Saratu Dauda had been kidnapped. It was 2014, she was 16 years old and she was in a truck full of her classmates heading into the bush in northeastern Nigeria, a member of the terrorist group Boko Haram at the wheel. The girls’ boarding school in Chibok, kilometers behind them, had gone up in flames.
Then he noticed some girls jumping out of the back of the truck, he said, some alone, some in pairs, holding hands. They ran and hid in the bush as the truck drove by.
But before Ms Dauda could jump, she said, a girl raised the alarm, shouting that others were “falling and running”. Their captors stopped them, secured the truck and continued on to what, for Ms. Dauda, would be a life-changing nine years of captivity.
“If he hadn’t shouted that, we would have all escaped,” Ms Dauda said in a series of interviews last week in the city of Maiduguri, the birthplace of Boko Haram’s violent insurgency.
Abducted from their dormitory exactly 10 years ago, the 276 captives known as the Chibok Girls have been catapulted to fame by Michelle Obama, by churches that have taken up the cause of the mostly Christian students and by activists using the slogan “Bring Back Our Girls.”
“These girls’ only crime was going to school,” said Allen Manasseh, a Chibok youth leader who has spent years pushing for their release.
Their lives have taken very different turns after the kidnapping. Some escaped almost immediately. 103 were released a few years later after negotiations. A dozen or so now live abroad, including in the United States. About 82 are still missing, possibly killed or still being held hostage.
Chibok was Nigeria’s first mass school kidnapping — but far from the last. Today, kidnapping—including large groups of children—has become a business across the West African country, with ransom payments as the primary motivation.
“The tragedy of Chibok plays itself out again and again every week,” said Pat Griffiths, spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Maiduguri.
The Chibok Girls are just the most prominent victims of a 15-year conflict with Islamist militants that, despite hundreds of thousands of people killed and millions uprooted, has been largely forgotten amid other wars.
More than 23,000 people in northeastern Nigeria have been listed as missing by the Red Cross — globally, the second highest number of cases after Iraq. But that’s a huge understatement, Mr Griffiths said.
Before she was kidnapped, Ms. Dauda said, she was a happy teenager in a large, close-knit Christian family. She loved playing with dolls and dreamed of becoming a fashion designer. She was her father’s pet and adored her mother.
For months after her capture, Ms Dauda said, the girls slept outside in the Sabisa forest, Boko Haram’s hideout, listened to a steady stream of Islamic preachers and fought over limited water supplies. When two girls tried to escape, she said, they were whipped in front of the others.
Then, he said, they were given a choice: Get married or become slaves who could be called upon for housework or sex.
Ms Dauda chose marriage, converted to Islam and changed her first name to Aisha. She was introduced to a man in his 20s whose job it was to shoot videos of Boko Haram battles. Hours after they met, they were married.
He wasn’t cruel to her, he said, but after a few months, he came home one day to find her playing with a doll he had made out of clay and made a dress for her.
“Do you play with idols? Do you want to make trouble for me?’ she remembered him saying. He got angry and left their home, staying with another girl from Chibok. When he realized she wasn’t coming back, he said, he broke up with her.
She soon married another Boko Haram fighter, Mohammed Musa, a welder who made weapons, and in time they had three children. Although she was still held hostage by murderous Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau and his henchmen, she said they were given everything they needed, surrounded by people “who cared about each other like family” and that she was happy.
The Chibok girls were treated much better than other kidnap victims, other escapees said.
Her husband said in an interview last week that Ms Dauda refused to join the group of Chibok Girls who were released in 2017 after government negotiations.
“There were many of them who refused to be taken home simply because they were afraid that their family would force them to leave Islam,” Mr. Musa said, or that they “might be stigmatized.”
But as the years passed, Mrs. Dauda kept track of the friends from Chibok who died. Sixteen in airstrikes and bombings. Two in labor. One as a suicide bomber, forced by Boko Haram. One from illness and one from snakebite. She noticed that it was mostly women and children who were dying in the airstrikes and wondered when it would be her turn.
And life became more difficult. When Boko Haram’s leader died and its powerful offshoot, Islamic State’s West Africa Province, took over the Sambisa Forest, Ms Dauda and her husband found themselves on the wrong side, she said, and under suspicion. They were worried that they would become slaves. Late at night, in whispers, they talked about running away. But Mrs. Dauda wanted to act faster than her husband and decided to go ahead. He refused to let her take the children, saying he would follow with them later.
One night at 3 in the morning she prepared a small bundle of food, looked into the faces of her sleeping daughters and said a short prayer for their protection. He left their house. She waited under a tree, checking that no one had seen her. Then she walked for days through the bush, going from village to village, telling people that she was going to visit friends, and always left at morning prayer, when the men were at the mosque and did not see her go.
She met other women who escaped on the road and last May they surrendered together to the army. He had heard on the radio that the Chibok Girls had become a cause celebre, and he finally experienced it.
“Is this a Chibok girl?” she remembered a soldier she admired when he learned her identity. “We thank God.”
It had been six years since the last negotiated release and many families had given up hope. Mr Manasseh said he had grown desperate over the years as three governments failed to bring all the girls home and mostly stopped talking to the families.
“Silence,” he said. “It’s a huge government failure.”
Since Chibok, Nigerian schools have become a hunting ground for kidnappers of all kinds. In just one of many such cases, last month dozens — or possibly hundreds — of children were kidnapped in Kaduna state, hundreds of miles from territory controlled by Boko Haram and the Islamic State. A few days earlier, hundreds of women and children were abducted in the northeast while foraging for firewood.
After the handover, Ms Dauda was transferred to Maiduguri and enrolled in the government’s rehabilitation programme, for counseling and de-radicalisation. A few months later, she was informed that her husband had escaped with their three daughters and they were reunited.
She said she had dreamed of seeing her parents again, holding them in their arms, feeling their warmth. One day, she was allowed out of the government facility with her children to visit them in their village, Balala.
She hugged her father and mother.
“She was crying, and I was crying,” said Mrs Dauda.
Her father offered her and her husband a place to stay if they would become Christians, she said. But she refused, saying she had freely become a Muslim and wanted to stay, even if many people believed she and other escapees were victims of Boko Haram indoctrination.
“I wasn’t brainwashed,” he said. “I was convinced by what they explained to me.”
Two of her daughters were named after her friends from Chibok. Zannira, 7, was named after a girl who ran away. Five-year-old Sa’adatu was named after another captive.
Recently, she said, her husband gave their girls a doll.
