Two years ago, Boko Haram kidnapped 276 Nigerian girls from their school dormitory in the dead of night, setting off international outrage.
First lady Michelle Obama pleaded with the world to “#BringBackOurGirls” in a photo that went viral on the internet.
{mosads}But on Thursday, the second anniversary of the kidnapping, most have yet to be found. Fifty-seven of the girls managed to escape in 2014, but the fates of 219 remain unknown.
“The fate of the Chibok girls is an enduring mystery,” said Jennifer Cooke, the director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“Their whereabouts are unknown. They may have been broken up into smaller groups and scattered, whether in Niger, in neighboring Chad and Cameroon,” she added. “There’s a huge uncertainty around that.”
Some of the girls may be dead, or they may have been sold into slavery. CNN on Wednesday reported that it obtained a video of 15 girls sent to negotiators as a “proof of life.”
Since the kidnapping, thousands more people have been abducted by Islamic extremists in West Africa, compounding a problem that experts say has been overshadowed by chaos in the Middle East.
The activities of Boko Haram — the extremist group whose name translates to “Western education is forbidden” — has crippled parts of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. The group is the single deadliest global terrorist group, responsible for 6,644 deaths in 2014, according to ths Institute for Global Economics and Peace.
The U.S. has given hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the region and has also been assisting with training and intelligence.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill and officials in the Obama administration have repeatedly expressed support for the fight against Boko Haram.
But to a large extent, Boko Haram’s reign of terror has been overshadowed by jihadists based in the Middle East, most notably the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which has carried out attacks in France and Belgium.
“The human toll that Boko Haram has taken suggests that, as a threat to peace and security, as a threat to humanity, it ought to have the same kind of priority as a counterterror threat as the fight against ISIS does,” said Reuben Brigety, the dean of the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and a former diplomat.
But ultimate responsibility rests with Nigeria, observers said, which has been plagued by corruption, as well as political and economic turbulence.
“You can’t clap with one hand,” Brigety said. “The partners can only assist as much as the government is creating conditions for effective partnership.”
Last year’s election of Muhammadu Buhari as president of Nigeria was widely welcomed as a positive step in the fight against Boko Haram. Buhari, a Muslim from Nigeria’s poorer north, was in part elected on his pledge to combat the extremist group, and he has made moves to work with other countries.
Progress has been made, watchers say, albeit slowly.
“Just like with President Obama, one man alone isn’t going to be able to completely overhaul a government,” said Sarah Margon, Human Rights Watch’s Washington director.
“The Buhari administration has set forth some very important goalposts,” she added. “But when push comes to shove, if you look at what’s actually changed in the case of the fight against Boko Haram, it hasn’t really been enough to say that the military operations are over or that Boko Haram has been defeated.”
The 2014 capture of the 276 girls in Chibok, an area in the northeastern state of Borno, rattled the world because so many children were abducted at one time.
A dozen of the girls who escaped reported to Human Rights Watch that men entered the school grounds on motorcycles around midnight, scaring away the only guard on site.
“We were told to be quiet,” an 18-year-old told the rights group. “We all started crying, and he told us to shut up.”
The militants took girls of all religions, escapees reported, including Muslims. Not all fit in one truck, and the rest were made to walk for roughly 10 miles at gunpoint. Three were released because there was no room for them, and others escaped by jumping off the back of the truck or during bathroom stops.
The April 2014 abduction was just one of many.
A few months later, roughly 400 people, including at least 300 elementary school children, were taken captive from the small town of Damasak, approximately 200 miles north of Chibok on the country’s border with Niger. Most of those children have also not been heard from since.
In total, more than 2.6 million people have been displaced by the group’s violence.
By all accounts, Boko Haram’s tactics are barbaric.
The United Nations children’s agency this week reported that children — sometimes as young as eight — were forced to wear bombs 44 times across the region last year. In three-quarters of those cases, girls were used to carry out the attacks.
When people who have been kidnapped escape or are freed, they face intense mistrust reentering their communities.
Often, the women and girls who are pregnant due to rape are rejected by their old friends and neighbors as “hyenas among dogs” filled with “bad blood” from the father of their children, aid group International Alert described in a report earlier this year.