May 6, 2017

The convoy of Land Cruisers rattled down a dusty road near Nigeria’s border with Cameroon, plunging into the remote forest stronghold controlled by fighters from Boko Haram. If everything went to plan, they would arrive at the rendezvous point before 4 p.m.

Inside the trucks sat five captured fighters, freshly extracted from prison, the first piece of the government’s proposed bargain. In a separate vehicle, according to people involved in the deal, a security detail guarded Nigeria’s principal concession to the Islamist terror group, a black duffel bag containing two million euros in plastic-wrapped cash.

The journey had started under a drizzling rain in a town torched by insurgents and bombed by jets during a decade of war. Lookouts were charting their progress, the passengers assumed, and the road was notorious for improvised explosives. One misstep could derail months of planning.

The two men most responsible for engineering this moment had split up that afternoon. For nearly three years, they had roamed the world together, organizing secret talks with Boko Haram. One of them was Zannah Mustapha, a former Nigerian barrister who had founded a school for orphans. He had listened to endless diatribes and broken up fights at the negotiating table. He had mourned when other deals collapsed in a hail of gunfire.

The other man was a Swiss government agent who had served as Mustapha’s partner and mentor during the talks. He monitored the scene from a staging ground a few kilometers behind. The man’s identity was such a closely guarded secret that even high-ranking Nigerians didn’t know his full name. As an operative for the Human Security Division, a little-known cog in Switzerland’s diplomatic machine, he preferred it that way.

Not far away, 82 young women cloaked in black veils stumbled through the tall grass toward the rendezvous point, flanked by masked militants with guns. Hours earlier, their captors had ordered them to pack their belongings and start walking. They weren’t told where. They had no idea they were the world’s most famous hostages.

Naomi Adamu had once been an ordinary student at the Chibok Government Secondary School. She was older than most of her classmates. She played soccer. She studied mathematics in her dormitory bunk bed. Now, as she shuffled through the wilderness at gunpoint after 1,102 days in captivity, her eyes were hollow, her skin drawn tightly over her cheekbones.

The Chibok schoolgirls carried only a few visible possessions: strips of colored cloth, flip-flops and small twigs for pinning their hair. Tied around Adamu’s waist, concealed from view, was something the men with guns didn’t know about—an article of defiance. It was a diary, one of the few surviving written records of the girls’ ordeal.

When the Red Cross convoy arrived at the rendezvous point, the drivers pulled to the side of the road. Hiding in the bushes and in branches of acacia trees, snipers were training their rifles.

Zannah Mustapha, 58 years old, stepped out of the truck. He wore a pair of Calvin Klein spectacles and, in honor of the occasion, a crisp gray Kaftan-style robe. From the scrubland opposite him, a group of wiry young fighters in tattered fatigues gathered, cradling Kalashnikovs.

Behind them stood Boko Haram’s end of the bargain: Naomi Adamu and 81 of her classmates, the subjects of one of the largest manhunts in world history.

The captives huddled close and stared ahead, their eyes fixed. Some linked arms, others held hands. Mustapha noticed that one girl’s arm was in a sling. Another was missing a leg.

Since their 2014 kidnapping, the Chibok students had faced every manner of hardship, dragged from one remote camp to the next. More than a dozen had died from illness or military airstrikes. For all the girls knew, this could be the moment their ordeal ended, or a cruel disappointment.

Mustapha began to read the girls’ names aloud from a list. As a sign of respect, he had practiced how to pronounce them. He did not make eye contact with the hostages, however. If the transaction unraveled, he did not want to be haunted by the memories.

One of the militants removed the lens cap from a battered camcorder and began filming. A Boko Haram commander asked each hostage the same two questions:

“Were you raped?”

“Were you abused?”

No, they all answered.

The trauma the Chibok girls had endured as Boko Haram’s captives was extraordinary, but not unprecedented. As a tenet of its ideology and business model, the insurgents had taken thousands of other young Nigerians, many of whom were raped or conscripted as fighters. Most of these abductions went unnoticed. This one didn’t.

News of this particular kidnapping caught fire as celebrities started a global outcry demanding their release. As it grew, it became the most prominent example of mass global activism on social media. The high point came on May 7, 2014, when then-First Lady Michelle Obama tweeted a photo of herself holding a placard with the hashtag: #BringBackOurGirls.

All at once, a desperately poor and warring region of Nigeria—and the hostages hidden there—became a central preoccupation of the global war on terror.

The story of the Chibok girls, as it is commonly understood, reflects a landmark moment in world history. A simple hashtag on Twitter spurred seven nations to dispatch billions of dollars in armed forces, drones, satellites and sophisticated surveillance equipment. That combination of digital activism and international cooperation cut through the battle lines of a near decadelong civil war and helped Nigeria bring the girls home.

The full story, never before reported, says otherwise.

In interviews, many Nigerians involved in negotiations for the girls, from cabinet ministers to soldiers at the front, expressed bewilderment that a series of tweets could so thoroughly distort the priorities of a conflict that had been grinding to a stalemate.

Nigerian officials complained bitterly of social media’s intrusion and the compromises it forced them to consider. Some believed the girls’ fame only prolonged their captivity. Others resented the lack of focus placed on tens of thousands of other children the insurgents had abducted or murdered.

Then there is the matter of the ransom, which has never before been disclosed. Nigeria’s government hasn’t publicly detailed what it offered Boko Haram, or where any funds came from. Several senior officials confirmed that the swap included the release of five captured militants and a total of three million euros, delivered in two drop-offs.

“We had no choice,” said one cabinet minister. “And if we had to pay the same price again, we would.”

To a threadbare insurgency that had been driven into the mountains, the two payments in 2016 and 2017 represented a timely windfall. Since they collected the money, the group has stepped up its terrorist attacks. The number of suicide bombs detonated in Nigeria, most strapped to children, has seen a fourfold increase from the previous year.

At the exchange point, as he recited the list of names, Mustapha had a different view on the potential consequences of the deal. Bringing back these girls was, for him, the crowning achievement of his second act—a humanitarian mission devoted to helping Nigeria’s children.

To analyze the cost of freeing the girls was to miss the central point. Their release, he thought, was a prelude to ending the war. “#Bringbackourgirls had become the lock to the conflict,” he said, in an interview after the girls were freed. “I am trying to pick the lock.”

When asked about the price paid for the girls’ freedom, he pointed a finger skyward: “That’s between me and God.”

The following account of the kidnapping of the Chibok girls, their captivity and Nigeria’s attempts to free them is based on dozens of interviews on three continents with West African, European and American officials, including intermediaries between the warring parties.

Details of the girls’ captivity come from their handlers, the officials who debriefed them, and Naomi Adamu, the first of the Chibok girls to talk so extensively about the ordeal.

The Hashtag

Hours after the attack on Chibok, the first intelligence reports flashed across screens at the White House. The details coming through were terrifying: More than 100 girls were missing from a school in northeastern Nigeria, making it one of modern history’s largest abductions.

It was Monday morning in Washington. President Barack Obama was scheduled to meet faith leaders to discuss immigration policy, then hold a strategy session to discuss the escalating conflict in Ukraine.

To the surprise of Obama’s Africa team, the abduction of an entire student body barely registered in the press at home or abroad. In Nigeria, the reaction was muffled by military leaders who informed their president the kidnapping seemed to be a hoax.

“We knew this was going to be big,” said Grant T. Harris, Obama’s Africa director. “But it was initially met with a deafening silence.”

On the afternoon of April 15, Oby Ezekwesili thumbed through her phone and found a short article from the British Broadcasting Corporation. More than 100 girls had been kidnapped in Nigeria the previous night.

At first, she figured it was an error. She walked through the office of the aid organization where she worked, in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, and checked the story again. What if it wasn’t?

When Boko Haram burned the schoolboys in Buni Yadi, Ezekwesili, a former Nigerian education minister and mother of three sons, felt she had failed them. That evening, her son found her in her bedroom in tears. “These people’s children are missing, and nobody is talking about it or doing anything,” she told him.

In the following days, Ezekwesili began leading daily protests at a decrepit fountain near the Hilton. “What are we demanding?” the few demonstrators chanted. “Bring back our girls, now and alive!” One day, police shot tear gas at them. On another, hoodlums ran through the crowd, whacking protesters with plastic chairs.

As a former government official who had worked at the World Bank, Ezekwesili had developed a following on Twitter. For nine days, she posted a series of hashtags aimed at needling the Nigerian government. None caught on. Then a lawyer who followed her account tagged a post with #BringBackOurGirls.

Ezekwesili had picked up a handful of celebrity followers during her trans-Atlantic travels. On April 30, in the space of five hours, recording artists Mary J. Blige, Common and Young Jeezy tweeted the hashtag. Actors Reese Witherspoon, Whoopi Goldberg and Anne Hathaway followed suit, while Harrison Ford held up a placard on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival. “#BRINGBACKOURGIRLS You crazy mothaf—ers,” wrote comedian Chris Rock.

By mid-May, the hashtag had been mentioned more than 3.4 million times. Ezekwesili’s Twitter account became so overwhelmed that she stopped checking her mentions.

While Obama was preoccupied, another resident of the White House embraced the cause. His wife, Michelle, asked the National Security Council for regular briefings on the hunt for the missing students. On May 7, to the surprise of her husband’s staff, she called a photographer into the White House’s Diplomatic Room.

Standing opposite a portrait of George Washington and wearing a somber expression, she held up her placard. The tweet was liked or retweeted more than 179,000 times.



The first lady’s photo would front nearly every Nigerian newspaper, blindsiding President Goodluck Jonathan, whose military still suspected the kidnapping had never happened. Facing an unprecedented form of public pressure from his most powerful ally, Jonathan had few options. He accepted the White House’s request to launch a rescue effort.

Days later, a rapid-response team of roughly 40 officials deployed to the U.S. embassy in Abuja, including CIA analysts, two of the FBI’s top hostage negotiators and a therapist to treat the girls upon their return. The team even brought its own receptionist.

Within days, a U.S. Predator drone was circling northeastern Nigeria, scouring the forest floor. U.S. and Nigerian officials began to gather regularly around a table at a so-called intelligence fusion center.

Other nations followed suit. The U.K. sent a spy plane. Canada deployed special forces soldiers as advisers, and China pledged to send satellite imagery. “The line that came down from Obama,” said a U.S. diplomat in Abuja, “was do everything you can to get those girls.”

Convert or Die

At their camp in the forest, the Boko Haram militants lined up gasoline cans, rounded up the Christian girls they had taken from the Chibok school and told them it was time to choose. They could convert to Islam and marry a fighter. Or they could die.

Ever since the girls arrived, the insurgents had been pressuring them to embrace the group’s creed. “We were initially threatened that seven men would rape us if we refused to get married to their members,” Naomi Adamu said. “But we stood our ground.”

This tactic was new. “You don’t want to be Muslim?” the girls recalled the captors saying. “We are going to burn you.”

The girls were terrified. Still, they refused. The militants shook the cans menacingly. Then they broke into laughter. The cans were full of water.

For refusing to marry a member and convert, the girls became slaves. The militants assumed hard labor and deprivations would wear them down. The girls said it strengthened their bond. “Anything that happens, happens,” Adamu and her classmates told each other.

The road to captivity had been a two-day journey for the girls, often on foot. Several students had suffered gashes, broken limbs and scorpion bites. After passing through a labyrinth of backwoods tracks, they arrived at the beating heart of the insurgency: a thousands-strong encampment of mud-brick homes powered by stolen generators.

The Sambisa Forest, where the hideout was located, consisted of 250 square miles of forbidding wilderness. During colonial times, the forest had been set aside as a game reserve. Boko Haram saw advantages in its topography. Gunmen riding motorcycles and pickups launched deadly raids on military outposts, then retreated into scrubland only they could navigate.

On reaching the camp, Adamu said, she cried through the night. She and her classmates had no idea a world-wide social media campaign was being waged on their behalf. “We were just on our own,” Adamu said. “They are going to kill us, or even burn us—that was what I was thinking.”

For the Muslim students, and a handful of their Christian classmates who agreed to convert, captivity brought a different, though no less harrowing set of consequences. They were pushed into sexual bondage.

In the early days of captivity, two of Adamu’s closest friends succumbed to the pressure to marry. That night, Adamu said, she cried herself to sleep. She felt sick for a week. “I was thinking about what was happening to them,” she said.

Christian girls who refused to yield were denied tents and forced to sleep under trees and in the rain. They cooked beans, rice and yams for the militants, and ate little themselves, usually one meal near sunset. They were sent to repair roads, treat injuries and amputate the limbs of wounded fighters. They buried the dead in shallow graves.

To keep the girls hidden, their guards split them into small groups and relocated them constantly. “They were moved through every kind of terrain: desert, forest, mountain,” said one official who debriefed them.

One asset the Chibok hostages had was their bond, developed over years of sharing bunk beds and dorms. Many of their families were friends. They also had a common language, Kibaku, spoken almost exclusively in Chibok and understood by 0.1% of Nigerians. In captivity, it was an uncrackable code, allowing them to communicate privately.

To force the girls to study the teachings of Islam, the guards gave them flimsy notepads, some with cartoon characters on the cover, for transcribing recitations from the Quran. The girls were accustomed to copying lessons verbatim from the blackboard. Here, under the watchful eyes of violent captors, they turned the notebooks into diaries, to tell their own stories.

“We were hoping that we would eventually be released,” Adamu said. Or if they died, that the diaries might someday be found. “We wanted the world to see what we witnessed,” she said.

The girls continued to show no enthusiasm for their religious studies, and their captors decided to try a new tactic. They took Adamu and 21 others to meet Shekau.

The warlord who controlled their fate sat on a chair flanked by two deputies with guns, each of them shooting video of the meeting on tablet computers. Shekau was dressed in a Nigerian military uniform underneath a sweater, balancing a rifle and a Quran on his lap.

“You have shown that you do not like the Islamic religion,” he began. He launched into a long lecture about Boko Haram fighters in Nigerian prisons being denied food and water. “God will not hold me responsible for any one of you,” Shekau said.

Kidnapping the girls had helped Boko Haram by deflating the morale of Nigeria’s soldiers. The insurgency had been notching battlefield victories. But Shekau seemed to view them as a nuisance.

The thousands of young boys he’d kidnapped could be pulled into his army to fight, but the girls had little military value. It took money and manpower to feed and guard them. Thinking back on the meeting, Adamu said, Shekau didn’t show any sign that he had grasped how valuable social media had made the young women seated before him.

“I will sell them in the market, swear to God,” he shouted in a YouTube video posted around the same time. “Because they are our slaves!”

‘Cancel the Operation’

In the space of a month, the high-tech, seven-nation military hostage-rescue operation began to stumble. The British spy plane broke down after a few weeks. The FBI negotiators bugged out. Nigerian officials don’t recall ever seeing any satellite data from China.

On several occasions, when U.S. drones spotted large groups in Sambisa Forest they believed to be the Chibok girls, the analysts had to wait up to 72 hours for approval from Washington before sharing their intelligence with the Nigerians. By then, the girls had usually been moved. In some cases, U.S. officials said, the Nigerians didn’t follow up on leads.

Soon, the Nigerians stopped returning American phone calls. “We had to tell them: Obama is not our president! You’re not in Washington now,” said one official.

“We gave them a hammer, but they never picked it up,” an American officer said. “There wasn’t enough political will.”

The #BringBackOurGirls campaign had made Nigeria a magnet for reward chasers and have-a-go heroes. The government fueled the chaos by paying millions of dollars for information that led nowhere.

Reuben Abati, President Jonathan’s spokesman at the time, acknowledged the search became a gold rush. “There were too many actors working at cross-purposes,” he said.

Nigeria’s decision to call Ahmad Salkida, the grocery store security guard, began to look prescient. In an early meeting with Nigeria’s security chiefs, Salkida shared an insight, gleaned from his sources, that the Twitter activists and foreign rescue brigades hadn’t considered. Shekau was tired of the girls and wanted to bring them back, too.

Salkida contacted Boko Haram to request a meeting with Shekau. The insurgents said they would allow it, so long as Salkida left his phone behind. If he brought it, they’d kill him, they said.

Boko Haram agreed to the meeting and pointed Salkida to a rendezvous point in northeastern Nigeria. Once there, he was collected in a car and dropped off to wait for another driver. After several more trade-offs and a bumpy nine-hour ride on the back of a motorcycle, he arrived at the Sambisa camp, where Shekau welcomed him with a hug.

The warlord was more sober in person than the barking figure on YouTube, Salkida said. After they prayed together, Shekau walked off with hardly a word, directing Salkida to an air-conditioned tent.

After debating with Shekau’s deputies into the wee hours, Salkida woke the next morning to an encouraging sight: the Chibok girls, about 100 of them, some still wearing their checkered-print school uniforms. Naomi Adamu was there, sitting on a patch of scrub and staring back defiantly. A militant began filming a proof of life video, which Salkida took as a sign that Shekau was interested in striking a bargain.

Back in Abuja, he brought the video to the president, who gave his blessing to cut a deal.

Salkida spent the next few weeks exchanging text messages with the two sides to help Nigeria piece together the terms of the girls’ release. The government would load a vehicle with five imprisoned Boko Haram fighters. The insurgents would deliver 20 girls. The two sides would repeat the process until one ran out of captives. Nigerian officials concluded it was the best deal they could hope for. They told him to go ahead.

After scheduling the first exchange, Salkida and the prisoners climbed inside six government vehicles and rode in a convoy to the designated exchange point in the city of Damaturu. It was all systems go.

As evening fell the day before the swap, Salkida’s phone rang. It was a ranking figure in the Nigerian military. The man gave Salkida a curt order.

Cancel the operation.

The military had grown uncomfortable with the trade. Some still thought the kidnapping was a hoax and the exchange a feint to free Boko Haram fighters. Others simply hated negotiating with terrorists.

Shekau was furious. “Nigerians are saying bring back our girls?” he screamed in a tape posted on YouTube weeks later. “Bring back our prisoners of war!”

Salkida flew back to Dubai feeling betrayed.

As the calendar turned to 2015, the rescue effort had all but collapsed. Almost all of the U.S. operatives had been pulled out, and the Twitter community had moved on to a crisis in West Africa, the Ebola epidemic. In Nigeria, a tightening presidential race dominated the news.

There was one ray of hope that had been kept from view. After secretly making contact with Boko Haram, Zannah Mustapha received a video from the militants. It showed the Chibok girls, very much alive, resting against a bullet-riddled wall. Despite the disaster in Damaturu, the insurgents were still open to cutting a deal.

Mustapha considered taking the footage to the president but decided against it. He remembered one of the lessons he’d learned in Switzerland: Negotiations take time. “I realized, at that moment, I needed to keep my mouth shut,” he said.

The Betrayal

To maintain their spirits in the Sambisa camps, and their unity, the girls began engaging in small acts of rebellion.

They whispered Christian songs in Kibaku. They traded stories from back in Chibok and awarded their captors nicknames. “Soon Soon” was a commander who kept promising they’d be released, “soon, soon.”

When instructed to chant Muslim prayers, the girls mouthed Christian verse instead. On Friday prayers, they sat together. They retold the Old Testament story of Job, who was tortured by Satan but never abandoned his faith. “This was their favorite,” a psychologist who later treated them said. “It helped them make sense of their situation.”

Most of the Christian girls had steadfastly refused to embrace Islam and marry fighters. Boko Haram decided it was time to try a new approach.

The militants told the girls they could all go home, but only if every single one of them converted.

The proposal began to cleave the girls into two camps. Those who were willing to accept the offer, or had already converted, began trying to persuade the others. The arguments became heated. Some of the holdouts flatly refused; others said they didn’t trust their captors.

Eventually, one of the converts grew so angry at the holdouts that she took a desperate step. She approached her group’s commander and said her classmates were keeping diaries.

A panic broke out. Some girls opted to throw their notebooks in water, or burn or bury them. Naomi Adamu had two notebooks. One had a picture of Cinderella on the cover. There were many pages of handwritten entries, some by her, some by classmates. She decided she couldn't destroy them. She tucked them inside her clothes.

Nearly all of the holdouts refused to convert. “We would rather die than accept,” Adamu said.

Though the girls didn’t know it, their captors were reluctant to harm them. Boko Haram finally grasped that the Chibok girls were the among the world’s most valuable hostages. Besides, they had a bigger problem. Their enemies were coming.

The initial foreign deployment of drones and aircraft, justified as a rescue effort, had evolved into a grisly aerial assault. On the ground, South African mercenaries, crack troops from Chad and vigilantes packing muskets entered the forest to engage in gunbattles with Boko Haram. Nights now brought the threat of airstrikes.

One evening, the whoosh of jet engines sent Adamu’s captors scrambling. Soon the camp erupted into smoke, flame and the smell of sulfur. “There were jet bombers hovering over our heads, bullets passing close to our ears,” Adamu said. Six men died in front of her.

She decided to make a break for it, and sprinted through the forest. Soon however, she was lost and hungry. For five days, she wandered the woods in silence, turning delirious. A militant found her.

Back at the camp, she felt a strange sense of resolve. “I had seen so many dead bodies,” Adamu said. “I was no longer afraid to die.”

The relentless attacks of 2015 pushed Boko Haram back into the hills, and the girls came with them. In their camps, the girls had seen other, less-valuable hostages eating leaves or sticks. Children died constantly of hunger, thirst and disease. Though they slept outside, the Chibok girls knew they had it better than some.

The more Boko Haram retreated, the more that distinction faded. As they moved from camp to camp, food became scarce. The Chibok girls chewed tree bark as they waited for meals that never came. They used plastic bags to lift sips of water from muddy puddles, sometimes going thirsty for up to four days. Adamu had a long-running kidney condition, which brought physical agony. “We were left to eat grass,” she said.

In the summer of 2015, Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s newly elected president, gathered his cabinet for a meeting. The list of girls reported killed had grown, and the others were said to be near starvation. Two weeks before Buhari’s election, Shekau made an audio recording pledging allegiance to Islamic State.

Buhari had won the presidency in March on the strength of his vow to wrap an iron grip around the insurgency. He set a hard target. He wanted the girls freed by Sept. 5, his 100th day in office.

After leading a 1983 military coup, Buhari had ruled Nigeria as a dictator for 19 months, imposing a harsh code of law and order. In a so-called “war on indiscipline,” he ordered soldiers to whip Nigerians who cut in line and demanded retroactive death sentences for drug dealers.

On taking elected office, Buhari turned over the Chibok negotiations to Nigeria’s State Security Service and began asking his aides sharp strategic questions about the insurgency and its vulnerabilities.

Beyond his military bluster, the president had another motivation for freeing the girls. He reminded aides he had nine daughters of his own. “I’ve never seen Buhari’s tears except in the case of the Chibok girls,” said a senior intelligence adviser to the president: “This is personal.”

The Deal

For more than a year, the world heard almost nothing about the Chibok girls. Social media had gone dark. Buhari, failing to meet his deadline, moved to a more confrontational strategy. Negotiations were officially off the books. The situation appeared stagnant.

Meanwhile, Boko Haram continued its terrorist attacks throughout the north. In the fall of 2015, after Mustapha returned from his second training session in Switzerland, the insurgents detonated a bomb in Maiduguri just blocks from his school. When the last of his students was accounted for, Mustapha threw a celebratory feast.

He watched the children of Boko Haram sitting with the children of government soldiers sharing plates of chicken and rice. “It made me stronger,” he said. “It made me think the new generation could make peace. They will grow up and make a settlement.”

With a renewed spirit, Mustapha scheduled meetings with Nigerian intelligence operatives and Swiss diplomats. He traveled the globe to meet in secret with Boko Haram emissaries. In meetings, he began taking charge, putting both sides in their place. Sometimes he let them argue for hours until fights broke out. Other times he cut meetings short after 15 minutes. At one session he listened to both sides discuss an issue, then outlined a middle ground so persuasively the rival parties broke out in applause.

Freedom and Its Price

Under the terms of the first exchange, which took place on Oct. 13, 2016, Nigeria expected to receive 20 hostages. Instead, Boko Haram brought 21. The extra girl, the militants told Mustapha, was a personal gift to him. “You took care of our children when no one else would,” explained a Boko Haram commander. The barrister allowed himself a smile.

The girls climbed into Red Cross Land Cruisers, discarded their veils and burst into a hymn in Kibaku. “Praise God!” they sang.

The world’s attention was focused elsewhere. The U.S. presidential election was three weeks away and Hurricane Matthew was pummeling the Carolinas. Although Oby Ezekwesili continued to lead protests demanding the release of the other girls, the celebrities moved on.

Michelle Obama last addressed the girls’ plight in April 2017 at a World Bank event in Washington. Through her office, she declined to comment, as did former President Obama.

The second exchange on May 6 freed another 82 captives, including Naomi Adamu. She pressed her face to the window as the convoy drove away, watching her captors became small figures on the horizon.

After a restless night’s sleep in a military barracks, she was bundled onto an airplane for the first time. She and her classmates landed in Abuja and rode in a motorcade to a presidential banquet hall. There she watched a compilation of CNN footage and learned what none of the Chibok girls had known. They were a global cause célèbre.

One by one, in the following days, handlers peppered the girls with questions to see if they’d been radicalized. Is the earth flat? they asked.

Each of them said no.

Asked if the Trump administration knew about the second trade, which took place on its watch, a spokesman for President Donald Trump’s National Security Council said: “To my knowledge, not in advance.”

Of the 276 kidnapped schoolgirls, 163 are now free: Fifty-seven fled in the early hours and days after the initial attack. Three more escaped later. The Swiss-coached mediation secured 103.

Of the remaining 113, at least 13 have died, officials say. Some were felled by malaria, hunger or a snake bite. The majority died in airstrikes. Among those forcibly married to fighters, at least two died in childbirth.

The last command Boko Haram made to the Chibok girls before their release was a parting threat. “If you go back to school, we’ll kidnap you again.”

They ignored that order, too.

Since September, the freed girls have been living in the northeastern city of Yola learning music, literature and computer science in air-conditioned rooms on the sprawling and secure campus of the American University of Nigeria. They walk arm-in-arm over manicured grass, hold spelling bees, watch movies and do yoga together. Outside the campus gates, tens of thousands of escaped Boko Haram victims suffer anonymously.

Zannah Mustapha toured Europe after the second exchange, collecting awards. At a glitzy gala in Geneva, Angelina Jolie, a U.N. goodwill ambassador, told him: “Mr. Mustapha, you are an inspiration.”

“I have a vision for peace in Nigeria,” he told the crowd, which later gave him a standing ovation. “We are in a journey to understand our differences and overcome our adversity.”

Since the insurgents collected their three million euros, some Nigerian officials say an army that had struggled to feed itself seems replenished. Since the first exchange, Boko Haram has sent more than 90 children strapped with bombs into public places. More than 1,000 people have died and two million are homeless. Kidnappings have continued as well.

A month after the final exchange, Shekau released a video boasting he’d abducted 10 policewomen.

The Nigerian government believes it is finally winning the war. President Buhari is starving Shekau out, officials say. Peace talks are ongoing. Thousands of fighters may be willing to come out of the hills.

Behind the scenes as always, the Swiss operative from the Human Security Division continues to work on the larger goal of a lasting peace in Nigeria.

After helping to identify prisoners for Mustapha, Salkida decided to stay in Abuja. He remains a go-between as the war rages on.

Though the two weren’t always aware of the other’s work, Mustapha and Salkida were never strangers. They knew one another from Maiduguri. Asked to comment on Salkida’s prowess as a mediator, the barrister demurred. “He is my younger brother,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to say anything bad about him.”

Mustapha doesn’t think the deal empowered the insurgency. “I have done this mediation with the highest sense of sincerity,” he said.

The office of Nigeria’s president did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Boko Haram could not be reached.

For the first time in four years, Naomi Adamu plans to spend Christmas with her mother. In an interview on a recent afternoon at her aunt’s one-room apartment in Maiduguri, the college student said she is hoping to study medicine. She saw no problem with the ransom payments.

“The government should yield to the requests of the Boko Haram terrorists so the remaining girls can be free,” she said.

The diaries the girls kept, which haven’t been published, documented what one official who debriefed the girls called “a hard, hard life. These girls are combat veterans. They are tough,” the official added.

Mustapha said he has unambiguous reverence for the Chibok girls he helped bring home. They remind him of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the biblical characters who were thrown into a fire but escaped unburned.

“They survived,” he said, “because they stuck together.”

9jakohai:
This is a good article, possibly the best article on the Chibok saga.

LRNZH:


Yesso... could not resist posting it on Nairaland.
It is well researched and covers all angles of the story without political lean

otil1:
Seems too long for lazy Nairalanders.

Nairalanders I hail thee!

Pepsi101:
Paying a ransom of such huge amount is akin to arming the insurgents with enough cash to procure weapons.

usba:
Long story but reading it will give you a better insight. iIf only GEJ reacted immediately the girls were missing, we would be having a different discussion but GEJ sorrounded himself with thieves, imbeciles and dimwitted crooks.

2cato:

And bubu sorrounded him self with 40 gangs of thieves i just bought fuel 4 500 per litter what do you have to say to that
If you believe that chibok girls story is real click like
But if you know it is scam click share

ajepako:
Now this is called investigative journalism..

Backed with facts, figures, quotations, evidence and pictures..

Though l sometimes disagree with FFK but in this instance, his tweet is right on the Chibok saga

2cato:


If you believe that chibok girls story is real click like
But if you know it is scam click share

Saaruman:
Buhari d Vegetable released imprisoned boko haram fighters captured by GEJ'S govt and millions of euros as Ransome for boko haram northern political chess game (Chibok Girls), The Terrorist used the cash buhari gave them to revitalized themselves as was confirmed by Yari. Now d same Vegetable is planning to withdraw $1 billion dollars from ECA to fight boko haram, the same boko haram he gave millions of euros to in ransom. What kind of logic is this?
Buhari's govt is the worst govt since God created himself!!!!



BTW, when are they going to release the remaining Chibok girls they are hiding? Na only God go punish these people.
Chibok girls is nothing but a political chess game between northerners and Barack Obama to return power to the north.

LRNZH:


You take this matter personal sha...

Saaruman:
All those involved in Chibok abduction enterprise will soon pay for their crimes.