How I was kidnapped, recruited by Boko Haram - Freed captive narrates experience

In 2016, there were over 2, 000 confirmed cases of forced recruitment of boys by Boko Haram militants fighting in the ongoing conflict in northeast Nigeria.

Also, the United Nation International Children's Fund (UNICEF) said that the estimates indicated that tens of thousands under the age of 18 were being used in conflicts worldwide, adding that the exact data on the number of children used and recruited in armed conflict was difficult to ascertain because of the unlawful nature of child recruitment.

In this piece, Bukar, who is one of the children kidnapped and recruited by the dreaded insurgents, explains how he escaped from Boko Haram’s den, why he wants to see his parents and return to school.

Bukar’s mother sent him to collect water early one morning when Boko Haram attacked and he was kidnapped.

“They told us to go and do the work of God,” he remembers. “The men were holding guns so I had no choice but to follow them.”

Boko Haram took them into the forest and Bukar was quickly forced to help with the insurgency efforts by carrying fuel and driving a motorbike.

“If I had refused they would have shot me,” Bukar remembers. “They told me that. I was so afraid that they would shoot me. I just wanted to survive.”

Bukar would plan his escape every day when the insurgents would conduct a head count to make sure they hadn’t lost any captives. The guard who kept watch was told to kill anyone that ran away. What’s more, the guard himself was often a boy and fellow captive, and the boys were told that the guard would be executed if anyone escaped on his watch.

Life with Boko Haram was a daily struggle for survival. The boys and girls were separated and kept in canvas tents. Each night Bukar would hear the boys crying. “When I heard them crying sometimes I would cry too,” he says. The feeling of hopelessness was inescapable.

After a few months, the group got words of the advancing military and the insurgents decided to regroup, some of the children took up arms to join the fight. Bukar saw the defectors killed as they fled and decided it would be safer to stay until he could slip away without being noticed.

As a motorbike driver, Bukar was forced to drive heavily armed Boko Haram fighters in to battle. One day in the chaos of combat he was able to escape on his bike.

“When I turned to escape they were trying to work out where I was going,” he says. “I told them I was coming back, they started shooting at me but I swerved on the bike and dodged their bullets.”

Going into hiding, Bukar eventually negotiated his way onto a truck bound for Maiduguri. When he made it to the city, with nowhere to go, he roamed the streets trying to find food and work so he could survive.

“For two days I didn’t eat, I was just walking around the street, trying to beg, to find something to eat,” he says.

Life of the streets of Maiduguri is brutal. Still stranded, Bukar moves around the city each day trying to survive on what bits of work he might find and whatever food he can scrounged. Despite all of this, he says the situation is still preferable to life with Boko Haram.

When Bukar does manage to find somewhere to sleep at night he often wakes the people around him with his nightmares. He never tells anyone what haunts him when he sleeps for the stigma of his association with Boko Haram will make daily life unbearable.

All Bukar really wants is to see his parents again and return to school. He has no money to make the two hour journey home to see if they have survived.

“I believe that someday I’ll be reunited with my parents. I think they are still alive. I hope they are still in Monguno,” he says optimistically. “There is no way for me to contact them to find out if there is any news because I have no money. I hope that one day I’ll be able to go back to my village and find my family. Once I get back to my parents, everything will come back to life.”

It estimated that over 1.3 million children like Bukar have been displaced by ongoing conflict in northeast Nigeria. Through its family reunification programme UNICEF is working to relocate Bukar’s parents and help other children in this situation find their way home.