were recruited and neighbours who once lived in peace now spied
on one another.‘The girls said they’d been raped and
left there’One night as he slept in his family’s
mudhouse in the village, the gunmen came door to door, looking for
informers. ‘I heard some noise, I woke up and saw men coming through the
door, shooting at my uncle who was in the bed beside mine,’ he said.
‘That was the end of my childhood, the end of everything. I saw his body
covered in blood, I backed away, and the men turned their guns on me.
They grabbed me roughly and took me outside to a pick-up truck.Baba, telling his story confidently and
lucidly, wants to skate over the details of his two hellish years in the
Boko Haram camp in Sambisa Forest. Today there are special forces
soldiers swarming over the vast nature reserve and circling overhead in
surveillance aircraft.For this slight boy, there was no such
worldwide interest as he scurried back and forth at the command of a
ruthless gang dug into woodland far from any help or rescue.He remembers many of them lived with
women who had come voluntarily into the camp. He never saw any girls
abducted. This latest phenomenon is unknown to him. ‘There were many
abducted boys, but no girls,’ he said. ‘We were all scared to death and
had to do whatever we were told – fetch water, fetch firewood, clean the
weapons.‘We couldn’t make friends – you didn’t
know who to trust. I was made to sleep next to the Boko Haram elders,
the senior preachers. I had no special boss in the camp, I was ordered
around by everybody’.The men prayed five times a day yet would leap on their motorbikes and trucks to carry out killing sprees.‘I knew they had started out as holy men but now I saw them as criminals, loaded with weapons and ammunition,’ he said.As he got older, he was taught how to use an AK-47, how to strip it down and clean it, and reassemble it.He could never understand what drove the
men. They did not use alcohol or hard drugs, though he sometimes saw
them smoking marijuana. They were monsters and he felt convinced they
were mad.‘They were wild, even when they prayed so
loudly in groups together, making us join in. They were insane,
unpredictable, and always planning their next attack. I never wanted to
be one of them.‘They slept rough every night, just
taking shelter under trees in the rainy season,’ he said. ‘We all wore
the same afaraja [the Nigerian long shift and trousers] day and night.
We washed them when we could. We slept on mats made of palm leaves, out
in the open with the trucks all parked nearby, ready for a hasty move if
necessary.’He said the fear, and the endless
boredom, were his worst enemies. ‘They made us work hard so it was easy
to sleep. I don’t remember crying through homesickness. I think the
night when my uncle was killed in front of me did something to my
feelings forever. It seems mindless, but I adapted to my life out
there.’Then came the day when he was given a
‘special’ but sickening task. One of the commanders told him he was
going on a journey and would be tested for his loyalty to the group.Support: Cross party MP’s gather outside the
Houses of Parliament for a photo call to show their support for the
#bringbackourgirls campaign‘He brought two of his senior men to
stand beside me. He said I would be going with them to my family’s home
and I would have to shoot and kill my father.’ Baba had no time to plan.
He was sandwiched between the two fanatics as they set off on a
motorbike for his village home.‘I pretended I was willing to do the job.
I took the ammunition belt I was handed and clung on as we drove
through the rough bush. When we were less than a mile from a nearby
village, I threw the ammunition belt to the ground and pretended it had
slid out of my hands.‘They stopped to let me
pick it up. Instead, I ran as fast as I could through the undergrowth. I
didn’t care about thorns or snakes or anything. They shot at me and I
could hear the bullets flying past and hitting the trees, but I was not
going to stop for anything. I made it to the village and some kind
people let me hide there.‘The shooting would have been heard by local vigilante groups. I think that is why I wasn’t followed by the men on the bike.’The next day Baba went home. He saw his grieving parents and siblings for the first time in two years.‘But I couldn’t stay,’ he said. ‘I was bringing danger to their door and we all knew it.’Confirmation of that came when Baba soon
heard that vengeful Boko Haram chiefs had put a bounty on his head for
his defiance of the equivalent of £12,000 – a fortune in the local
economy.‘I took a bus to Damboa, to report to the
youth vigilante group,’ he said. ‘I wanted to work with them and I knew
I was doing the right thing.’His family, terrified, abandoned their
home soon afterwards and today live in a remote part of Borno, rarely
seeing their eldest son. He lives with a cousin who is also under a Boko
Haram death threat.He became a valuable volunteer with the
vigilantes. He helps man checkpoints where Baba points out members of
Boko Haram to the rest of the team.But he was soon exposed to brutality of a
different kind – this time from the government side. He helped to get
one of his captors, a man he only knew as Alaji, arrested and handed to
the soldiers.‘It felt good at first, but then they shot him dead right in front of me,’ he said.Now joining the patrols armed with a
shotgun and machete, Baba has been able to give valuable intelligence to
the Nigerian authorities about Boko Haram’s way of life in their camps.
‘By now I have seen
this violence many times. It never gets better. It will always be an
even worse sight than finding those poor schoolgirls in the forest,’ he
says.