Bring back our girls: International hashtag against Boko Haram and kidnapping of Nigerian girls

Ahmed Adel

Nigeria has witnessed a sharp increase in the number of mass kidnappings of girls recently at the hands of Boko Haram, which has prompted the population of the West African country to expose this through social media so that the whole world knows about the terrorist group’s most dangerous crimes in the vicinity of Lake Chad.

Russell Simmons tweet

In the same context, the magazine Foreign Policy reported on Thursday May 13 that the US-led war on terror, which cost Washington a trillion dollars, is incapable of defeating Boko Haram.

The story began in April 2014 when hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons was on a yacht in the Caribbean when he tweeted about 276 girls who had been kidnapped by Boko Haram from a high school in Chibock, northeastern Nigeria.

Social media campaigns

A new book by Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw, who work as reporters for the Wall Street Journal, underscores the dangers of social media campaigns and the limits of military intervention in saving the Chipok children in Nigeria.

It pointed out that Simmons’ tweet was the beginning of a massive campaign on social media in which politicians and celebrities around the world participated, and its hashtag was “BringBackOurGirls”.

The authors of the book explain that the failure of this global intervention led to a number of fatal miscalculations.

Moreover, the crackdown on social media has kept girls in captivity longer, and the lack of trust between the US and Nigerian governments has delayed action on sharing vital information.

For example, the authors found that a Nigerian military airstrike, with the help of US drones, mistakenly bombed some of the kidnapped girls, killing at least 10, and this was not reported to senior officials in Washington, although Boko Haram published a video of the dead online.

Story’s popularity

According to the report, the popularity of the girls ’story made it difficult for them to escape, adding that sympathizers of Boko Haram immediately returned the fleeing girls to their captors, largely due to their sense of loyalty towards the terrorists, who provided basic needs to the villagers when the government authorities have historically failed to do so.

By the time Nigerian soldiers rushed into the vast Sambisa forest in northeastern Nigeria, the Chibok girls were already openly living in the towns that Boko Haram controlled.

By 2017, Washington found itself bound by a war against terrorism that it had not won in the region, and the rebellions led by Boko Haram escalated, which led to horrific scenes of churches and mosques being bombed and of children who were used as suicide bombers against their communities, which was covered by global media.

Foreign mistakes

The report pointed out that the most prominent mistakes of foreign governments in trying to eliminate Boko Haram and bring schoolgirls back home was the hashtag launched by then-First Lady Michelle Obama and the hollow explanations that followed about extremism and victims in Africa.

According to the book’s authors, many of those who participated in the campaign on social media knew that 800 American soldiers were deployed to Niger and another 300 in Cameroon to train local security personnel, provide surveillance, and gather intelligence in the region. But many of them were not aware that Boko Haram had in fact been left unabated by the Nigerian government since 2009.

“High unemployment rates among the youth, poverty and harsh police repression have led to men entering Nigeria’s bleak prisons, and some have been tortured and ill-treated by judicial officials, police and prisons,” the book stated.

It added that by the time the Obama administration began sending troops to countries around Nigeria in 2014 to gather intelligence, Boko Haram was already in control of important infrastructure networks.

Parkinson and Hinshaw shed light on how Washington’s failed efforts, along with widespread kidnappings, were actually encouraging Boko Haram.

While Nigerians were protesting in the streets for the government to do something about the missing girls, Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau posted videos threatening to marry off girls, which sparked a flare of social media.

While the world was tweeting about the Chibok girls, Boko Haram seized six other villages without any coverage outside the Nigerian press, the book noted.

In fact, the authors argue, the mainstream media provided Boko Haram with the materials needed to build its terrorist brand.

With videos about the group of kidnapped girls broadcast and talk about them on TV stations around the world, Boko Haram has become a household name, and it was more useful for the organization to keep girls in captivity.

Months before the kidnapping of the Chibok girls, the French government paid just over €3 million to free a family of seven tourists kidnapped by Boko Haram.

Because of the popularity of the Chibok girls, the militants wanted more. The fame of these girls was tempting them to ask for more, while 103 girls were freed in two stages in September 2016 and May 2017.

The book indicated that this was by bartering the family for €3 million in ransom, according to unnamed ministers, even if the official line of the government was that it did not pay anything.

However, the official line from the Nigerian government is that no ransom was ever paid. Later, four girls escaped alone, and 57 girls escaped within hours of the kidnapping.

But there are still 112 in captivity to this day. and the book’s authors estimate that at least 40 of them died, two of them due to childbirth as a result of a forced marriage.

According to the book’s authors, Boko Haram would not have kept these victims if social media had not elevated them to the level of expensive bartering, and Nigerian officials would not have committed to such resources without the public pressure created by the hashtag.

The social media activity was well intentioned, but it led to some unintended consequences, the book concluded.