It began with efforts to erase all sense of identity. Minutes after Boko Haram fighters stormed into Michika, a speck of a town in north-eastern Nigeria, they singled out all the teen-aged girls and herded them onto trucks. The terrified prisoners were told their names would be changed. Those who protested had their throats slit.
Silently repeating her name to herself, 17-year-old Yohana understood what the turbaned men intended for her and six others as they rattled through the night to a Boko Haram hideout last December: “They wanted us to stop thinking.”
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The militants hoped it wouldn’t be long before their captives, adrift from home and dependent on the gunmen for survival, could be unleashed as human bombs back into their unsuspecting hometowns. The grooming started immediately. The men from Boko Haram intended to grind down their captives psychologically, but the girls also had to be convinced the gunmen had only their interests at heart. “If anyone started crying, they just told us, ‘Don’t cry. What are you crying about? Anything that you like — anything — just talk to Boko Haram,’” Yohana told BuzzFeed News during several months of interviews culminating in a refugee camp in Yola this month. “They wanted us to like them.”
It’s a pattern the militant Islamist sect has repeated with hundreds of people it has captured, most of them impoverished teenagers, forcing them to become fighters, decoys, or suicide bombers in crowded markets and bus parks. That tactic appears be taking another turn, this time aimed at showing that even those who’ve escaped the group can never be beyond its reach: Refugee camps are the latest targets.
This week, two young female suicide bombers hit the sprawling Dikwa refugee camp that’s home to some 50,000 people, killing 58 of them. It followed another attack just 10 days earlier in which 80 refugees died, while, last September, explosives were set off at yet another camp. Fleeing across borders is no guarantee of safety either. In October, a village turned refugee camp in neighboring Chad was struck by five bombers in a single day, in what officials said was retaliation for providing safe haven.
Rescue workers transport a victim of a suicide bomb attack in Dikwa refugee camp in north-east Nigeria
For the more than 2. 5 million people who have been driven from their homes since 2013, it raises a specter they had hoped was behind them. The people in those refugee camps had already escaped Boko Haram’s murderous campaign, which has seen schoolchildren burned alive, villages razed, and thousands abducted.
Among them are Yohana and Asabe, her best friend at an overcrowded refugee camp in the northeastern Adamawa state. Amid the thousands of strangers they now live alongside, the two girls forged a bond after finding they were both orphaned by the militants who had made similar attempts to recruit them during captivity. Both girls requested that their surnames not be used, out of fear for their safety.
Nineteen years old and constantly startled by loud sounds, Asabe hates falling asleep; when she does, she wakes up screaming. So Yohana, who has a quick smile for everyone, sometimes sits sleepily beside her, and the two braid each other’s hair by the light of their phones.
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