My road to nowhere12/10/2023 Soldiers set up checkpoints and duck behind piles of sandbags with rifle tips pointing outward. Niger’s military regularly patrols this paved stretch of highway. It was as far from the fighting as her money would take them. They wanted his life.”Įventually, she and her children wound up at the road. “We told them we would give them whatever they wanted,” she said. Thinking they wanted the bike, he handed them the keys. The militants chased, shooting at them until they stopped. She and her husband frantically piled their eight children onto a single motorbike and sped away, she said. She first started running two years ago, when Boko Haram invaded her village. “I was there when my husband was killed,” said Kiari Yamangou, a young widow living along the road. Families have fled four or five times before arriving at the highway, their last resort. More than 200,000 people scattered by the violence have come seeking safety here in the Diffa region alone, with tens of thousands settling along National Route 1, a sleek, paved highway in a part of the country where roads are usually nothing more than skinny scratches in the sand.įor many, Boko Haram has stormed every other place they’ve run. Hundreds of thousands of Nigerians are now going home to their villages - or in some cases, what’s left of them.īut along Nigeria’s blurry border with Niger, Boko Haram fighters are still raging. A military offensive has killed and captured fighters, invading their hide-outs in the forest. In parts of neighboring Nigeria, Boko Haram has suffered big losses. “I have nightmares - they’re coming to kill me, they’re coming to kill me.”Įscaping Boko Haram on the Road to Nowhere: A 360 View “Sometimes I think they’ll come again, even here,” said Atcha Mallam, 13, who has been living by the road for 18 months and still dreams that Boko Haram fighters will find her. Many have been living here for more than two years. From the air, they look like scattered piles of hay. Now, desperation spans the horizon instead: tens of thousands of ragged huts made from millet stalks, scraps of fabric, torn flour bags and sheets of tarp.
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