The War for Nigeria

Janet Daniang, 15, bears scars from a 2012 church bombing by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram.

The War for Nigeria

A bloody insurgency tears at the fabric of Africa’s most populous nation.

By James Verini

Photograph by Ed Kashi

The ticket taker, who worked at Kano’s bus station, had his back to the blast. Before he heard it, it knocked him to the ground, and flame licked his head. He lay facedown, dazed, his ears ringing, blood streaming from a shrapnel wound in his leg, but still he knew instinctively what had happened: There was a bomb in the car.

The driver of the Volkswagen had acted strangely. After pulling into the dirt lot of the station, he and the man in the passenger seat had been approached by touts—ticket salesmen who compete for fares—and had told them, “We don’t know where we’re going.” But when the ticket taker went up to the car, the driver said, “We already bought tickets.” Not thinking much of it, the ticket taker walked away.

And then—boom.

As his ears stopped ringing, the screaming grew louder. He got up, and through the thickening black smoke he saw people staggering away from the buses. Burning bodies hung from what had been their windows. Moments before, they had been sleek, new 60-seaters waiting to head to points south. Now they were a pyre, like some awful ancient ritual offering. On the ground around him the ticket taker saw the corpses and remains of passengers, of the touts, his colleagues, the women who sold boiled cassava and roasted fish from plastic tubs carried on their heads. Friends he saw every day were now “separate people parts,” as he put it to me.

He looked down at his leg and saw that he too was on fire. Frantically, he pulled off his clothing. Then he made his way out of the lot, one in a crowd of unclothed people stumbling out of the clouds of black smoke billowing from the station. “I walked naked to the hospital,” he said. He lost consciousness along the way. Someone, he doesn’t know who, carried him on.

These survivors of a March 2013 bus station bombing in Kano were treated in city hospitals. Many of the dead were incinerated. Estimates of their numbers vary widely, but few believe the government’s toll of 22.

The ticket taker came to in a nearby hospital. Then he was transferred to Kano’s National Orthopaedic Hospital, where, the following week, I met him. (The hospital’s director would not allow me to ask his name.) His ward and two more were filled with victims of the bombing, and their wounds were eerily repetitive.

For those lucky enough to have escaped the worst, faces were singed, and skin was missing from arms and waists, stripped off with burning clothing. Those not as lucky were no longer visibly African; the outer layer of flesh had been burned from their bodies, leaving them looking—as some joked to each other, when it wasn’t too painful to move their mouths—like beke, the Igbo word for a white man. It was as though their identities had been taken.

One such man sat on his bed staring at the wall in an effort to withstand the pain, while nurses wrapped him in gauze. He turned and looked at me with an expression of such kindness that I smiled. I asked—the stupidity of my question apparent immediately—“Are you OK?”

“No,” he said calmly, and returned to staring.

When the car exploded, the same two words occurred to him, and to the ticket taker, and to every other person who saw or heard the blast, which could be heard on the other side of Kano, Nigeria’s second largest city: Boko Haram. That neither they, nor practically anyone else in Nigeria, knew what Boko Haram was exactly or why it would want to bomb a bus station was beside the point.

Officially, according to the Nigerian government, Boko Haram is a terrorist group. It began life as a separatist movement led by a northern Nigerian Muslim preacher, Mohammed Yusuf, who decried the country’s misrule. “Boko Haram” is a combination of the Hausa language and Arabic, understood to mean that Western, or un-Islamic, learning is forbidden. In 2009, after Yusuf was killed—executed, it’s all but certain, by Nigerian police—his followers vowed revenge.

The world is coming to the unwelcome realization that, 12 years after 9/11, violent Islamist extremism and the conflicts it ignites aren’t going away. Accompanying that is the equally unwelcome realization that these conflicts afflict, more than ever, Africa, a continent still unequal to the challenges of the 20th century, never mind this one. In the Sahel, home to al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and to the jihadists who until recently controlled northern Mali, Boko Haram has emerged as the nastiest of a nasty new breed. Calling for, among other things, an Islamic government, a war on Christians, and the death of Muslims it sees as traitors, the group has been connected with upwards of 4,700 deaths in Nigeria since 2009. And although Nigeria, with 170 million inhabitants, is the continent’s most populous country (one in six Africans is Nigerian) and has sub-Saharan Africa’s second largest economy, even by its immense standards the carnage attributed to Boko Haram is immense.

So much so that unofficially, in the national collective consciousness, Boko Haram has become something more than a terrorist group, more even than a movement. Its name has taken on an incantatory power. Fearing they will be heard and then killed by Boko Haram, Nigerians refuse to say the group’s name aloud, referring instead to “the crisis” or “the insecurity.” “People don’t trust their neighbors anymore,” a civil society activist in Kano told me. “Anybody can be Boko Haram.” The president, Goodluck Jonathan, an evangelical Christian, wonders openly if the insurgency is a sign of the end times.

After the bus station bombing I twice traveled to Atakar, a hilly area in Kaduna state, where mass killings had been reported. Before the first visit I consulted officials. They hadn’t gone to Atakar and wouldn’t, because they believed Boko Haram was behind the killings. Everyone killed had been Christians, they assured me. “It’s not unconnected with the quest for the Islamization of the north,” one official said. “They want as much as possible to annihilate the Christians.”

In the first village I visited, I met a family huddled by their roofless, charred homes. They were, in fact, Fulani Muslims, and they claimed they’d been attacked by marauders from the other side of Atakar—Christians, they presumed. Some of them said the attack had been ethnically motivated, others religiously. A young man told me that the original incitement had to do with a poisoned cow. “We were attacked because we are Fulani—and because of the cow that died,” he said. He wasn’t being facetious: Northern Nigeria has endured decades of ethno-religious slaughter, often enough touched off by peccadilloes. In 2002, after a journalist remarked that the Prophet Muhammad would have approved of a beauty contest, riots left hundreds dead.

Later I traveled to the other side of Atakar and found that villagers there, Christians from the indigenous Ataka tribe, had also been attacked. They’d assembled in a refugee camp in a schoolyard. One man told me that he was in his home when he heard gunfire. He went outside and saw men dressed in black shooting “powerful guns.” He barely escaped with his life, he said. He was certain the attackers were Fulani, as was a neighbor who joined our conversation. When I asked the neighbor why, he said, “My people don’t wear black.” Both suspected the attackers were also Boko Haram, though why that group would want to assail this remote place they couldn’t say.

“We want to believe it’s Boko Haram,” a local aid worker told me, in such a way as to denote that life had become so incomprehensibly frightful in northern Nigeria that wanting to believe Boko Haram was involved was enough to make it so. “We don’t have any other information,” he said, expanding on the thought, “so we want to believe it’s Boko Haram.”

In his autobiography Ken Saro-Wiwa, the son of the Nigerian activist of the same name who was executed by the state on trumped-up charges in 1995, writes that “Nigeria should be God’s own country in Africa.” This could be dismissed as just more of Nigeria’s famous nativist braggadocio if its neighbors and its despairing partners in the West didn’t agree. That braggadocio—and a fierce ambition—are matched by the country’s resources, among them gas, minerals, good harbors, and fecund soil that once helped propel the British Empire. Nigeria boasts an educated middle class, industrious cities, a rowdy, if not exactly free, press.

The most lucrative of its resources, however, since its discovery in the 1950s, is crude oil. Nigeria is the world’s fifth largest exporter; yet nearly two-thirds of its citizens live in absolute poverty, meaning that they have just enough to not die. Oil has made government the best business venture in Nigeria, and because oil, and not taxes, accounts for most of the state’s revenue, it also makes politicians unanswerable. A newspaper last year estimated that since President Jonathan entered office in 2010, $31 billion have disappeared. “There’s been a failure of government at all levels historically in Nigeria,” a Western diplomat working there told me.

This failure is everywhere apparent, but nowhere as much as in Kano, once one of the great cities of Africa and of the Muslim world. Islam arrived with merchants and clerics in the 11th century (giving it a much longer history there than Christianity); the Hausa king of Kano adopted it in 1370. In 1804 a caliphate was established. The British toppled it in 1903 but retained its pliant emirs. Kano, the heart of regional trade since antiquity, became an industrial and agricultural hub. So well was the arrangement working for him, the Emir of Kano opposed Nigeria’s independence, gained in 1960. A half century later roughly half of Nigerians are Muslims, the vast majority living in the north.

The emir and the British kept out Western education and other advances but allowed in Christians from the south. Kano’s fortunes began to slide in the 1970s, and as they did, its lack of development—and the lack of oil in the north—grew more apparent. Current statistics are unnerving: More than half of children under five in northern Nigeria are stunted from malnutrition. In the northeast, where Boko Haram started, only a quarter of homes have access to electricity, which would be a bigger problem if more than 23 percent of women could read. In the 1980s, 1990s, and again in the early 2000s ethno-religious conflicts killed thousands. Then Boko Haram came in.

Today Kano feels like a weary garrison. Approaching it, you come to checkpoints every few hundred yards. Between them you pass farms left fallow by neglect and desertification and through the half-alive villages they used to support. In the city, urban desertification: streets, parks, plazas empty. Signs are gone from any place deemed vulnerable to attack, which, since the bus station bombing, is any place. At police headquarters the only notice, spray-painted on an exterior wall, instructs, “Do Not Urinate Here.”

The most visible figures of authority in the city, the only visible figures of authority, are the Joint Task Force units (JTFs)—paramilitary teams made up of police, soldiers, and agents from the State Security Service, Nigeria’s equivalent of the FBI, who patrol in reptilian armored vehicles and canopied pickups. They’re known for their brutality and venality and have become as feared as the insurgents in some quarters, particularly in poor Muslim districts.

The real power in Kano is hidden, conspicuously. Behind tall walls in the city center is the state government’s sprawling seat. In his office there, the governor, Rabiu Kwankwaso, greeted me from an archipelago of leather sofas. On one wall was a life-size painting of Kwankwaso; against another, a life-size stand-up cardboard cutout of him. In both he was wearing exactly what he had on when I met him: a white babban riga robe and red brimless cap, emblems of his Kano revitalization campaign, which he calls the Red Cap Revolution.

“I have no doubt in my mind that one day Nigeria will overcome it,” Kwankwaso told me, referring to Boko Haram. “How it will happen, it is difficult to say now.” A trio of aides nodded. “This is the time to listen even to foolish people, to hear what they are saying, because we don’t have answers.” Kano hasn’t upgraded its power grid in years, and as he talked, the lights went out. They came back on, and he continued. “You have to prevent violence. On the other hand, government has to do so many other things. What we are seeing is just a symptom of what has happened in the past.” After Kwankwaso’s first term in the governor’s office ended in 2003, he was indicted for embezzling $7.5 million in state funds. He was not prosecuted and in 2011 was elected again.

In Kano’s old walled city is the emir’s palace. Amid the poverty of his subjects, the emir, now 83, still lives very much like an emir. I wasn’t granted an audience with him, but one morning I was invited to look around the palace, a rumpus of alcoves and anterooms. I arrived alongside a busload of Gulf-state visitors filing in with gifts in duty-free bags. After convening with them, the emir emerged in a meringue of robes, mounted a horse, attendants shielding him with a giant, tasseled umbrella, and rode to his mosque. It used to be that anyone could come and watch these rituals. That ended in January, when men drove up alongside the emir’s Rolls-Royce, pulled out guns, and opened fire. Two of his sons were shot, several of his entourage killed.

The assurance of violence hangs in the air. While I was in Kano, there were near-daily reports of shootings and a series of botched bombings, including one at the palace. On Sunday mornings police park water-cannon trucks outside churches, and preachers inside talk about the “Lord’s battle” against Boko Haram; in nearby mosques clerics condemn Goodluck Jonathan’s “war on Islam.” On Easter a TV reporter friend of mine got a call. JTFs had raided a suspected Boko Haram hideout. He returned a few hours later with familiar footage: an orderly array of guns, bullets, and homemade bombs, and near it an orderly array of bodies of slain “militants.” Among the dead on this day I could see at least one woman and a child. The position of the bodies suggested that the people had either been piled together after being shot or were killed en masse.

There are various creation stories for Boko Haram. The most common I heard in Nigeria is this: In the early 2000s in the northeastern city of Maiduguri, Mohammed Ali, a preacher fed up with poverty and disorder, embarked on a hegira, a Muhammadan withdrawal from society. He and his followers created a commune and practiced sharia. After a dispute with authorities, the Nigerian Taliban, as they’d become known, attacked a police station. The army laid siege, and Ali was killed.

Survivors regrouped around a promising contemporary of Ali’s, Mohammed Yusuf. Yusuf built a bigger commune, described in a report as a “state within a state, with a cabinet, its own religious police, and a large farm.” He called his group Jamaa Ahl al Sunna li al Dawa wa al Jihad, or People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad. Possibly deriding Yusuf ’s religiosity, someone called it Boko Haram. Yusuf was carrying out forced conversions to Islam, according to reports, and likely ordered the murder of a rival. Nonetheless he gained sympathizers around Nigeria, not all of them Muslim. “Boko Haram is a resistance movement against misrule rather than a purely Islamic group,” one bishop said. Yusuf, a Maiduguri reporter told me, “was so charismatic. He could talk to people very gently, very simply,” but “when he preached, he acted. Overacted.”

In 2009 Yusuf’s followers clashed with security forces. The army shelled the commune. Yusuf had predicted that if he was ever arrested, he would be killed without trial, and that’s exactly what happened. Surviving devotees went into hiding. Some traveled abroad for training with other militants, and some regrouped in Kano around Abubakar Shekau, Yusuf ’s deputy. They set out to “liberate ourselves and our religion from the hands of infidels and the Nigerian government.” Northern Nigeria was overtaken by bombings, arsons, and shootings—at police stations and government offices, then at churches, mosques, schools, and universities—and by assassinations of officials, politicians, clerics, and others. The federal police headquarters in Abuja was suicide-bombed, then the UN compound. A residence of the vice president’s was shot up.

A deadly attack hit Kano on January 20, 2012. Waves of gunmen set upon police stations and State Security Service offices. The official estimate of the dead was 185, but according to Kano residents I spoke with, the real number was much larger. I was also told that some people risked their lives to gather outside police stations to cheer on the attackers, so despised are the authorities in Kano.

The resentment that impelled those residents is summed up in a favorite saying of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s, which his son likes to quote: “To live a day in Nigeria is to die many times.” The smallest tasks in Nigeria sap one’s dignity. En route to Kano, I flew through the Lagos airport, where the guard at the bag scanner shook me down for a bribe in front of his expressionless superiors. I refused. He negotiated: “Money for water?” I told him that if he really was thirsty, he could meet me in the snack bar. A half hour later he arrived, uniform gone, now in natty denim, two mobile phones in hand, and leaped into a chair with a “Here you are!” We talked for an hour. I ended up buying him water and lunch. He in turn called a friend who picked me up at the Abuja airport. “Anything you need,” the guard said as we parted, and he meant it.

Such is the polyphony of interaction in Nigeria—“affectionate extortion,” I heard it called. In a country that’s endured a civil war, six military coups, two assassinations of heads of state, and at least three crippling domestic insurgencies in just over 50 years of existence, and where contempt for leadership has hardened into a perverse kind of civic responsibility, this mixture of menace and generosity, officiousness and humor—the attitude that allows a man whose skin has been burned off to joke that he’s been turned white—is indicative of a certain flippancy, part of that Nigerian braggadocio. It’s also a way of keeping sane. And to that end it orders Nigerians’ complex perspective on sedition. They condemn Boko Haram and see its hypocrisy. As one soldier, a Muslim, said to me while guarding a church on Palm Sunday, “They say Western education is wrong. But that book you’re reading, how was it made? That pen you’re using, how was it made? That gun you have, where was it made?” But they pay Boko Haram a grudging deference too. They know well the frustration that would drive someone to take up arms against the state.

This deference takes subtle forms. On Kano street corners vendors sell DVDs of insurgent attacks downloaded from the Internet. Saying Boko Haram aloud is discouraged, but you can refer to the Boko Boys, or BH, as though it were some hot rap act.

The extent of the insurgency’s strange effects on the Nigerian psyche became apparent as I looked into the bombing at the bus station. Unlike Boko Haram’s signature attacks, this one was indiscriminate, meant to kill as many as possible, whoever they were. But theories about its meaning vary. Kano is majority Hausa and Fulani, but Sabon Gari, the district where the station is located, is home to many Igbo. They tend to be Christian, and they operate the bus lines. So the most widespread theory is that the bombing was an attack on Igbo Christians. “To me it’s an extension of killing Christians in their churches,” a security officer in Abuja told me. A traditional Igbo leader in Sabon Gari who goes by Chief Tobias said, “Igbos were the target.”

But this theory goes only so far. The bus operators are Igbo, yes, as were many of the passengers and station workers who died. But many others were not. Some were Hausa or Fulani, some, possibly, Kanuri, the majority ethnicity of Boko Haram’s originators. Sabon Gari is home to most of Kano’s churches, but it also has many mosques. It is the most diverse part of Kano, a throwback to the city’s old cosmopolitanism, and on a given day any number of the 250 or so ethnic groups that make up Nigeria might be represented there.

A prominent former Kano parliamentarian, Junaid Muhammad, a Muslim, told me that Chief Tobias’s claim was ridiculous. “You cannot tell your bullet or your bomb, ‘Go and hit an Igbo man’ or ‘Go and hit a Hausa man.’” I went to see Boniface Ibekwe, the supreme leader of the Igbo in Kano and a Christian, and was surprised to find he agreed. “It’s not a direct attack on Igbos,” he said. “Boko Haram’s objective is to get where people are gathered together and destroy it.”

Some people believe the bus station was bombed because it is a center of commerce. It represents the influx of foreign goods, foreign ideas, impious ideas. Others wonder if the bombing was meant to protest the economic dominance of the south over the north. Perhaps what Boko Haram really wants, one theory holds, is regional equity or a new northern nation. Among northern politicians, secession is an oft talked about, if impracticable, idea.

One thing everyone seems to agree on is that when the authorities got involved, the confusion increased. Take what ought to be the most basic fact: how many died. I spoke to one reporter who put the total around 30; another said around 40. Chief Tobias said 75. The real number will never be known, because no official account of the incident has been given. The government’s tally—22 dead—is a fiction.

The government won’t say who it suspects the bombers were, aside from Boko Haram; how the car bomb was made; or even whether there was only one bomb. Some witnesses claim there were two. Most people agree the car was a Volkswagen, but some—including the ticket taker—say it was an Opel. Some witnesses claim there were two people in the car, others three. According to local journalists, security forces removed corpses from the station as quickly as possible and moved survivors from one hospital to another in an effort to keep reporters away from them. The authorities “don’t want the public to know what is actually happening,” Nasir Zango, a Kano reporter, said.

Why? There are varying theories about that too. To head off reprisal attacks. To protect their jobs. Because they deceive a lot. The most common explanation offered to me, and the most troubling, is that security forces didn’t properly investigate the bombing because they can’t. They don’t have the training or the experience, not to mention the interest. They don’t have the equipment to analyze bomb fragments or the intelligence networks to lead them to the bombers. Often police don’t even bother taking statements from witnesses after attacks, I was told.

Still, the government and the press are equally quick to pin any violence in the north on Boko Haram. For the former, it distracts from mendacity and ineptitude. For the latter, it provides copy. Privately many people agree that criminals have found in Boko Haram a perfect cover. The result of all this no longer stops at confusion. “You begin to think it’s as though someone’s hellbent on seeing these problems continue,” Lawan Adamu, another Kano reporter, said. “The conflict, the crisis, is taking a very big dimension that is really making many of us start thinking or believing that there is a conspiracy. Many people have said this before, and I didn’t want to believe, but now I’m starting to.”

Ken Saro-Wiwa the younger, who now is (in a perfect Nigerian irony) an adviser to President Jonathan, told me that Boko Haram is “typically Nigerian, in that it started as an ideological movement. Then it was co-opted by political opportunists. Then it was mixed with economic issues. And now it’s muddied, so that you can’t tell what it’s about.”

When I asked a local community leader in Atakar why no state officials had come to the attacked villages there, he said, “Why would they come? They are the sponsors of these things.” And was Boko Haram involved? “Why not?” he said. “What is the difference?”

It was a sentiment I heard again and again. Almost no Nigerian I spoke with believes Boko Haram is just Boko Haram. Some claim it’s the creation of Wahhabis from the Gulf states; others, of “the West.” Still others believe Boko Haram is backed by northern politicians vying for power; or by southern politicians who want to destabilize the north; or by people in President Jonathan’s party who want to unseat him; or by Jonathan himself, in an effort to cancel elections in the north; or, if not by him, by the people around him. In fact, Jonathan apparently believes the last. In a moment of unbuttoned paranoia at a church service last year he said, “Some [Boko Haram] are in the executive arm of government, some of them are in the parliamentary/legislative arm of government, while some of them are even in the judiciary. Some are also in the armed forces, the police, and other security agencies.”

And some Nigerians say that Boko Haram doesn’t exist at all. “We believe Boko Haram is a political expression,” Chief Tobias said. “We don’t believe there is an organization Boko Haram.”

As I continued reporting, it became apparent that the insurgency’s gravest toll on Nigeria isn’t physical. It’s existential. Boko Haram has become a kind of national synonym for fear, a repository for Nigerians’ worst anxieties about their society and where it’s headed. Those anxieties touch on the most elemental aspects of Nigerian life—ethnicity, religion, regional inequities, the legacy of colonialism—and not least is the anxiety that Nigerian leaders are wholly incapable of facing this insurgency, indeed unwilling to face it, much less the social fissures beneath it. Or worse, that the leaders are no better than the insurgents. That the state is Boko Haram.

In the city of Kaduna people scavenge amid trash heaps. Nigeria is the world’s fifth largest oil exporter, but nearly two-thirds of its citizens are abjectly poor. The north, long neglected by the central government, is especially bleak.

It’s not an entirely unreasonable supposition. Of the more than 4,700 killings associated with Boko Haram to date, almost half have been at the hands of security forces, according to Human Rights Watch. Many of those killed have been civilians who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. As the insurgency gets more vicious, so does the government. In July suspected Boko Haram militants set fire to a boarding school in Mamudo, killing 42 students and teachers. In April the military assaulted the village of Baga, claiming militants were hiding there. At least 200 were killed. Witnesses described soldiers gunning down people as they ran from their homes.

I interviewed people in Kano who claimed they’d been harassed, beaten, or shot by security forces. In my last days in Nigeria I went to Abuja, where I recounted their stories to a general, one of the main architects of the campaign against Boko Haram. He wasn’t moved. In fact he wouldn’t concede that there had been any abuses. When I pressed the point, he began yelling and pounding his desk. He said such stories were invented by journalists sympathetic to Boko Haram, including, he intimated, me. “We know there are some journalists deliberately siding with Boko Haram in this war!” said the general, who did not want to be named. “I have found some journalists, and they confessed to me they were deliberately siding with certain sides. Deliberately! Some based in Western countries.”

Calming down, he went on, “Look, it’s a shadowy war we are fighting.” To prove how shadowy, he showed me a video found in a raid. It showed Abubakar Shekau. Bushy-bearded, muscular, with a bit of a gut and a limp, the Boko Haram leader is training three young men to wield an AK-47. They’re in the closed courtyard of a residential building somewhere, maybe Kano. Children can be heard playing inside. Suddenly there’s a knock at the gate. Shekau lurches to a wall, as one young man lifts the rifle unsteadily, ready to fire. A man comes in, carrying a shopping bag. They know him. Everyone laughs with relief.

“You see, they could be anywhere, anywhere!”the general said. “Not only in the north—in the whole of the country! [Nigerians] still don’t understand the challenge—the real challenge—we’re facing, the seriousness of the situation. They don’t understand.”

As he said this, I thought back to the hospital in Kano and to a woman I met there. She’d been selling water in the bus station the day of the bombing. Her young daughter had been helping her. When the car exploded, the girl vanished. In the darkness the woman called out for her. When her daughter didn’t respond, she began looking for a body. When she couldn’t find a body, she looked for an arm, a leg, clothing, a shoe, anything. She found nothing. She told the police what had happened, but they didn’t care and ordered her to leave. The woman’s husband went to every hospital in Kano, to no avail.

“I never saw my daughter since that day,” she said. Dominant in her cracking voice as she said this were grief and confusion. But when she spoke of the police, another note took over. It was anger.

_____________________________________________________________

1.  What is Boko Haram?  When and why was it formed? What are its goals?
2.  Describe the demography of Nigeria.  What ethnic and religious divides exist?
3.  Describe the economy of Nigeria.  What resources does it possess? What are its top exports? 
4.  What has been the Nigerian government's response to Boko Haram? Why has it been ineffective?
5.  What human rights are people in Nigeria being denied?
6.  What can and should be done to help solve Nigeria's problems?

The girl who was shot for going to school

Malala: The girl who was shot for going to school

  By Mishal Husain BBC News

One year ago schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by Taliban gunmen - her "crime", to have spoken up for the right of girls to be educated. The world reacted in horror, but after weeks in intensive care Malala survived. Her full story can now be told. 

She is the teenager who marked her 16th birthday with a live address from UN headquarters, is known around the world by her first name alone, and has been lauded by a former British prime minister as "an icon of courage and hope".

I didn't want my future to be imprisoned in my four walls and just cooking and giving birth” -- Malala Yousafzai

She is also a Birmingham schoolgirl trying to settle into a new class, worrying about homework and reading lists, missing friends from her old school, and squabbling with her two younger brothers.

She is Malala Yousafzai, whose life was forever changed at age 15 by a Taliban bullet on 9 October 2012.

I have travelled to her home town in Pakistan, seen the school that moulded her, met the doctors who treated her and spent time with her and her family, for one reason - to answer the same question barked by the gunman who flagged down her school bus last October: "Who is Malala?"

The Swat Valley once took pride in being called "the Switzerland of Pakistan". It's a mountainous place, cool in summer and snowy in winter, within easy reach of the capital, Islamabad. And when Malala was born in 1997 it was still peaceful.

Just a few hours' driving from Islamabad brings you to the foot of the Malakand pass, the gateway to the valley. The winding road up to the pass leaves the plains of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province, far below.

I remember it well from childhood holidays in Pakistan. But my latest trip felt very different - the BBC crew made the journey with a military escort. Although the Pakistan army retook control of Swat from the Taliban in 2009 and it is arguably now safer for foreigners than some other areas, the military clearly didn't want to take any chances.

Historically, the north-west has been one of Pakistan's least developed regions. But Swat, interestingly, has long been a bright spot in terms of education.

Until 1969, it was a semi-autonomous principality - its ruler known as the Wali. The first of these was Miangul Gulshahzada Sir Abdul Wadud, appointed by a local council in 1915 and known to Swatis as "Badshah Sahib" - the King. 

Although himself uneducated, he laid the foundation for a network of schools in the valley - the first boys' primary school came in 1922, followed within a few years by the first girls' school.

The trend was continued by his son, Wali Miangul Abdul Haq Jahanzeb, who came to power in 1949. Within a few months, he had presented the schoolgirls of Swat to the visiting prime minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, and his wife Raana. As his grandson Miangul Adnan Aurangzeb says: "It would have been unusual anywhere else in the [North-West] Frontier at that time, but in Swat girls were going to school."

The new Wali's focus soon turned to high schools and colleges, including Jahanzeb College, founded in 1952, where Malala's father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, would study many years later. Soon, Swat became known across Pakistan for the number of professionals it was producing - especially doctors and teachers. As Adnan Aurangzeb says, "Swat was proud of its record on education… one way to identify a Swati outside of Swat was that he always had a pen in his chest pocket, and that meant he was literate."

Against this backdrop, the fate that befell the schools of Swat in the first years of the 21st Century is particularly tragic.

By the time Malala was born, her father had realised his dream of founding his own school, which began with just a few pupils and mushroomed into an establishment educating more than 1,000 girls and boys.

It is clear that her absence is keenly felt. Outside the door of her old classroom is a framed newspaper cutting about her. Inside, her best friend Moniba has written the name "Malala" on a chair placed in the front row.

This was Malala's world - not one of wealth or privilege but an atmosphere dominated by learning. And she flourished. "She was precocious, confident, assertive," says Adnan Aurangzeb. "A young person with the drive to achieve something in life."

In that, she wasn't alone. "Malala's whole class is special," headmistress Mariam Khalique tells me.

And from the moment I walk in, I understand what she means. Their focus and attention is absolute, their aspirations sky-high. The lesson under way is biology, and as it ends I have a few moments to ask the girls about their future plans - many want to be doctors. One girl's answer stops me in my tracks: "I'd like to be Pakistan's army chief one day."

Part of the reason for this drive to succeed is that only white-collar, professional jobs will allow these girls a life outside their homes. While poorly educated boys can hope to find low-skilled work, their female counterparts will find their earning power restricted to what they can do within the four walls of their home - sewing perhaps.

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Malala's diary: 3 January 2009

"I had a terrible dream yesterday with military helicopters and the Taleban. I have had such dreams since the launch of the military operation in Swat.
My mother made me breakfast and I went off to school. I was afraid going to school because the Taleban had issued an edict banning all girls from attending schools."
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Only 11 students attended the class out of 27. The number decreased because of Taleban's edict. My three friends have shifted to Peshawar, Lahore and Rawalpindi with their families after this edict.

"For my brothers it was easy to think about the future," Malala tells me when we meet in Birmingham. "They can be anything they want. But for me it was hard and for that reason I wanted to become educated and empower myself with knowledge."

It was this future that was threatened when the first signs of Taliban influence emerged, borne on a tide of anti-Western sentiment that swept across Pakistan in the years after 9/11 and the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

Like other parts of north-west Pakistan, Swat had always been a devout and conservative region, but what was happening by 2007 was very different - radio broadcasts threatening Sharia-style punishments for those who departed from local Muslim traditions, and most ominously, edicts against education.

The worst period came at the end of 2008, when the local Taliban leader, Mullah Fazlullah, issued a dire warning - all female education had to cease within a month, or schools would suffer consequences. Malala remembers the moment well: "'How can they stop us going to school?' I was thinking. 'It's impossible, how can they do it?'"

But Ziauddin Yousafzai and his friend Ahmad Shah, who ran another school nearby, had to recognise it as a real possibility. The Taliban had always followed through on their threats. The two men discussed the situation with local army commanders. "I asked them how much security would be provided to us," Shah recalls. "They said, 'We will provide security, don't close your schools.'"

It was easier said than done.

By this time, Malala was still only 11, but well aware of how things were changing.

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Malala's diary: 18 January 2009

My father told us that the government would protect our schools. The prime minister has also raised this issue. I was quite happy initially, but now I know but this will not solve our problem.

"Here in Swat we hear everyday that so many soldiers were killed and so many were kidnapped at such and such place. But the police are nowhere to be seen.
"Our parents are also very scared. They told us they would not send us to school until or unless the Taleban themselves announce on the FM channel that girls can go to school. The army is also responsible for the disruption in our education.

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"People don't need to be aware of these things at the age of nine or 10 or 11 but we were seeing terrorism and extremism, so I had to be aware," she says.

She knew that her way of life was under threat. When a journalist from BBC Urdu asked her father about young people who might be willing to give their perspective on life under the Taliban, he suggested Malala.

The result was the Diary of a Pakistani Schoolgirl, a blog for BBC Urdu, in which Malala chronicled her hope to keep going to school and her fears for the future of Swat.

She saw it as an opportunity.

"I wanted to speak up for my rights," she says. "And also I didn't want my future to be just sitting in a room and be imprisoned in my four walls and just cooking and giving birth to children. I didn't want to see my life in that way."

The blog was anonymous, but Malala was also unafraid to speak out in public about the right to education, as she did in February 2009 to the Pakistani television presenter Hamid Mir, who brought his show to Swat.

I was surprised that there is a little girl in Swat who can speak with a lot of confidence, but I was concerned about her security” --Hamid Mir

"I was surprised that there is a little girl in Swat who can speak with a lot of confidence, who's very brave, who's very articulate," Mir says. "But at the same time I was a bit concerned about her security, about the security of her family."

At that time it was Ziauddin Yousafzai, Malala's father, who was perceived to be at the greatest risk. Already known as a social and educational activist, he had sensed that the Taliban would move from the tribal areas of Pakistan into Swat, and had often warned people to be on their guard.

Malala herself was concerned for him. "I was worried about my father," she says. "I used to think, 'What will I do if a Talib comes to the house? We'll hide my father in a cupboard and call the police.'"

No-one thought the Taliban would target a child. There were however notorious incidents where they had chosen to make an example of women. In early 2009, a dancer was accused of immorality and executed, her body put on public display in the centre of Mingora. Soon afterwards, there was outrage across Pakistan after a video emerged from Swat showing the Taliban flogging a 17-year-old girl for alleged "illicit relations" with a man.

Ziauddin Yousafzai must have known that Malala's high profile in the valley put her at some risk, even though he could not have foreseen the outcome.

"Malala's voice was the most powerful voice in Swat because the biggest victim of the Taliban was girls' schools and girls' education and few people talked about it," he says. "When she used to speak about education, everybody gave it importance."

By the time Malala was shot in 2012, the worst days of Taliban power in Swat had receded. A high-profile military operation had cleared out most militants but others had stayed behind, keeping a low profile.

"Life was normal for normal people, but for those people who had raised their voice, it was now a risky time," says Malala.

She was one of those people.

When I saw the blood on Malala, I fell unconscious” -- Fellow pupil Kainat Riaz

On the afternoon of 9 October, she walked out of school as normal and boarded a small bus waiting outside the gates. These vehicles are seen everywhere in Mingora - a little like covered pickup trucks, open at the back, with three lines of benches running the length of the flatbed. Each could carry about 20 people and would be waiting to take the girls and their teachers home at the end of the school day. 

In Malala's case, it was only a short journey, past a small clearing where children played cricket, and along the canal bank to her house. Once she had walked, but then her mother, Tor Pekai, intervened. "My mother told me, 'Now you are growing up and people know you, so you must not go on foot, you must go in a car or a bus so then you will be safe,'" Malala says.

That day, she was in the middle of her exams, and had a lot on her mind. But there was still the usual after-school chat and gossip to share with Moniba, who was sitting next to her. But as the bus progressed along its route Malala says she did notice something unusual - the road seemed deserted. "I asked Moniba, 'Why is there no-one here? Can you see it's not like it usually is?'"

Moments later, the bus was flagged down by two young men as it passed a clearing, only 100 yards from the school gates. Malala doesn't recall seeing them but Moniba does. To her they looked like college students.

Then she heard one ask: "Who is Malala?" In the seconds between that question and the firing beginning, Moniba at first wondered if the men were more journalists in search of her well-known friend. But she quickly grasped that Malala had sensed danger. "She was very scared at that time,' she remembers. The girls looked at Malala, thereby innocently identifying her.

The two girls sitting on Malala's other side, Shazia Ramzan and Kainat Riaz, were also injured.

"I heard the firing, then I saw lots of blood on Malala's head," says Kainat. "When I saw that blood on Malala, I fell unconscious."

Moniba says the bus remained there for 10 minutes, before anyone came to the aid of the panic-stricken women and children.

When they reached hospital, it was assumed all four girls were wounded, because Moniba's clothing was drenched in her friend's blood.

News of the shooting spread quickly. Malala's father was at the Press Club when a phone call came to tell him one of his school buses had been attacked. He feared at once that it was Malala who had been targeted. He found her on a stretcher in the hospital.

 
Malala as she was stretchered to hospital 

 

"When I looked towards her face I just bowed down, I kissed her on the forehead, her nose, and cheeks," he says. "And then I said, 'You're my proud daughter. I am proud of you.'"

Malala had been shot in the head and it was clear to everyone, including the Pakistan army, that her life was in danger. A helicopter was scrambled to airlift her to the military hospital in Peshawar - a journey that would eventually take her not just away from Swat but away from Pakistan.

The Combined Military Hospital in Peshawar is the best medical facility in the region, treating not just military personnel but their families too. As he flew in with Malala, Ziauddin Yousafzai was braced for the worst, telling relatives at his family home in rural Swat to make preparations for a funeral. "It really was the most difficult time in my life," he says.

From the helipad, Malala was brought in by ambulance and placed in the care of neurosurgeon Col Junaid Khan.

"She was initially conscious, but restless and agitated, moving all her limbs," he says. The entry wound of the bullet was above her left brow. From there it had travelled down through her neck and lodged in her back.

Malala was treated as a severe head injury case and placed under observation. After four hours, she deteriorated visibly, slipping towards unconsciousness. A scan revealed a life-threatening situation - her brain was swelling dangerously and she would need immediate surgery.

"The part of the brain involved was concerned not only with speech but also giving power to the right arm and leg," Khan says. "So contemplating surgery in this very sensitive area can have risks. The person can be paralysed afterwards."

Nevertheless, he told Malala's father that surgery was vital to save her life - a portion of her skull had to be removed to relieve pressure on the brain.

The procedure began with shaving part of Malala's hair, and then cutting away the bone, before placing the portion of removed skull inside her abdomen in case it could be later replaced. Blood clots and damaged tissue were extracted from inside the brain.

Before that day, Khan says, he had never heard the name Malala Yousafzai, but he was soon left in no doubt that he was treating a high-profile patient. Camera crews besieged the hospital compound as a tide of shock and revulsion spread through Pakistan.

TV presenter Hamid Mir looks back on the attack and the country's realisation that the Taliban were capable of shooting a young girl as a defining moment. "It gave me a lot of courage and strength [a sense] that enough is enough, now is the time to speak against the enemies of education," he says. "If they can target a little girl like Malala, they can target anyone."

From Adnan Aurangzeb, so closely connected to Swat and its people, there was anger - not just at the Taliban but at the government of Pakistan, which he held accountable for failing to protect Malala.

"She should have been under the protection of Pakistan," he says. "Not left to go unescorted like any normal student in an area infested with militants and Taliban."

Inside the intensive care unit in Peshawar, Malala appeared to respond well to the surgery. Her progress was by now being followed not just in Pakistan but around the world. In Islamabad, the army chief General Ashfaq Kayani was taking a keen interest, but wanted a definitive and independent opinion on Malala's chances.

 

 A vigil for Malala in Karachi as she recovered in hospital

 

As it happened, his officers were looking after a team of British doctors at the time - a group from Birmingham who had come to Pakistan to advise the army on setting up a liver transplant programme. The multi-disciplinary team was led by emergency care consultant Javid Kayani, a British Pakistani who maintains close links with the land of his birth.

When the request for help came through, Kayani knew which one of the team he wanted to take with him to Peshawar on the helicopter that was standing by. Given Malala's age, paediatric intensive care specialist Fiona Reynolds was the obvious choice. Although she had her doubts about security in Peshawar, she had heard enough about Malala from news reports to feel the risk was worth taking. "She'd been shot because she wanted an education, and I was in Pakistan because I'm a woman with an education, so I couldn't say 'no,'" she says.

"The quality of the intensive care was potentially compromising her final outcome." --Fiona Reynolds

What the doctors discovered in Peshawar, though, was not encouraging. Although Malala had had what Reynolds calls "the right surgery at the right time", she was being let down by the post-operative care. A similar patient in the UK would have been having her blood pressure checked continuously via an arterial line - according to Malala's charts, hers had last been checked two hours earlier. 

Reynolds' instinct told her that Malala could be saved, but everything depended on how she would be cared for.

"The quality of the intensive care was potentially compromising her final outcome, both in terms of survival and in terms of her ability to recover as much brain function as possible," she says.

That clinical opinion would be vital to Malala's future. An army intensive care specialist was sent to bolster the team in Peshawar, but when Malala deteriorated further, she was airlifted again, this time to a bigger military hospital in Islamabad.

In the first hours after her arrival there, Fiona Reynolds remained very worried. Malala's kidneys appeared to have shut down, her heart and circulation were failing, and she needed drugs to support her unstable blood pressure. "I thought she was probably going to survive, but I wasn't sure of her neurological outcome, because she'd been so sick. Any brain damage would have been made worse."

As Malala gradually stabilised, over the next couple of days, Reynolds was asked for her opinion again - this time on her rehabilitation. She asked what facilities were available, knowing that acute medicine is often far ahead of rehab. That was indeed the case in Pakistan. "I said that if the Pakistan military and the Pakistan government were serious about optimising her outcome… I said that everything that she would need would be available in Birmingham."

 
Graphics from the hospital showing the bullet's path, titanium plate and implant

On 15 October 2012, Malala arrived at the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham, where she would remain for the next three months. She had been kept in a medically induced coma, but a day later the doctors decided to bring her out of it. Her last memory was of being on a school bus in Swat - now she was waking up surrounded by strangers, in a foreign country.

"I opened my eyes and the first thing I saw was that I was in a hospital and I could see nurses and doctors," she says. "I thanked God - 'O Allah, I thank you because you have given me a new life and I am alive.'"

Malala's parents and brothers were still in Pakistan but Javid Kayani was standing at her bedside.

"When she woke up she had this very frightened look and her eyes were darting back and forth," he says.

"We knew she couldn't speak because she had a tube down her throat to assist her breathing. But I knew that she could hear so I told her who I was and I told her where she was, and she indicated by her eye movements that she understood."

Malala then gestured that she wanted to write, so a pad of paper and a pencil were brought. She attempted to write, but she had poor control of the pencil - unsurprising for someone with a head injury. Instead, an alphabet board was found and Javid Kayani watched her point to the letters one by one.

"The first word that she tapped out was 'country'. So I assumed she wanted to know where she was and I told her she was in England. And then the next word was 'father' and I told her that he was in Pakistan and he'd be coming in the next few days. That was the limit of the conversation."

More "conversations" would take place with one of the few visitors allowed in - Fiona Reynolds, who brought Malala a pink notebook in which to write down her questions.

Malala showed it to me, It is a poignant reminder of her search for answers in that period, especially the page where she simply asks, "Who did this to me?"

For Reynolds, the fact that Malala was able to articulate her questions was a huge relief.

"I was hoping that her cognitive abilities would still be there. I was also hoping that she hadn't lost the power of speech. So the fact that she was mouthing words and writing - I thought she's not lost the ability to speak.

"And remember she was talking in her third language [Pashto is Malala's mother tongue, Urdu her second language], so her speech centre was pretty intact."

Malala would go on to make an outstanding recovery, a tribute not just to the quality of the care she received - but also, her doctors told me, to her own resilience and determination.

Once she was out of intensive care, doctors began to consider what could be done about the paralysis of the left side of her face, which had caused great distress to her parents when they were reunited with her in Birmingham. Malala's father felt she had lost her smile.

"When she used to try to smile I would look at my wife and a shadow would fall on her face, because she thought, 'This is not the same Malala I gave birth to, this is not the girl who made our lives colourful.'"

 
Malala with her father Ziauddin Yousafzai in Birmingham

Malala's ear specialist Richard Irving thinks that in those early weeks, she was troubled by her new appearance.

"She was very reluctant initially to speak, she preferred to be photographed from the good side," he says. "I think it probably did have an emotional impact on her, which she didn't really voice to anyone, but it's very easy to understand in a 15-year-old."

After tests and scans, Irving's view was that the facial nerve was unlikely to repair itself, but without surgery, he couldn't be sure exactly what state it was in. The procedure would be a lengthy one, and this time Malala was herself able to weigh up the risks.

 

 A titanium plate used to repair Malala's skull

 

"She was in control," Irving says. "She would take advice from her father but she was making the decisions. She took a great interest in her medical care and didn't leave it to someone else."

During a 10-hour operation last November, he discovered that Malala's facial nerve had been entirely severed by the bullet and that a 2cm section of it was missing. For any movement to return to her face, the two ends of the nerve would have to be re-attached, but the missing section made it impossible to do this along the original route. Instead, Irving decided to expose the nerve and re-route it so it travelled a shorter distance.

In February this year, a further operation replaced the skull section removed by the surgeons in Pakistan, with a titanium plate. A cochlear implant was also inserted into Malala's left ear to correct damage to her hearing caused by the bullet. No further surgery is said to be required - her face should continue to improve over time, with the help of physiotherapy.

On 12 July, nine months after the shooting, came a major milestone - Malala stood up at the UN headquarters in New York and addressed a specially convened youth assembly. It was her 16th birthday and her speech was broadcast around the world.

"One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world," she said.

How did it feel to speak in public once again - this time on a bigger stage than she could ever have imagined?

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Malala's speech to the UN

• Speech delivered to 500 young people aged 12-25 from around the world
• Malala called on politicians to take urgent action to ensure every child can go to school
• UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also addressed the session, calling Malala "our hero"
• The event, described by the UN as Malala Day, was organised by former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, now the UN Special Envoy for Global Education

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"When I looked at 400 youth and people from more than 100 countries… I said that I am not only talking to the people of America and the other countries, I am talking to every person in the world," she says.

Ziauddin Yousafzai remembers it as the biggest day of his life. For him, Malala's speech was an assault on negative perceptions of Pashtuns, of Pakistanis and of Muslims.

"She was holding the lamp of hope and telling the world - we are not terrorists, we are peaceful, we love education."

Malala was introduced to the audience in New York that day by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the UN's special envoy on global education.

He has no doubt about her power to focus attention on the bigger picture of nearly 60 million out-of-school children around the world. "Because of Malala," he says, "there is a public understanding that something is wrong and has got to be done."

There is even speculation she could be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The girl from Swat has gone global, but she still believes she can and will return home to Pakistan. Few would advise her to do that anytime soon. There are still fears for her security and also criticism that she attracts too much attention, especially in the West.

But she seems sanguine about any criticism. "It's their right to express their feelings, and it's my right to say what I want," she says. "I want to do something for education, that's my only desire."

The danger for Malala is that the more time she spends away from Pakistan, the less she will be seen at home as a true Pakistani, and the more she will be identified with the West. But she has little time for distinctions between East and West.

"Education is education," she says. "If I am learning to be a doctor would there be an eastern stethoscope or a western stethoscope, would there be an eastern thermometer or a western thermometer?"

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• 1997:

  Born in Swat Valley, Pakistan

• 2009:

  Wrote anonymous BBC blog about life under the Taliban

• 2009-10:

  Identity revealed in TV interviews and a documentary

• 2011:

  International Children’s Peace Prize nominee

• 2012:

  Shot in assassination attempt by Taliban

• 2013:

  Nobel Peace Prize nominee, named one of Time magazine’s most influential people

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Still only 16, she has to balance being the world's most high-profile educational campaigner, in demand around the world, with the completion of her own schooling.

"I am still the old Malala. I still try to live normally but yes, my life has changed a lot," she tells me.

There are moments when she misses her old anonymity, but says it's "human nature" to want what you don't have.

She is an extraordinary young woman, wise beyond her years, sensible, sensitive and focused. She has experienced the worst of humanity, and the best of humanity - both from the medics who cared for her and the messages from many thousands of well-wishers.

I find one of those well-wishers in her own street in Swat, just outside the home that she never made it back to, on the afternoon she was shot. He is a young man called Farhanullah and he says the Taliban have blighted his life, destroying Swat's economic, social and educational fabric. Malala was "Pakistan's daughter", he says. "We should be proud that she has made such a big sacrifice for Pakistan."

I ask if he would like to send a message to Malala. Yes, he says. "She should continue her struggle. We are all with her."

The voice of the girl whom the Taliban tried to silence a year ago has been amplified beyond what anyone could have thought possible.

When I ask her what she thinks the militants achieved that day, she smiles.
"I think they may be regretting that they shot Malala," she says. "Now she is heard in every corner of the world."

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1. What was your reaction to this article? What surprised/ shocked you the most? 
2. Why are women in Pakistan more motivated than men to attain a good education? 
3. Why did the Taliban grow in influence in Pakistan in the early 2000s? 
4. Who shot Malala? Why?
5. What medical treatments did Malala undergo? 
6. What was Malala's message to the world in her speech to the UN? 
7. Do you think Malala should return home to Pakistan? Why or why not? 
8. What do you think can and should be done to help spread Malala's message? What can we do to help?