Boko Haram's terror is two hundred green scars. In 2015, the city of Kirinowa, in Nigeria's northeastern Borno state, was an enclave of notable commercial importance. Satellite images at the time showed a swarm of hundreds of houses, schools, public buildings, a bridge and even an irrigation canal. In those days, Kirinowa was alive with life. A few months later, the city became a ghost: the advance into the region of the jihadist gang Boko Haram, whose name in the Hausa language translates as Western education is a sin, meant the flight of all its inhabitants and the destruction of the city. location.
Today nature covers that horror: from the sky the advance of the vegetation is observed, which has recovered its place between houses, schools or collapsed bridges. Not a single building remains standing. If green draws a scene of exuberant and unstoppable nature, in the short distance, the concatenation of images shows the magnitude of the devastation after more than a decade of violence. Since the start of the insurgency in 2009, which intensified five years later when the group paid homage to the Islamic State, Boko Haram has killed more than 50,000 people, kidnapped thousands of civilians and displaced more than five million people. .
The inaccessibility of the area, where the Islamist gang came to control intermittent territory the size of Belgium and organizes ambushes that turn road travel into a death trap, prevented a full picture of the destruction in Borno state, the group's stronghold. . Until now.
Nigerian outlet HumAngle this week published a months-long investigation of satellite imagery that finds as many as 221 cities, towns and villages in north-eastern Nigeria razed and engulfed by bush. The devastation in Borno, the epicenter of the crisis, is enormous: according to official sources, more than a million houses and public structures have been destroyed by the jihadists or, as denounced by some local human rights groups, by the army's counterterrorism activities. Nigerian, whom they accuse of committing abuses and punishing communities suspected of collaborating with fundamentalists.
For the Nigerian reporter Murtalla Abdullahi, co-author of the investigation, after years of covering the conflict from the human angle and from the displacement camps, they decided to take a perspective from the sky. For Abdullahi, the result is "the greatest evidence of the catastrophe of the Boko Haram insurgency." According to the journalist, it was the displaced themselves who gave him the idea. “In the last decade we have interviewed many victims of the insurgency. They are stories of farmers who have had to flee and tell us that they no longer have a place to return to, because their villages are no longer habitable, ”he explains to this newspaper.
Precisely, the images of cities and towns engulfed by nature also confirm an impossibility of return that has led thousands of people to a blind alley. For a few months, coinciding with a decrease in the number of attacks by the gang, the Government has urged tens of thousands of displaced people in urban areas to return to their villages. For Human Rights Watch, the measure causes extra suffering to the victims. “The closures (of the displacement camps) cut aid to thousands of people and force them to leave the camps without assistance, adequate information or reasonable alternatives that ensure their safety and their ability to subsist in the communities into which they have been forced. come back and settle down."
According to calculations by reporter Abdullahi based on data and satellite images, the number of towns dismantled and missing under the vegetation is between two and three times more than those published and could exceed half a thousand. "In many cases, people cannot return anywhere, their homes are part of ghost towns."
For Josep Siegle, director of the think tank African Center for Strategic Studies, abandonment is general. Boko Haram's violent campaign has meant the isolation of the territory. “As violent attacks by Boko Haram increase, fewer traders are crossing the border to take the risk. Access to the internet and mobile phones has also been restricted due to the Boko Haram bombing of 24 transmission stations of six telecommunications companies.” According to Siegle, ostracism serves the gang's goals. “Ideologically, the sect claims that it seeks a purified version of Islam. Cutting the region's ties to the outside world curbs the influence of outside ideas, technology and resources and leaves more room for the group's message.”
Although the numbers of attacks and deaths caused by Boko Haram had dropped significantly from 2017 to last year, it is a mirage. The cause of the decline is the split within the group of the Islamic State West African (ISWA) branch, which follows the strict guidelines of the global ISIS and has become another deadly player. Between both jihadist groups, they were responsible for 952 violent attacks in northern Nigeria or the Lake Chad area, which borders Nigerian, Cameroonian and Chadian territory.
Lake Chad is precisely the third deadliest area on the continent after Somalia and the Sahel, where 20% of deaths from Islamist attacks in Africa occur.
From the sky or from the ground, the devastation and suffering continue.
