Bring Back Our Girls by Joe Parkinson

Author:Joe Parkinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2020-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

27

The Windows Are Closed

ABUJA, NIGERIA

NOVEMBER 2015, NINETEEN MONTHS INTO CAPTIVITY

The work now felt like a drug, a roller coaster of adrenaline rushes that was ultimately leading in circles. At odd hours, the phones of the Dialogue Facilitation Team pinged with messages from the insurgency, demanding to know what the government thought of their latest proposal. Zannah was continuously shuttling back and forth between Abuja and Maiduguri, the roadblocked city held under curfew. Pascal, the Swiss diplomat, could be summoned at any time, day or night, by Nigeria’s intelligence agencies for a readout of their work or to quiz them on their sources. The team had learned to speak in code, careful to avoid words or names that could trigger the antenna of digital spies. Each new contact would bring hopes of inching toward an agreement, and when the trail inevitably went cold again, it was followed by a crushing low.

In late 2015, almost two years had crawled by since the kidnapping, and after the failure of Ahmad Salkida’s attempts, the Swiss team was running what seemed to be the sole remaining effort to free the Chibok students. They had spent untold hours gradually expanding their contacts inside the insurgency, building a regular flow of correspondence with some of the terrorists they’d once studied on a whiteboard in the embassy. Members of the team had been mounting motorbikes to travel to the edges of the Sambisa Forest to deliver messages to contacts, hoping not to hear the whistle of an incoming air strike or the pop of gunfire from soldiers or insurgents. Fulan, the fundamentalist turned terror analyst, had become practically a resident of the Swiss embassy by now; he would vanish from Abuja, crossing unseen over a front line to exchange communications. Zannah’s friend Tijani had become the team’s chief courier, making calls to Boko Haram contacts, then sometimes venturing out to meet them, slipping into Cameroon on a rowboat moving up the Benue River. “Try to come back,” his teammates would nervously joke, mindful of the risks he was taking. Tahir, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the sect’s hierarchy had won him the nickname “The Elder” from his teammates, was secretly meeting his own contacts to cross-check the information flow. Safehouses in northeastern cities under military patrol had become locations for face-to-face meetings with insurgents who could take information to senior commanders. The team had permission from the presidency to pursue this dialogue, but the bosses of the military and security agencies had their own ideas of who should talk to Boko Haram, and the risks were constant. At any moment, a soldier could have kicked down the door and thrown team members and their sources into jail to join the ranks of Nigeria’s disappeared.

To crack their way into the insurgency, the Dialogue Facilitation Team had started from the fringes and methodically worked their way toward the core. At first, the terrorist group had been hard to penetrate. But the team had followed a key lesson that Zannah’s instructors had repeated in his classes in Switzerland’s Lake Thun: “Meet the diaspora.

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