The-moment-I-rescued-two-girls-Boko- Haram.

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 Molested 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 Molested, 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.
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