Some 25,000 are missing, many believed to be victims of extrajudicial killings and clandestine mass burials by the army.
Where must this story begin?
That Saturday morning in March 2013, when Adamu Sa’adu set out for his tailoring shop in Maiduguri, in northern Nigeria? Days later, in an overcrowded detention centre where he came face to face with death? Or now, more than a decade afterwards, as his father staggers through memories of Adamu’s childhood? The truth is, regardless of how it starts, the story ends with a question mark, a gap into which Adamu vanished, and with the sinking dread that so many with loved ones who shared the same fate know: that the young man’s story likely ends with his body in a mass grave, dug by his own government.
Adamu, 22, headed out early that Saturday morning to the tailor’s workshop in the Gwange area of Maiduguri, where he apprenticed. Crowds had gathered on both sides of the street, one for a wedding and another for a funeral. Suddenly, truckloads of soldiers arrived, breaking up the crowds and carting off over a hundred young men from the neighbourhood — all of them suspected of belonging to Boko Haram, the Islamist insurgency plaguing their region — including Adamu.
“Only four of them returned,” said Mallam Uba Sa’adu, Adamu’s father. Others, including his son, never came back — whether dead or alive.
The Sa’adu family’s experience is a window into a pervasive but oft-ignored crisis in Nigeria: Since the Boko Haram insurgency erupted in the country’s northeast in the early 2010s, thousands of people have gone missing in the affected region — over 25,000, according to a 2022 report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, more than a third of all missing persons cases documented on the African continent. A monthslong HumAngle/New Lines investigation has revealed that the Nigerian state — and in particular the military — has helped to drive this crisis, through a campaign of arbitrary arrests, prolonged detention, extrajudicial killings, mass burials and deliberate attempts to obscure their actions. Through interviews with eyewitnesses, satellite data, documents and site visits, we have also uncovered new information regarding the murder and burial of terrorism suspects, indicating that Nigerian state officials violated various international humanitarian laws in their prosecution of the war against insurgents.
Arbitrary and unexpected arrests were common in his neighbourhood when Adamu went missing, but they rarely involved so many people at once. At the time, there were still many active members of the Boko Haram terror group spread across Maiduguri, the capital of Nigeria’s northeastern Borno state. People were killed every week, from ordinary civilians to community leaders, politicians, government workers, security agents, students and their teachers. No one was safe. Gunfire and bomb explosions were commonplace. As much as possible, residents locked themselves indoors and security personnel walked in groups. In 2012 alone, according to data compiled by the Nigeria Security Tracker, at least 335 civilians and 92 security agents lost their lives to terror attacks in Maiduguri. Outside the city, the terrorists had broken their associates and other inmates out of prisons and attacked more ambitious targets, including military barracks, the national police headquarters and the United Nations building in Abuja.
Soldiers in Borno state had no foolproof way to tell terrorists apart from civilians; as a result, they treated everyone with extreme suspicion. The Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF), a militia eventually formed by locals, had yet to spring up to support the armed forces in identifying and arresting members of the terror group. The soldiers, many newly deployed to the area, saw residents as contributing to the insurgency by sheltering the terrorists or withholding information. They were particularly wary of large gatherings. In another part of the city the previous year, military officers had rounded up 15 people during a wedding, according to witnesses. Suspicion was such a powerful force in this period that people hesitated to assemble even to mourn their deceased loved ones, lest they be ushered to join them.
Nigeria has battled the Boko Haram scourge for over 14 years now. The group, which began with the preaching of a radical version of Islam in Maiduguri under the leadership of Mohammed Yusuf, became increasingly violent, especially following face-offs with security forces. Yusuf, a moon-faced middle-aged man and the unschooled child of a security guard father, gained notoriety for his extremist — but well-articulated — sermons in the early 2000s. He spent several years in Saudi Arabia and was inspired by the works of Salafist scholars and ideologues. After the police hurriedly killed him in July 2009, Yusuf’s followers unleashed a hailstorm of violence across northern Nigeria. The crisis is estimated to have killed nearly 350,000 people over the next 11 years, including those who died from food insecurity, poverty, lack of healthcare and other disasters. That is equivalent to filling up Nigeria’s largest stadium, killing all the spectators, and then repeating the bloodbath five more times. Today, 2.4 million Nigerians are internally displaced, according to the International Organization on Migration, and about 8.3 million people need humanitarian assistance to survive across the northeastern region alone.
When the insurgency broke out, the military may have been emboldened by a state of emergency declared by the government in December 2011, and then again in May 2013, which granted security forces additional powers to tackle the threat. Human Rights Watch documented cases of arbitrary arrests, assaults and killings — with some individuals executed in front of their families.
“At the outset of the violence, the police and soldiers in Maiduguri carried out scores of extrajudicial killings of detainees,” the group noted in a 2012 report. “Since then, security personnel have detained suspects at several military and police facilities in Maiduguri, including in an underground detention centre at Giwa military barracks.”
Some of the detainees were confirmed to be innocent, either by the army itself or through the courts. Many were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. It was a war zone, and to survive, the security personnel regarded everyone, especially men, as a potential threat — particularly those living in areas where government forces had been attacked. Many of the arrested men died in detention because of torture or inhumane conditions. Some were taken to the outskirts of Maiduguri and executed, the burden of burying the dead bodies left to residents.
The arbitrary and secretive nature of these events meant that the victims’ families could not verify the status of their missing relations. While most of the atrocities happened years ago, the shock waves they triggered are still present. The tears have not dried. Thousands of families are still waiting for answers and silently praying that their loved ones will return — or at least get some form of justice.
After spending weeks in Nigeria in 2019, the U.N. Special Rapporteur for Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions concluded that though reports of human rights violations in the northeast had decreased, “accountability for violations in the course of the conflict against Boko Haram has not yet been delivered.”
We revisited these horrors through interviews with over two dozen people whose families have gone missing or who witnessed different dimensions of the problem — from arbitrary arrests to extrajudicial killings and the events that followed, including mass burials.
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