- Series: The war against Boko Haram
- 10 years of terror.Shekau, Belmoktar and Kony, the terror that dies and rises
There are no words in any language, no prayers in any religion, no tears in any look that can express what women like Miaramou, Djera and Abba feel after those who want to see the world burn decide to tear their ears off.
Miaramou's left was cut . The bad men didn't want me to hear their conversations. It was a clean cut, with a machete with 40 cm blade.
Djera was cut right . The bad men , who had not been in Gakara for many months, a small village in the far north of Cameroon, a few kilometers from the border with Nigeria, wanted to send a message of terror: Boko Haram had returned.
Abba's left was cut . The bad men didn't want to kill her. Nor rape her. Nor kidnap her, as they did two years ago with eight other women from the village. This time it was a warning to the farmers, that one day last winter they decided to organize in commandos, armed with bows and arrows, to protect their land and their families.
Today, from the infirmary of the city of Kerawa, near Gakara , the three women ask for protection from the soldiers of the Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR) who assist them. They do it with their eyes, with their gestures, with their silence. Some, like Djera, asks for it with the pats she gives her baby while trying to explain what happened on the day her right ear was cut. The memory is blurry. Try to turn it into words. Can not. They do not come out. The fear is too strong. To whom words do slip, it is to the Cameroonian soldier in charge of healing his wounds: “We are trying to discover what message is behind this barbarism. They had never acted like this. And they not only cut off the ears of these three women.
Early morning of July 29. A group of 40 men, fighters of Boko Haram , cross the border between Nigeria and Cameroon and arrive at the Christian village of Gakara, in the district of Kolofata (77,850 inhabitants). First, they start shooting and chasing the members of the so-called self-defense group of the village, a dozen men whose mission is to protect their people, who end up fleeing to the mountains. The terrorists enter the huts and take eight women hostage. The majority are twenty years old. A few exceed thirty. They are all mothers .
They line them up, crouched down, knees in the sand. Behind all have a soldier who grabs the hair while another is cutting one ear to each. Just one. Shouts are heard. Of pain Of help. Then they release them. To all. This is the first time that Boko Haram uses this method of mutilation to attack women. Before leaving the village, the terrorists activate an artifact. In the explosion two men die, Oumar Matapa (70 years old) and the teenager Abba Mamadou (15 years old). And back to Nigeria they kill three local militiamen. Boko Haram had not attacked Gakara for two years. The last time was in August 2017, when they ransacked and burned several houses, killed 15 men with kalashnikovs and kidnapped eight other women. These never returned .
After the attack on July 29, women with cut ears were taken to the town of Kerawa (1,600 inhabitants) and attended by the soldiers-nurses of the Cameroonian army stationed in a health center where three people died three years ago after a bombing of Boko Haram. It was one of Cameroonian soldiers who spread on the internet the photograph of three of the women with mutilated ears hugging their babies: Miaramou Naba (32 years old), Djera Brahim (30) and Abba Moussa (30).
The local newspaper L? Oeil du Sahel was the first to echo what happened in Dakara. "We have told many times how terrorists have tortured, raped or killed women, but never cut off their ears and then let them go," explains Guibaï Gatama , the director of the media.
When reading the news, a French journalist of 24jours crossed to Nigeria to ask about what happened in Dakara to several fighters of Boko Haram who were arrested by the Nigerian Police. "We cut the ears of women to make them deaf and dumb," they replied without further explanation.
One of the greatest experts in jihadist terrorism in northern Cameroon is the investigative journalist Chief Bisong Etahoben , editor in chief of the Weekly Post newspaper. «With the escalation of the separatist insurgency in the northwest and southwest regions of Cameroon, the Rapid Intervention Battalion (popularly known for its French acronym BIR), which is the elite force of the Cameroon army and has participated in most of the fight against Boko Haram, it has spread too far to these regions. So Boko Haram feels emboldened to re-enter the region of the north end of the country. The cutting of women's ears is the first incident of this type . However, Boko Haram in the past has been constantly kidnapping and raping women, ”he explains.
SEPARATIST PROBLEM
Bisong refers first to the separatist problem, which has hit Cameroon since the end of 2016. In the English-speaking population of the country (20%), historically discriminated against by the Francophone central government, armed groups began to form when in the southern zone, in Ambazonia , after unilaterally proclaiming their independence, they suffered a strong repression of the Cameroonian army by order of President Paul Biya . This Anglophone crisis, according to the United Nations, has caused nearly 2,000 deaths and more than 430,000 displaced from their homes, who have marched to the north of the country or to Nigeria. And they have been the main beaten by the terror of Boko Haram.
This has been experienced in first person by the cooperators of the Spanish NGO Zerca and Lejos , the only ones that remain on the ground in the extreme north of Cameroon, where they have been installed since 2001. «We have a project of an education school Primary with 627 children enrolled. Luckily we have never been attacked by Boko Haram being in a town between two mountains on the border with Nigeria. There are many families that are moving here, fleeing from terrorists and the separatist conflict, ”explains Elena Aranda , project technician at Zerca and Lejos, who had never heard of jihadists cutting off women's ears during an attack, as happened on July 29
“The attacks they have been making in recent years consisted of isolated groups that went down to the villages, carried supplies and burned the houses, but did not attack the population so directly. And, normally, there are vigilance committees that are in the mountains to warn the people if Boko Haram comes close so that people hide, ”says Elena Aranda. «Last year we were calmer, but now Boko Haram has returned to attack regularly in this area of the far north. It is not that they have rearmed or that they are growing. What the coordinators of the area say is that the authorities have ignored the local population and the terrorists have seen that they have more freedom and space to attack. That is why, a month ago, they went out to demonstrate, demanding protection from the State ».
At the beginning of the year, after months without entering northern Cameroon, Boko Haram began burning villages again, looting the barns and kidnapping children for use as soldiers. The decline of jihadist terror in the previous months was due to the internal division that emerged in the terrorist group between the faction of its leader, Abubakar Shekau , and that of Abú Musaf Barnabi , the one designated by the Islamic State as the new ringleader.
THE WORLD explained a few months ago in a worked series of reports by Boko Haram on the ground the role of each faction: from how the goal of Abubakar Shekau, famous for kidnappings such as that of the more than 200 girls of the Chibok school in 2014 , are all Muslims who do not share their ideas, even above Christians. Shekau controls the south and east of the state of Borno (Nigeria), as well as part of the Lake Chad basin and northern Cameroon. The second group of Boko Haram, in the hands of Abú Musaf Barnabi, who swore allegiance to the self-proclaimed Caliph Al Baghdadi, controls the west and north of Borno and the southern border of Niger.
On July 26, 10 years of the first terrorist attack perpetrated by Boko Haram, when he attacked a police station and killed 50 people. In this decade their terror has left about 27,000 dead and almost three million displaced.
DRON TO MONITOR
Cameroon, after Nigeria, is the country most affected by jihadist activity. Especially the border area with Nigeria. There they have already welcomed more than 100,000 refugees from the neighboring country who have fled the jihadist domain. One of the problems they have also faced is the kidnapping of children by Boko Haram to make them soldiers. Like the 78 who took last year from a Presbyterian school.
Another problem that hits the area is poverty and hunger, something that terrorists have taken advantage of to recruit soldiers for their cause. That is why the Government has just approved a project to distribute more than 60,000 goats and sheep to the young Cameroonian people in the villages along the border. Another project, that of a young 25-year-old engineer named Borel Teguia , consists of a solar drone (with four symmetric engines and flying at 150 meters) that he has manufactured to monitor the border and give notice if Boko fighters Haram approach villages like Gakara again, so that they do not cut off the ears of women again.
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