[ad_1]
Annas Shuaibu says she woke up to the sound of gunfire from men breaking into her boarding school in northwestern Nigeria in a nightly raid. He and hundreds of other children were arrested and forced out of school into a nearby forest.
After several hours of walking through the forest, the armed men ordered them to stop walking and warned them not to try to flee, Shuaibu said. “They said that even if you tried to escape, or we allowed you to run, you would not go anywhere. Rather, you will die in the forest, ”he said.
Shuaibu, 16, was among 344 students who were abducted from the Government Science High School, a boarding school for boys, on December 11 in Kankara city, Katsina state.
The children were detained for six days before security services rescued them Thursday from the Rugu forest, a vast forested area that encompasses four of Nigeria’s 36 states.
The incident fueled anger over insecurity that has gripped much of the country, Africa’s most populous, and evoked memories of the 2014 Boko Haram abduction of more than 270 schoolgirls in the northeastern city of Chibok.
Dressed in a turquoise kaftan and smiling broadly while playing soccer with friends near his home in Kankara, Shuaibu seemed carefree one day after reuniting with his family.
But the smile left his face when he described the conditions in which he and the other children were being held.
“I was really scared because I didn’t know where we were going,” he said, speaking quietly and often staring at the ground as he described how he walked through the woods and children were beaten by their captors.
Shuaibu, who said he did not know how many people were holding them, said the children received little food, sometimes resorting to eating leaves and drinking from pools of water in the forest.
[ad_2]
