A year ago, the Nigerian Muslim terrorist group Boko Haram roused the world by kidnapping almost 300 girls from school, and they have not slowed down their atrocities since. According to a just released report from UNICEF, Missing Childhoods, Boko Haram killed 7,300 last year and has murdered over 1,000 so far this year. (In its own report Amnesty International gives the figures of “more than 4,000 people, although the true figure is almost certainly higher” for 2014 and 1,500 for the first three months of 2015.)

Since 2009, when they increased their attacks on Christians and others — including Muslim leaders —  the group has killed at least 15,000 people. (This doesn’t include the destruction of homes, churches, hospitals and businesses, which leave the survivors without places to live, worship or work.)

Amnesty International’s extensive new report, “Our job is to shoot, slaughter and kill,” describes the group’s tactics:

The group bombed civilian targets across Nigeria, raided towns and villages in the north-east and from July 2014 began to capture major towns. … Boko Haram used improvised explosive devices (IEDs), including car bombs, and suicide bombers to kill civilians at markets, transport hubs, schools and other public institutions. They repeatedly attacked cities in the north-east, but also struck targets in cities across Nigeria. In 46 bomb attacks between January 2014 and March 2015, the group killed at least 817 people.

Some attacks, the report continued,

were carried out by just two or three gunmen on a motorcycle, some by hundreds of fighters supported by tanks and anti-aircraft weapons mounted on flat-bed trucks. The fighters shot civilians in the streets and in their homes. They stole from people’s houses, shops and markets, burned these buildings and left. They frequently abducted civilians. In some attacks, Boko Haram gunmen quietly entered villages or towns and assassinated specific individuals identified in advance. In others, Boko Haram assembled civilians and preached to them, instructing them not to be loyal to the government and to follow Boko Haram’s version of Islam. Boko Haram sometimes gave civilians a choice: to be killed or join the group. More frequently, fighters simply shot civilians or cut their throats. …

When Boko Haram fighters took control of towns and villages, they arrived in large numbers and first targeted the military or police presence. After forcing soldiers to abandon their barracks, Boko Haram fighters would capture arms and ammunition left behind. Then they proceeded to target civilians, shooting them as they tried to flee or searching out men of fighting age in their homes and executing them. Often the gunmen divided their forces during attacks, with one group going from house to house to collect valuables and set houses on fire, one looting shops, one killing people and one abducting residents or preventing them from fleeing.

The group also kidnaps many, taking women and girls for wives, servants and sex slaves, men for servants or soldiers, although it more often executes the men of a village it raids. In the last fifteen months, Boko Haram has kidnapped 2,000 or more women and girls. One young woman named Aisha, 19, quoted by Amnesty International in an article on the report, had been kidnapped with her sister, the bride, and the bride’s sister.

Boko Haram took them to a camp in Gullak, Adamawa state, home to approximately 100 abducted girls. One week later, Boko Haram forced the bride and the bride’s sister to marry their fighters. They also taught Aisha and the other women and girls how to fight. “They used to train girls how to shoot guns. I was among the girls trained to shoot. I was also trained how to use bombs and how to attack a village,” Aisha told Amnesty International. “This training went on for three weeks after we arrived. Then they started sending some of us to operations. I went on one operation to my own village.”

Aisha said that during the three months that she was held captive, she was raped repeatedly, sometimes by groups of up to six fighters. She also saw more than 50 people killed by Boko Haram, including her sister. “Some of them refused to convert. Some refused to learn how to kill others. They were buried in a mass grave in the bush. They’ll just pack the dead bodies and dump them in a big hole, but not deep enough. I didn’t see the hole, but we used to get the smell from the dead bodies when they start getting rotten.”

The article also included a ten-year-old boy’s description of the stonings he’d witnessed. “They stone them to death on Fridays. They will gather all the children and ask them to stone. I participated in the stoning . … They will dig a hole, bury all the body and stone the head. When the person dies, they will leave the stones until the body decays.”

The Guardian had previously reported that Boko Haram was responsible for almost half the civilian deaths in Africa last year. (Somalia, whose government battles al-Shabaab, had the second highest number of victims.) “Civilians are quite expendable,” explains Clionadh Raleigh, director of the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project. “They’re a way to relay information about your relative strength in a conflict environment. In order to be taken seriously, you either have to engage with the military, which I think a lot of them don’t necessarily want to do, or you can make trouble for the government — and that trouble often comes down to attacking civilians.”

Buzzfeed News reports: “’What we have seen is that the tactics used by Boko Haram have evolved over time,’ Laurent Duvillier, one of the authors of the [UNICEF] report, told BuzzFeed News. The group initially struck schools at night when they were empty, and then progressed to attacking them when pupils and teachers were there to get more attention, he said. Over the last six months, there has been a rise in abducting children to swell the group’s ranks.”

“I think the thing that the press and the media generally misunderstand is the poverty of the situation in which this phenomenon has arisen,” explains Fr. Peter Ryan, interviewed for CNA by Matt Hadro. Fr. Ryan, who lived for eleven years in Nigeria and visited the country many times in the fifteen years he lived in nearby Ghana, now teaches theology at Fordham University. “People think Nigeria and they think well, it’s a major oil producer [but] the money does not filter down to the lower levels.” With all the country’s oil wealth, most of the elites “enrich themselves and remain sort of a permanent wealthy elite.”

Ryan argues that Nigeria must put its efforts into improving a poor educational system and building infrastructure. Over ten million school age children in Nigeria do not attend school, most of them in the north, reports Missing Childhoods. “In northeast Nigeria, students and teachers have been deliberately targeted. More than 300 schools have been severely damaged or destroyed and at least 196 teachers and 314 school children were killed in the period between January 2012 and December 2014.”

Displaced Survivors

Those who survive face many problems. Boko Haram has driven over a million Nigerians from their homes, reports the International Organization for Migration. About one-fifth of these IDPs (internally displaced persons) have fled across the border into Cameroon, Chad and Niger. An IOM mission found that

displacement is concentrated mainly outside camps, putting a huge strain on host communities. “Internally displaced people (IDPs) and the friends and families hosting them are reaching the limit of their ability to cope with the situation,” said Giovanni Cassani, an IOM Regional Emergency Specialist, on behalf of the assessment team. “These are often poor and disenfranchised communities where basic services and infrastructure are very limited. Many now lack adequate shelter, household items and access to income generating activities.”

“Unicef has warned that the hundreds of thousands of displaced people are putting additional strain on already stretched health, education and social services systems in host communities,” reports The Guardian.

“As people flee their homes, a large and growing number of children have been separated from their parents,” reports Missing Childhoods. “An assessment conducted in 33 locations in Borno and Yobe States in Nigeria found nearly 2,400 separated and unaccompanied children among a population of nearly 150,000 displaced persons.” The UNICEF report also notes:

Children are experiencing immense suffering. Many have seen parents, siblings, relatives or neighbours killed, tortured or abducted. Many have had to run for their lives and walk for days to reach safety. Others have been exposed to extreme violence and abuse.

“Some children are very shy,” said Marzia Vigliaroni from COOPI, a UNICEF partner in charge of managing a child-friendly space in Diffa, Niger. “They won’t speak or participate in our activities; they need psycho-social support. We ask them to make drawings of their experience during the attack. They draw people with slit throats and people drowning in the river. This shows us how deeply affected children are. We work with them individually; we try to help them forget the traumatizing events they have experienced and continue their lives like other children and forget what they had to live through.”

The Wall Street Journal offers a slide show of drawings made by child victims of Boko Haram. Many feature their families, others Boko Haram attacking their families or villages. One child, Mamoudou, describing his picture said, “Boko Haram people broke the legs of my father. As he ran, they shot him and his feet were broken and he was transported. We lost everything: our freezer, TV, cup, chicken, mutton, the canary.”

In the areas Boko Haram has ravaged, only about one-third of health clinics still function, meaning many children are missing necessary immunizations, safe water is increasingly hard to find, and many suffer from malnutrition.

Eliminating Boko Haram

Opinion is divided on how successful Nigeria’s newly-selected president Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim and former army leader, will be in eliminating Boko Haram. Scholar Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos, quoted in The Guardian, argues that the group

is adept at exploiting the state’s chronic institutional weaknesses. It knows the local terrain well, can navigate around a demoralised and deficient security presence, and is able to attack villages with total impunity. Government troops on the ground suffer from low morale. Local vigilante forces have been unable to stave off violent Boko Haram operations.

Another observer quoted by The Guardian, Mark Roberts, described an attack by Boko Haram on two towns, in which they killed hundreds and razed the area. “Roberts said the army had withdrawn ahead of the raid, after being told the Nigerian air force was about to bomb the rebels. But the plane never arrived. Typically, the army runs away when Boko Haram advances, he said.”