Boko Haram (17 page)

The extremists were now threatening to take their fight directly into the heart of the Nigerian state. The response from the authorities was, however, little more than the same pattern that would become so familiar and frustrating: condemnation, empty promises about bringing those responsible to justice and then little else. In the days after the attack, Jonathan issued a statement similar to other government responses. The president said, ‘the explosion was an act of terror, which had become a global trend, but assured that the administration was taking steps to ensure the safety of all Nigerians, adding that no incident should be overlooked, no matter the circumstances or location of its occurrence.'
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Two months later, a suicide bomber would seek to drive into police headquarters in Maiduguri in the north-east during screening of potential new recruits, with about 1,500 on site at the time. He would be stopped, police shooting him dead before he set off his explosives and as he tried to drive into the complex.
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The attack on the UN building in Abuja would occur less than two weeks later, instantly transforming the image of Boko Haram, making it a dangerous new threat with unclear aims. It showed how far the extremists had advanced their planning and bomb-making abilities. A source who has seen the security video from the day of the attack said it seemed that advance surveillance had been done on the location by the attackers since the bomber knew to drive his car through the exit gate, which was less closely guarded than the entrance side. An investigation that included FBI agents from the United States also found that the bomb had been manufactured as a ‘shaped charge', intensifying the force of the blast, and included 125 kilograms of explosives, according to Reuters news agency,
which saw a copy of the classified report. It was made with both TATP and PETN, common for both military and commercial purposes, and regularly used by extremists worldwide to carry out attacks.
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Nigeria's intelligence service said the mastermind of the attack was a man named Mamman Nur, who was by some accounts Boko Haram's third-in-command at the time of the 2009 uprising, behind Yusuf and Shekau. His nationality has been debated, with some claiming he was from Chad or perhaps born in Maiduguri to Chadian parents, while others said he was Cameroonian. He was believed to be among the Boko Haram figures who formed links with AQIM and Al-Shebab, having recently returned from Somalia before the UN attack.
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Nigerian authorities said they received intelligence six days before the bombing that ‘Boko Haram elements were on a mission to attack unspecified targets in Abuja' and arrested two suspects on 21 August named Babagana Ismail Kwaljima and Babagana Mali. They did not say, however, why they were unable to stop the attack.
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Vinod Alkari, the UNICEF official caught up in the bombing who struggled to help rescue others who were trapped, questioned why more was not done to secure the building ahead of time given the vague warnings. Alkari said that, during UN security meetings he attended, intelligence from the Nigerian government indicating attacks may be in the works against unspecified high-profile targets was discussed. He was not aware of any specific changes put in place on the ground to further guard against such a possibility. UN officials in Abuja did not respond to my requests to discuss the attack, and a spokeswoman at the secretary-general's office in New York declined to comment on security matters.

Boko Haram would claim credit for the attack. In the alleged bomber's ‘martyr' video, a recorded message, purported to be Shekau's voice, played over an image of him, bearded and wearing a red-and-white keffiyeh and white robe. An AK-47 leaned against
the wall behind him, tape wrapped around its magazine. He said that one of the group's main goals was establishing true sharia law, and that his followers were prepared to die for it.

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When a helicopter landed in Maiduguri in September 2011 carrying former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, there would be a fleeting moment of hope. With the UN building blown up, hundreds killed across northern and central Nigeria, and the violence showing no signs of abating, it became obvious to many that some form of negotiation would be needed as part of any serious bid to end the insurgency. Obasanjo had flown to Maiduguri for that reason, and after meeting other organisers at the air force base in the city reeling from months of bombings and shoot-outs, he drove with them to the ruins of the mosque where Mohammed Yusuf once preached. A meeting had been arranged and it was to include an audience of about 60 people, a mat spread out under a tree at the site of the destroyed mosque for this purpose. According to an organiser of the meeting, northern-based rights activist Shehu Sani, those in attendance included relatives of the late Boko Haram leader and those identified as insurgents. The main speaker apart from Obasanjo would be Babakura Fugu, Yusuf's brother-in-law and the son of Baba Fugu Mohammed, the elderly man killed by security forces at the conclusion of the 2009 uprising. Despite a court ruling awarding Mohammed's family some $600,000 in damages over his death, the government still at that point had not paid.

‘We sat down and had a frank talk', Sani told me one afternoon a couple years later at a cafe in the Hilton hotel in Abuja, where he had gone for meetings. ‘President Obasanjo told them that he is here on a peace mission [...] and he is passionate about peace and he wants an end to this violence, and he wants to hear their grievances. And now it was then that they came out with a list of their – the “crime”, in quotes, that was committed against them by the state.'

They showed him pictures of supposed Boko Haram members they said had been killed by the security agencies during the crackdown in 2009 as well as documents related to their case against the government.

‘They didn't ask for court money, but they showed how even a secular order from a secular court could not even be obeyed by even the president himself, by the government', Sani said. Other points they raised included ‘the need to release some members of the Boko Haram group and also to stop the raiding of houses and arresting of people, and then to look at the possibility of rebuilding the mosque, schools and homes that were [...] demolished by security agencies, and to end the harassment of their wives and children'.

The meeting lasted around four hours, according to Sani. He said he sought to have Obasanjo act as mediator for a few specific reasons, including the fact that he was a Christian from the south, making him less vulnerable to accusations of ‘sponsoring' the violence, as some northern politicians had been accused of doing. Sani said he also chose him because Obasanjo remained highly influential in Nigerian politics and could speak directly with the president. On top of that, Obasanjo and Sani knew each other, having both been held in the same prison under the regime of Sani Abacha in the 1990s.

Obasanjo, whose commanding presence stands in sharp contrast to Jonathan, accepted the documents and photos presented to him and told them he would speak with the president. Others in the audience took turns speaking, including some who ‘said clearly that they will not stop fighting until justice is done to them', Sani said. The ex-president listened, but also told them the violence had been counterproductive.

‘He was saying they should stop killings, that it is destroying the image of Nigeria – it is destroying democracy – and that he has listened to their grievances and he will do something about it', Sani said. ‘He said it is demonising the north as a region, it's
demonising the country, it's giving us a bad name, and they should stop all these killings.'

There were doubts then, and there continue to be, over whether those Obasanjo met with had any real influence over the Boko Haram that had re-emerged after Yusuf's death. Babakura Fugu was a relative of Yusuf's, but it was not clear by any means whether he still had any contact with the group. In any case, Sani said he believed those at the meeting, based on their own assurances, could have exerted influence over Boko Haram as well as arranged contact with Abubakar Shekau.

After the meeting, Obasanjo and Sani travelled back to Abuja. According to Sani, Obasanjo met personally with his one-time protégé, President Jonathan, and presented him with the documents while describing the meeting. After that, it seems the government did nothing, and Sani said Obasanjo made no secret of his anger over his efforts having gone to waste.

‘What he told me is that he is not happy with the way the president has not taken seriously what he has done', said Sani, relaying what he says Obasanjo told him. ‘From my own thinking, the security chiefs at that time were those who were putting pressure on the president not to agree to the documents which president Obasanjo brought that may help in ending the insurgency.'

It may not have mattered anyway. Two days later, Babakura Fugu was shot dead in Maiduguri. There were suspicions over whether a faction of the insurgents opposed to negotiations was responsible, while others questioned whether the security forces may have been behind it. A man believed at the time to be a spokesman for Boko Haram's main faction denied they were responsible, while the military and police also said they had nothing to do with it.

Another short-lived attempt at negotiations would occur several months later in March 2012, this time with an Islamic cleric acting as mediator. When word leaked to journalists that talks were moving ahead, the mediator, Ibrahim Datti Ahmad, quit, issuing a statement questioning the government's sincerity.
Some had accused those within the government who were opposed to negotiations of leaking the story to sabotage the talks.

‘To our shock and dismay, no sooner had we started this dialogue, Nigerian newspapers came out with a lot of the details of the meeting held', Ahmad said in his statement. ‘This development has embarrassed us very much and has created strong doubts in our minds about the sincerity of the government's side in our discussion as the discussion is supposed to be very confidential to achieve any success. In view of this unfortunate and unhelpful development, we have no option but to withdraw from these early discussions. We sincerely regret that an opportunity to negotiate and terminate this cycle of violence is being missed.'

Asked why members of the security forces and government would want to sabotage a legitimate attempt at ending the insurgency, Sani, the organiser of Obasanjo's visit, repeated what many others have also said. He named pride among members of the security forces who continue to believe the insurgency can be defeated militarily, but also a factor that comes into play far too often in Nigeria: money. The national security budget would rise to some $6 billion by 2013, or about 20 per cent of the country's total spending, providing many opportunities for corruption. No one could ever prove whether anyone would go so far as to prefer violence over peace because of the financial benefits, but the way in which that perception spread was telling in itself of how little trust Nigerians placed in those who were supposed to be protecting them.

The president, apparently attempting to comfort the nation, would end up doing something else entirely. It was January 2012, at the end of a Christmas season that had been so bloody it had led some to again question whether Nigeria was careening toward a second civil war. Boko Haram insurgents had changed tactics and targeted churches in an onslaught of bombings on Christmas Day. In the worst of the attacks, a suicide bomber drove up outside a Catholic church in Madalla, near the capital Abuja, as Christmas morning mass was ending and set off his explosives near the entrance. The force of the blast ripped through the crowd, a combination of churchgoers making their way outside, motorcycle taxi drivers and passersby, killing 44 people. Some who were badly injured ran to the priest for a final blessing. ‘It was really terrible', Father Christopher Barde told my AFP colleague Ola Awoniyi. ‘People ran towards me, [saying] “Father anoint me.”'
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After at first issuing statements with the usual condemnations and promises to track down the masterminds, President Jonathan made two speeches on New Year's Eve that would be his most forceful yet related to the insurgency. The first came as he visited the church in Madalla where the bomb attack had occurred. While there, he said Boko Haram ‘started as a harmless group [...] They
have now grown cancerous. And Nigeria, being the body, they want to kill it. But nobody will allow them to do that.'
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On the heels of that visit, Jonathan would later in the day give a nationally televised address to announce he was declaring a state of emergency in areas hit particularly hard by the violence. ‘While the search for lasting solutions is ongoing, it has become imperative to take some decisive measures necessary to restore normalcy in the country especially within the affected communities', he said.
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He provided few details on what exactly the declaration would mean on the ground, and as the days wore on, it seemed that little had actually changed. However, while the announcement may have been light on substance, it provided some relief in the country, since the government seemed to finally acknowledge the dangerous situation it was facing.

That relief would give way to more confusion only a few days later. On 8 January, Jonathan would give a speech that would have been extremely alarming had it not been so baffling. It occurred on Armed Forces Remembrance Day at the National Christian Centre, a cathedral-like structure in the capital Abuja, near the national mosque. It generated little interest beforehand, seeming to be one of the many functions and events a president shows up for, says a few words and departs. Jonathan seemed to speak off-the-cuff, ranging from the recent attacks on churches to corruption, but it was his comments about Boko Haram that were so startling. He suggested that the group had infiltrated the government and security forces, but in such vague terms no one knew what to make of it. ‘The situation we have in our hands is even worse than the civil war that we fought', Jonathan said. The speech continued:

The comments were so stunning that when they were sent to me by a journalist who occasionally worked for us in Abuja, I immediately questioned whether they were accurate, even though I knew him to be a solid reporter. I called him to stress the importance of the story and the need to quote the president with absolute precision, telling him that the comments were surely going to cause a stir. He assured me that it would withstand the scrutiny and told me that he had a recording of the remarks which he had double-checked. Satisfied with his assurances, I began trying to write a story that would shed some light on what the president had said. I was not particularly successful. I was flummoxed, and so were my editors in Paris, who were asking me to interpret these remarks against some coherent context. Was he saying the insurgency was political? Did he mean it was a conspiracy by his enemies? Was he simply trying to make exaggerated excuses for why his government had been unable to stop the violence? What could possibly be made of such pronouncements? Above all, and perhaps most frustratingly, they posed a simple question: if Boko Haram members were in the security forces, judiciary and government and the president was aware of it, why had they not been arrested? That question would never be answered, and Jonathan would give no further
explanation. Whatever he meant, an attack less than two weeks later would show that Jonathan was at least right to be concerned about the threat Boko Haram now posed.

It seemed clear from the start that the attack on 20 January was going to be like no other Boko Haram violence before it. It occurred in Kano, the largest city in northern Nigeria, an important commercial centre dating back to the Middle Ages and where Frederick Lugard's men had begun their final conquest of the region for the British. The bomb blasts began to tear through the Friday afternoon bustle and simply kept exploding, one after another, so many that residents lost count. Gunfire rang out and residents in the city of about 3 million people rushed to take cover. Wellington Asiayei, the police officer shot and paralysed at his barracks whom I met in the hospital, was the victim of one of the cruellest individual assaults, the trigger pulled by a man dressed as one of his colleagues, but his story was one of many.

The assault may have been set in motion the month before, in December 2011, when a message purported to be from Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau was addressed to the Kano state government. It claimed that Boko Haram members had been arrested over the previous five months following allegations that they were armed robbers. ‘We are therefore compelled to write this letter to inform Kano residents of this development so that when we launch attacks in the city as we have been doing in Maiduguri, they should not blame us', it said.

Kano Governor Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso would later acknowledge having seen the ‘open letter', but sought to distance himself from any arrests, saying that the state had no policing powers, with the police force a federal agency.
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The police commissioner in Kano state at the time, Ibrahim Idris, would say later that a number of people had been arrested ahead of the January attacks, but he declined to provide any further details, calling it ‘sensitive'.
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Kano up to that point had mostly escaped the kind of serious attacks that had so badly hit Maiduguri and other cities.

The first blast would occur at around five in the afternoon at a regional police administrative office, where a suicide bomber sought to crash into the building. His vehicle exploded outside, ripping off a chunk of the roof. A police corporal who was stationed at the building at the time tried to explain to me what had happened from his hospital bed before trailing off, unable to speak. Corporal Muazzam Aminu, a 37-year-old father of one, his wife seated next to him, spoke briefly in clipped phrases, saying he saw a motorcycle enter the compound first. There was shooting, then an explosion. He was unable to continue any further. According to police, three suicide bombers drove a car on to the grounds of that building, called a zonal headquarters, and detonated a bomb. As security forces arrived to assess the damage, it began to become clear that they were facing an assault far larger than that attack.

‘We rushed there, and based on the assessment we made we discovered that it was a sort of a suicide bomber that drove into that compound', Idris, the police commissioner, told me and a group of other journalists at Kano police headquarters in the days after the attacks. ‘It was there then that we heard of another two attacks on two of our police stations.'

Even that was an underestimate. In fact, dozens, possibly hundreds, of attackers were swarming through the streets in an incredibly coordinated set of assaults. Many were on motorcycles, while others drove cars loaded with explosives. Their weapons included AK-47 rifles, drink cans transformed into tiny bombs, larger powdered-milk tins also designed to explode and powerful IEDs built with 350-kilogram drums. They would run amok, hitting an immigration office, a nearby police station where detainees were set free, a girls' secondary school, Kano police headquarters and several others. Part of their strategy included throwing the drink-can bombs at the buildings they were targeting, then opening fire on those who ran away.

‘That's what started the fire, and the whole place went up in flames', Idris said of the drink-can bombs. ‘And as people are
running helter-skelter, they now come – you know, these terrorists attack now with weapons, and they're just killing'.

Some wore uniforms resembling those of police or military divisions, and they would approach officers and civilians on the streets and gun them down.

‘Some of our police officers who saw them on the streets, they thought they are their colleagues, and that's how they now identified them to be police officers, and that's how they shot – they just shot them in cold blood', said Idris. ‘And it's true, we have some of the incidents like that in some locations in the city where [...] they were wearing uniforms resembling that of the mobile police and the military. They used that to deceive the members of the public, and in the process shot some of these civilians and some of our police officers. In fact, like I said, most of the casualties of the police are not killed at the police stations, but they are killed on the street where they saw them.'

At state police headquarters, a bomber who sought to enter crashed into one of the drums used as a security measure outside the gate and his explosives went off, killing at least one policeman on guard and four civilians at shops along the road. Several of the market stalls that line the street outside the headquarters were reduced to piles of splinters. While the bomber was not able to make it past the gates, others penetrated inside and roamed freely, which is what led to Assistant Superintendent Asiayei being shot and paralysed as he sought to lock the door to his room in the barracks before fleeing.

One 29-year-old man who was shot in the leg while on his way home from his job at a tannery told me the four friends who were with him at the time were all killed. He said they had been driving near the Palm Centre police station, one of those targeted by the attackers, and after hearing a bomb explode, everyone began to run.

‘I'm the only one who survived', Monday Joseph said from his hospital bed. ‘We heard a bomb, but what I felt in my body was a
gun [...] Once I'm shot, I'm just down flat.' He said a friend arrived about 30 minutes later and brought him to the hospital.

The morgue at the city's largest hospital, Murtala Mohammed Specialist Hospital, filled with bodies piled on top of one another. My colleague Aminu Abubakar was allowed inside and counted at least 80 before stopping.
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At the smaller Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, the morgue would also fill to capacity. Dr Aminu Zakari Mohammed, chief medical director at Aminu Kano, told me that he went to notify the emergency room when he heard about the first attack.

‘Even before I finished, already I heard another explosion [...] then a second and a third one', Mohammed said. ‘I felt this was something out of the ordinary. I kept hearing the explosions.' He and his staff worked until 2 a.m. to treat the victims being brought in. He said one family arrived later in the night after their house collapsed from the force of the blasts.

There were at least five suicide bombers, according to police. The authorities put the death toll at 185, but many people suspected it was higher. Bodies were scattered on roads the next morning, particularly near state police headquarters. Police said they discovered 10 cars with unexploded IEDs along with about 300 drink cans, eight powdered milk tins and eight 350-kilogram drums – all loaded with explosives. Some of my colleagues and I were allowed to see what the police had seized and taken back to headquarters, and the cans and various bomb-making materials were spread out across the floor of a storage room. There was even at least one meant to be a time bomb wired to a conventional wall clock, the kind you might see in a kitchen.

A mobile-phone seller near the immigration office that was attacked, 35-year-old Abdulrazak Murtala, told me, ‘we just heard a bomb blast and people started running. Some people are just shooting, shooting guns [...] Some are on bikes, some are inside cars.' He was unsure what to make of the people who carried out the attack. ‘We don't even know what they want', he said. ‘I don't
think these people are fighting for religion. I just think they are fighting for their own selfish interest.'

Abubakar Shekau would deliver a message posted on YouTube a week later, claiming responsibility for the violence and threatening further attacks. He said security forces were to blame, alleging Boko Haram members had been arrested and tortured, while women and children had also been detained. Perhaps sensing that the group had taken the violence too far, he also falsely claimed that civilians had not been targeted.

‘We attacked the security formations because our members were arrested and tortured', Shekau said in the audio message played over a picture of him.