Kidnapped Nigerian schoolboys plead for help on video

“Please sir, you must send back all the soldiers and armies and the fighter jets,” says a boy, visibly terrified, apparently referring to the rescue of the Nigerian army. “You have to close all kinds of schools except Islamiyah,” he says, referring to Islamic schools. “Please, sir,” the boy says again, his voice cracking with emotion, before a chorus of children’s voices echoes his plea.

The video could not be independently verified, but two Boko Haram specialists said it carried the group’s black and white flag branding alongside a short audio clip from leader Abubakar Shekau to verify its authenticity.

The group, which has been at war with the Nigerian state since 2009, first claimed on Tuesday that they had seized students from the Kankara Government Science Secondary School, a boys’ boarding school in Katsina, northwestern Nigeria, to punish them for ‘un-Islamic practices. Shekau – the most wanted man in Africa, with a $ 7 million bounty on his head – has repeatedly warned the Nigerian government to shut down all secular schools, which Boko Haram says were spreading ungodly ideas. Analysts said the video was in part appeared to be published to refute skepticism that the Shekau fighters could launch a massive kidnapping operation in northwestern Nigeria, hundreds of miles from their strongholds in the northeast.

The Nigerian government did not immediately respond. President Muhammadu Buhari – himself a resident of the northwestern state of Katsina, where Kankara is located – has not commented as of Saturday. The video was released on his 78th birthday.

Local officials raised their estimate of the number of missing students to between 330 and 400, a figure that analysts say could mark one of the largest mass kidnappings of schoolchildren in history. Nigerian surveillance planes and US drones have been sent over the dense Rugu Forest, where survivors say the kidnappers forced them to march.

Many of the details surrounding the kidnapping, in a remote agricultural area with poor communication, remain unclear, including the true count of the missing.

But all over Nigeria, citizens react with horror and a horrifying sense of déjà vu. The Kankara attack came six years after the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in the city of Chibok, a kidnapping that sparked off the global # BringBackOurGirls campaign. On Thursday, small street protests erupted in the cities of Katsina and the capital Abuja, spreading the word on social media with a new hashtag: #BringBackOurBoys.

Jacob Zenn, a Boko Haram specialist at the Jamestown Foundation think tank in Washington, said Thursday’s video was “ eerily similar ” to the first video the group released when they kidnapped the Chibok girls, suggesting that the group had the same strategy to increase media coverage and leverage conversations.

The Chibok girls were also interviewed in a proof-of-life video days after the first Boko Haram claim of their kidnapping generated worldwide publicity, he said. “With this video, the message is the same: it is Shekau who will decide their fate.”

In Kankara, dozens of grieving families gathered again on the school campus on Thursday. They have demanded answers every day as to how Boko Haram could have ventured so far from his strongholds to this remote corner of northwestern Nigeria and grabbed hundreds of their children.

Write to Joe Parkinson at [email protected]