15-year-old Baba Goni was part of a vigilante group who saved two of the
abducted Chibok girls,raped,beaten and left to die in the bush ..Baba
who was once abducted and lived with Boko Haram for 2 years told his
story as written by Babara Jones of Mailonline
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.
‘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.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. 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.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‘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.
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.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.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,’
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,‘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.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.
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.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.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,’
