how our girls are suffering: 15 year old Baba
Goni, a young lad from Borno was abducted and
held hostage by the Boko Haram sect at the
Sambisa forest for two years before he escaped
from their captivity.
While he was escaping, he came across two
teenage girls believed to be among the over 200
girls abducted by the dreaded sect from a
boarding school in Chibok, Borno State, more
than a month ago.
Giving graphic details of what happened to
them, Goni said the girls had been beaten,
rapéd and left to die tied to a tree with their
school uniform ripped...
In this exclusive from DailyMail, Baba recounts
his ordeal with Boko Haram and narrates how he
and his team valiantly rescued two girls left for
dead in the forest.
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.
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.
'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.
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN
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