Nigerian State Says 337 Students Missing After Gunmen Attack

At least 337 students are still missing after gunmen in Nigeria attacked a boys’ boarding school in the northern state of Katsina, an official said. Nigerian State Says 337 Students Missing After Gunmen Attack

So far, 446 students are accounted for and reunited with their parents following the Friday attack, Abdu Labaran, a spokesman for Katsina Governor Aminu Masari, said by phone. A total of 258 parents were contacted and they confirmed that their children hadn’t returned home, he said.

Armed assailants arrived in the town of Kankara during the night of Dec. 11 and opened fire before entering the boys’ school, causing students and staff to flee. An unknown number of students were said to have been abducted by the attackers, with 337 unaccounted for.

“The kidnappers had made contact and discussions were already on pertaining to safety and return to their homes” according to an emailed statement from the Presidency on Monday.

Katsina is the home state of President Muhammadu Buhari whose administration is struggling to contain widespread insecurity across swathes of northern and central Nigeria. Buhari arrived in his hometown of Daura for a week’s private visit on the same day the school was invaded.

The latest incident adds to previous school attacks in northern Nigeria, including the 2014 attack on a school in the northeastern town of Chibok in 2014 during which 276 schoolgirls were seized. Boko Haram Islamist insurgents claimed the attack and another in 2018 in the northern town of Dapchi in which at least 110 girls were kidnapped.

The latest attack happened in a region in which armed groups with no obvious affiliation have been active in recent years.

Updated: 12-16-2020

Boko Haram Kidnaps Hundreds of Nigerian Students, Six Years After Chibok

Local officials say 333 students are believed to have been taken captive from an all-boys boarding school.

Six years after the abduction of 276 schoolgirls ignited the global #BringBackOurGirls campaign, Nigeria is again reeling from a mass kidnapping, this time of more than 300 boys.

Jihadist group Boko Haram said on Tuesday it had seized students from an all-boys boarding school in Katsina, northwest Nigeria, to punish them for “un-Islamic practices.”

Local officials said that 333 of the school’s 800 students were missing and assumed captive, a number that analysts say could mark one of the largest mass kidnappings of schoolchildren in history. Nigerian surveillance aircraft and American drones have been dispatched over the sprawling forest where survivors say the captors forced them to march.

One of the students who escaped the captors—17-year-old Usama Male—said the abduction began just after 10 p.m. on Friday. Dozens of men in military fatigues shooting Kalashnikovs into the air poured into the sand-caked school campus and ordered the entire student body to march into the forest.

After almost two days of walking in a hundreds-strong column with no food and little water, he was one of the lucky few who escaped.

“They said they would kill whoever tried to flee, but I positioned myself near the back and waited for a chance to run,” he said, sitting alongside his father, Aminu, in the town of Kankara. “Hundreds of my fellow pupils are still in captivity somewhere in the forest.”

“Only in Nigeria have we seen militants walk into a high school and abduct the whole student body,” said Bulama Bukarti, an analyst at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change based in London. “The security situation across the north is rapidly deteriorating. An attack on Nigeria’s children is an attack on the country’s future.”

Many of the details around the kidnapping, in a remote agricultural area with poor communication, remain murky, including the true tally of the missing. School authorities said at least 446 students were now with their parents, but that they have been unable to reach scores of families to confirm the boys’ safety because of the poor phone network.

Boko Haram’s claim of responsibility has surprised some analysts, marking a departure from the extremist group’s usual area of operation in the country’s northeast.

“What happened in Katsina was done to promote Islam,” said Abubakar Shekau, the group’s leader and Africa’s most wanted terrorist, with a $7 million U.S. bounty on his head. “Western education is not the type of education permitted by Allah and his holy Prophet.”

Shekau didn’t give any figures for the number of boys kidnapped in Kankara, but the mass abduction appears to be even larger than Boko Haram’s 2014 kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok, which gave rise to the global #BringBackOurGirls campaign and sparked a U.S. military intervention.

A new hashtag, #BringBackOurBoys, began to trend in Nigeria as fresh details trickled out. The United Nations has strongly condemned the abductions and called for the children’s “immediate and unconditional release.”

Boarding schools across several northern states have been closed and the governor of Katsina appeared on television in tears. The local government has said that the kidnappers have been in contact to discuss a ransom to release the boys, although Shekau said there were no negotiations.

Nigerian Defense Minister Salihi Magashi confirmed that a search-and-rescue operation was under way and pledged to do everything necessary to ensure the return of the boys.

A Nigerian security official said the military has dispatched surveillance aircraft over the nearby forests, a sprawling area of dense canopy that stretches over four states. The U.S. was also flying a reconnaissance aircraft dispatched from the drone base in Agadez, Niger, to provide intelligence support, the official said.

The attack has sparked shock and anger in the largely poor and rural region close to Nigeria’s border with Niger, which has been beset by mounting insecurity in recent months. Distraught families have converged on the school’s campus in recent days, pleading with the authorities to save the boys.

On Tuesday, the campus was eerily quiet. Students’ belongings were strewn across the dormitory floors; text books, and stray soccer cleats sat next to bags that would have soon been packed for the end-of-year holidays.

The rising tide of violence across northern Nigeria comes amid the government’s faltering strategy to combat a decadelong insurgency that has metastasized into one of the world’s deadliest jihadist campaigns.

The Kankara attack is particularly embarrassing for President Muhammadu Buhari, a native of Katsina, who has repeatedly claimed that Boko Haram and its affiliates have been technically defeated. But since last year, the militants have been advancing, overrunning dozens of smaller military bases and looting weapons.

According to the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, the period since July 2018 has been deadlier for Nigeria’s security-service personnel than any other time in the decadelong conflict.

Boko Haram’s claim of responsibility comes after a bloody two weeks across the northern frontiers of Africa’s most populous nation. In late November, the group abducted and then slaughtered some 70 farmers in the village of Zamabari in Borno state. Last week, the group killed 28 people and burned 800 homes in a village across the border in southern Niger.

Now, Shekau—the leader of Boko Haram since 2009—has claimed a much bigger prize: a mass kidnapping that could again draw global attention to a conflict that rarely tops media coverage outside of Nigeria.

Shekau, who swore allegiance to Islamic State in 2014 and then split from the group in 2016 over theological disputes, has traditionally operated in northeast Nigeria but has been quietly building alliances in northwest for the past year.

Nigerian intelligence analysts say the Boko Haram leader has exploited the deteriorating security situation in the region to rebuild old networks and cultivate new alliances with criminal groups. In recent video messages, Shekau has claimed that Boko Haram has cells in the northwest, and appeared to address potential new recruits in the regional Fulani language.

“The growth of Islamic State and al Qaeda-linked groups’ outreach in northwest Nigeria has pushed Shekau to build combat capability in rural parts of the northwest, co-opting existing bandit groups and utilizing pre-existing contacts in the region,” said Fulan Nasrullah, executive director of the Conflict Studies and Analysis Project at the Global Initiative for Civil Stabilization, a Nigerian think tank focusing on armed conflict.

Mr. Nasrullah, who was an adviser to a Swiss-led effort to mediate talks between Boko Haram and the government, added, “From what we know of the details of the kidnap, there are a lot of similarities to the Chibok abduction.”

Shekau directed the kidnapping of the schoolgirls from Chibok Government Secondary School in 2014. After three years, 103 were freed in deals brokered by a team of Swiss mediators for a ransom and exchange of Boko Haram prisoners. A total of 112 have never returned home and many are feared to have died in captivity.

The testimony of the survivors of Kankara suggests the kidnap operation was eerily similar to the abduction in Chibok. Mr. Male and other witnesses said that dozens of gunmen on motorcycles surrounded the boarding school and opened fire on police, before rounding up students and telling them they were soldiers—the same technique used in the Chibok abduction.

Mr. Male and hundreds of his fellow students were then told to hand over their phones and walk for hours into the thickening forest without food or water. “At one point they counted us and we were 520 hostages,” he said.

Another student, who refused to give his name for fear of retribution, said that at least two of the captives died during the march.

Mr. Male said he walked for more than 12 hours in bare feet as he had no time to collect his sandals during the abduction. Suffering from anemia, he felt weak and dizzy but the gunmen said anyone who escaped would be killed. In the darkness, he noticed dozens of students had slipped from the crowds and disappeared into the forest.

As the militants ordered the group to rest near a village while they discussed how to avoid being seen, he slipped off and hid under a tree. He sneaked into the forest and reached a nearby village named Zango, where locals helped him home after a 36-hour ordeal.

“I thought I would never see my parents again…I hope I will see my friends,” he said.

Updated: 12-18-2020

Kidnapped Nigerian Schoolboys Set To Reunite With Families

Reunion comes a week after militants stormed their dormitories, as questions remain over who perpetrated the crime and why the students were set free.

More than 300 Nigerian boys were getting ready to be reunited with their parents Friday, a week after militants stormed their dormitories in one of the largest kidnappings of school children in history.

The governor of Katsina state, Aminu Bello Masari, said all 344 kidnapped boys had been freed after their six-day-long captivity, a claim several of those rescued confirmed.

It wasn’t immediately clear how those statements lined up with earlier testimonies from some of their classmates who had managed to escape and said a head count done by their captors as they marched through a thick forest revealed more than 500 hostages.

One of the rescued boys, Abdurauf Isa, still wearing the purple-and-white-checkered school uniform of the Government Science Secondary School in Kankara, said he was relieved their ordeal had ended. “We suffered in the hands of our abductors, but they gave us food to eat,” said the 16-year- old on Friday. “We ate raw local potatoes and drank water from the stream.”

Jihadist group Boko Haram, which translates to “Western education is forbidden,” has claimed responsibility for the kidnapping, saying on Tuesday it had seized the students to punish them for “un-Islamic practices.” In a grainy video released Thursday, hours before the boys were freed, hostages said that some of their classmates had died during their captivity. Mr. Masari, the governor, said Friday all the captured boys were alive.

Abdurauf said he was looking forward to getting back to his studies. “My dream is to be a scientist in future,” he said. “I will continue with my education.”

Nigerian officials, including President Muhammadu Buhari, were careful Friday not to name the group behind the boys’ abduction or provide details on how they were freed. In an interview with state-broadcaster NTA, Mr. Buhari thanked the army, which he said had encircled the boys’ captors, without revealing their identity or explaining what happened after.

His government has repeatedly said that its military had technically defeated Boko Haram and its affiliates, although the group has overrun dozens of military bases and launched brutal attacks on civilians over the past year.

If Boko Haram was indeed responsible, analysts said, the boys’ kidnapping would mark a dangerous expansion under its leader, Abubakar Shekau, from its stronghold in Nigeria’s northeast into the northwestern state of Katsina, potentially forming alliances with local criminal networks. Some analysts have also questioned statements from Nigerian officials that they didn’t pay a ransom to free the boys taken from the Kankara school.

The boys’ relatively swift release was a much-needed win for the government of Mr. Buhari, for whom the kidnapping was an embarrassing reminder of the 2014 abduction of 276 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok. That attack ignited the global #BringBackOurGirls campaign, drawing the world’s attention to the rise of Boko Haram militants.

After three years, 103 of the girls were freed for a ransom that, according to people involved, included the exchange of five imprisoned militants and €3 million, equivalent to about $3.7 million. The government has denied paying a ransom for the Chibok girls.

After medical checks and changing into clean clothes, the boys waited for hours Friday afternoon in a state banquet hall before meeting Mr. Buhair and the Katsina governor.

“Don’t allow your abduction experience to deter you from continuing with your education,” the president told the boys. “Please put the experience behind you and forge ahead.”

Outside, dozens of parents, who had traveled around 130 kilometers from Kankara to the state capital Katsina, were eager to welcome their children. “I was able to shake [my son’s] hand before he and other released children went in for medical checks,” said Hajia Mai Jida, whose 17-year-old son Buhari was among those released Thursday.

But like other parents, Ms. Jida said she wasn’t planning on sending her son back to the school. “The school is not secured and it’s left alone in the bush,” she said. “I don’t want him to be kidnapped again.”

Updated: 12-24-2020

Kidnapped Nigerian Schoolboys Say Ransom Was Paid, Tell of Beatings

Freed captives recount mistreatment by Boko Haram, as group’s terrorism and criminality appear to coalesce.

It was on the third day in captivity that the Lawal brothers thought they would be executed.

Exhausted and hungry, their bare feet lacerated after long marches at gunpoint through a dense forest with more than 300 abducted schoolmates, 16-year-old Anas and 17-year-old Buhari were ordered by their kidnappers to answer a question.

“Is your family poor?” said one of the gunmen, much of his face masked by a turban. “If they are, we will kill you now. They won’t be able to afford the ransom,” he said.

The brothers, whose father, Abubakar Lawal, is a construction-industry consultant with an income of $100 a month—middle class by the region’s standards—said nothing and stared at the ground.

“We thought they would kill us there and then,” said Anas.

“That was the scariest part. We thought we’d never see our family again,” said his older brother, who is named after Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari.

Three days later, the Lawals were among the 344 students from the all-boys Kankara Government Science School who were released, a happy ending to a terrifying week in which they endured beatings, threats and deprivations at the hands of their kidnappers. Jihadist group Boko Haram has claimed responsibility for the abduction.

Three boys said in interviews that the kidnappers told them a ransom had been paid for their release. A person familiar with the kidnappers’ talks with the government said a sizable sum had been paid for the boys’ freedom.

During their captivity, according to interviews with eight of the freed students, boys as young as 13 were forced to eat raw potatoes and bitter kalgo leaves to survive. They were seldom allowed rest, sleeping on rocky ground home to snakes and scorpions. They threw themselves on the forest floor to avoid being spotted by military jets their captors said would bomb them.

After six nights in captivity, the students were handed to security agents on the night of Dec. 17, some 80 miles from their school, in the neighboring state of Zamfara.

The release prompted outpourings of joy and relief across Africa’s most populous nation after fears the boys would become long-term hostages of Boko Haram.

The mass abduction—the largest such kidnapping in Nigerian history—came six years after Boko Haram seized 276 schoolgirls in the town of Chibok, igniting the global #BringBackOurGirls campaign. Those hostages were in custody for three years until 103 were freed for a ransom that people involved said included the exchange, mediated by Switzerland, of five imprisoned militants and 3 million euros, equivalent today to $3.66 million.

Yet the Kankara kidnapping was resolved within a week, following a secret deal, the details of which remain a mystery.

Government officials denied paying ransom and said the kidnappers released the schoolboys because the military had surrounded them.

However, three boys said their kidnappers told them they were initially paid 30 million naira, equivalent to around $76,000, but decided not to release the boys because they had demanded 344 million naira—1 per head.

“They threatened to release only 30 of us when the 30 million initial ransom was paid,” said 16-year-old Yinusa Idris. “They even took 30 of us away on motorcycles ready to release,” he said.

Imran Yakubu, a 17-year-old, said the kidnappers told them: “One million naira must be paid per each student…or we will recruit or kill you.”

None of the boys said they saw money changing hands. A person familiar with the negotiations said a ransom was transferred in three batches.

A spokesman for the federal government said: “The information we have is that not a dime was paid in ransom, and we have no reason to doubt the authenticity of the information.”

A spokesman for Zamfara’s state government said it paid no ransom but couldn’t tell if ransom was paid by other persons who participated in the negotiations.

A ransom payment would signal the increasing integration of criminality and terrorism in the region. On Saturday, less than 24 hours after the Kankara boys were reunited with their parents, Katsina police said that 84 students had been kidnapped before being freed after a fierce gun duel. On Friday, in neighboring Borno state, 35 people were abducted on a highway by Boko Haram, the state government said.

The Kankara kidnapping is also raising fears about the evolution of Boko Haram, which has expanded from its base in northeast Nigeria to ally itself with bandit groups in the northwest. Nigeria’s government says Boko Haram wasn’t involved in the kidnapping and only released the fake video claims of responsibility to seek relevance.

Some analysts say the group’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, who released two audio clips and a video claiming responsibility for the boys’ kidnapping, has a lucrative new business model: using his infamy to raise the cost of ransom payments in return for a percentage cut.

Fulan Nasrullah, a terrorism analyst who worked on the mediation to free the Chibok girls and other kidnappings, says Shekau—Africa’s most-wanted terrorist, with a $7 million U.S. bounty on his head—has found a lucrative new niche. “The kidnappers tried to ransom the boys for peanuts until Shekau got involved,” he said.

Shortly after 10 p.m. on Dec. 11, the Lawal brothers had just finished cleaning their sleeping quarters ahead of a dorm inspection the following morning when they heard gunfire. Several boys jumped from their rusting iron bed frames and the room became full of panicked chatter.

“We were all confused,” Buhari said.

“We should run,” he heard one voice say. “No, it’s vigilantes,” said another, referring to the civilian militia that often patrolled the area at night.

Then another volley of gunfire erupted, closer and louder, followed by the sound of voices barking instructions.

Anas joined the group of boys streaming out of the dormitory and toward the compound’s cement walls. There were more than 100 armed men in the school courtyard. They were shining bright flashlights and streaming into the pastel-colored buildings. “Gather here. We are soldiers,” they said. “We are soldiers.”

In the melee, Buhari and Anas lost each other.

The armed men told the hundreds of boys gathered in the unlit courtyard that they had been deployed for the school’s protection and that the students needed to follow them. Anyone who refused would be shot.

“We knew then they were not soldiers, but kidnappers,” Anas said.

The gunmen, some on foot, others on motorcycles, ordered the boys to walk in a long column, hitting anyone who walked too slowly with a whip or rifle butt.

By midnight, the hostages had entered the “Rugu” the sprawling forest that stretches over four of Nigeria’s 36 states. The brothers still had no idea if their sibling was among those kidnapped. “I couldn’t see Anas anywhere,” Buhari said. “I didn’t know if anything had happened to him.”

The boys walked until 5 a.m., hacking their way deeper into the forest, then were allowed to rest on rocks for an hour until they were ordered to move again. Almost all of them walked barefoot: They had had no time to grab their sandals.

In the daylight, the hostages got a better look at their captors. Many were also teenagers and some said they too had been kidnapped, and conscripted.

On the third day, the Lawal brothers saw each other again. “We rushed to hug and said we wouldn’t be separated again,” said Buhari.

“From then on we stuck together,” Anas said.

At one point, when the guards were looking at the sky, two students close to the back of the convoy tried to slip away. The hostages were all told to halt so they could watch their classmates be punished.

“The older one’s hands were tied to a tree and he was beaten,” Buhari said. “Water was poured on his body in the early morning so that he could feel the freezing cold.”

Some of the boys heard their captors discussing the details of the negotiations with representatives of the Zamfara state government.

On Thursday morning, a commander told them, “Tonight, you can sleep at your parents’ house.”

The kidnappers had a final message for their captives: If they went back to school, they’d kidnap them again.

Within hours, the boys were handed to security agents in a forest clearing and hoisted onto trucks bound for home. Buhari and Anas sat next to one another, relieved but saying little.

Now home in their father’s cream-colored three-room house, the brothers have agreed they won’t go back to the Kankara Government Science Secondary School.

“We don’t want a repeat of that experience,” Buhari said. “I am calling on my namesake, Nigeria’s president, to help us find another school, where we can study in peace.”

Updated: 3-2-2021

Nigerian Gunmen Release Hundreds of Kidnapped Schoolgirls

Release marks the end of the third mass abduction in northwest Nigeria in recent months.

Gunmen released hundreds of girls who were kidnapped from a boarding school in Nigeria, bringing to an end four days of captivity that underlined the perilous security situation in the northwest of the country.

Dozens of armed men abducted girls between the ages of 11 and 17 from the Government Girls Secondary School in the town of Jangebe at around 1 a.m. Friday and marched them into a nearby forest. The abduction was the second in just over a week in Nigeria’s northwest, where a surge in armed militancy has led to a breakdown of security. Kidnapping for ransom has become a lucrative industry.

“Our daughters are now safe,” Zamfara state Gov. Bello Matawalle wrote on Twitter in posts accompanied by pictures of girls arriving at the state house wearing matching yellow headscarves. “This follows the scaling of several hurdles laid against our efforts.”

On the day of the abduction, authorities said 317 girls had been taken, but the Zamfara information commissioner on Tuesday said the number was actually 279, without giving a reason for the discrepancy.

Gathered in rows inside the wood-paneled ceremonial hall state house, the girls sat on gold-padded chairs while the governor hailed their rescue. Some stared ahead silently while others chatted, giddy with the excitement of being free.

Three sisters from the Abdullahi family who were taken together asked worriedly about the fate of their sister, Amina. “We did not see her in the forest,” said the eldest, Nasira. When the sisters discovered that Amina had escaped by hiding in the bathroom, they embraced.

One of the girls, 15-year-old Hafsat Hamisu, said that a ransom was paid to the kidnappers. “In the night, the kidnappers began firing shots to celebrate the arrival of a payment,” she said. “Then we started sleeping and they woke us up, saying, “You idiots, wake up the money has come.”

Government officials said no ransom was paid. “These children were recovered through dialogue,” said Abutu Yaro, the Zamfara police commissioner. “The events and processes of the abduction are still the subject of a police inquiry.”

Later on Tuesday, the government banned mining and imposed a no-flight zone across Zamfara state, ordering a “massive” deployment of military and intelligence assets to restore normalcy to Nigeria’s northwest.

But security analysts said that despite the official denials, kidnapping for ransom was becoming one of the fastest-growing industries in Nigeria, a U.S. counterterrorism ally that is already dealing with a 10-year jihadist rebellion as well as swelling banditry and lawlessness.

“We know ransoms were paid in previous abductions because the perpetrators have admitted it,” said Bulama Bukarti, a terrorism analyst and columnist with the Daily Trust, northern Nigeria’s most popular newspaper. “The kidnappers are treated with kid gloves, which is incentivizing others to get into this industry.”

The release of the girls marks the end of the third high-school abduction in northwest Nigeria in two months. A total of 344 boys were taken from a school in nearby Katsina in December and then freed after a week, and last month 42 people were taken from a school in Niger state.

None of the perpetrators of the recent school kidnappings have been arrested.

Government officials denied paying a ransom for the boys abducted in Katsina and said the kidnappers released them because the military had surrounded them. Three of the boys told The Wall Street Journal that the kidnappers had told them a ransom had been paid for their release.

Governors in northern Nigeria have offered amnesty to “repentant bandits,” who have been contracted as mediators to resolve new abductions, a policy that has been widely criticized by Nigeria’s opposition.

President Muhammadu Buhari issued a statement Tuesday celebrating the girls’ liberation but also saying his government was working hard to bring an end to the cycle of abductions.

“The military and the police will continue to go after the kidnappers,” he said. “They need the support of local communities in terms of human intelligence that can help nip criminal plans in the bud.”

But he raised eyebrows on Friday when he appeared to contradict governors’ statements that they don’t pay ransoms, urging them to “review their policy of rewarding bandits with money and vehicles.”

“Such a policy has the potential to backfire with disastrous consequences,” the statement said.

The surge in kidnapping for ransom has signaled the increasing integration of criminality and terrorism in the region. Boko Haram, the jihadist group that kidnapped 276 schoolgirls in 2014, igniting the global #BringBackOurGirls campaign, released a video claiming credit for the Katsina kidnapping, which officials later said was an attempt to influence negotiations.

Criminal groups conducting kidnappings have benefited from the weapons being taken south from war-torn Libya through Niger and across Nigeria’s border. One of the bandits who claimed to be responsible for the Katsina abduction and turned himself in to the government in exchange for amnesty said that buying guns in the country’s north was now like “buying bread.”

In a recent report on kidnapping across Nigeria, SB Morgen, a Lagos-based geopolitical research firm, found that between January 2016 and March 2020 almost $11 million was paid to kidnappers. “It has become a national emergency,” the report said.

The impact on education across the country’s northern states is raising fears of a lost generation that could be recruited by criminal and terrorist groups, feeding the cycle of insecurity. The governor of Yobe state said this week that he would close schools for fear of kidnappings, marking the fourth Nigerian state to lock down education across an expanse home to some 20 million people.

After Tuesday’s press conference, the Jangebe girls were waiting to be reunited with their parents after hours of meetings with officials for medical checkups and security debriefings. Reached on the phone, parents said they were traveling toward the state capital to see their daughters.

Habib Abdullahi, whose three girls were kidnapped, said: “I am elated. We thank God. We thank God.”

Updated: 8-13-2021

1,000 Boko Haram Militants Surrender, Two Chibok Girls Walk Free

Fighting between Boko Haram and Iswap in Nigeria has prompted a wave of defections.

More than 1,000 Boko Haram members and their hostages surrendered to the Nigerian government, including two high-school students who were kidnapped seven years ago from the town of Chibok, in what security officials and mediators called a new chapter in Nigeria’s decadelong conflict.

Ruth Pogu and Hassan Adamu, who were abducted in 2014 along with 274 other schoolgirls in what prompted the global #BringBackOurGirls campaign, emerged from the jihadist group’s Sambisa forest hideout in recent days, alongside men who called themselves their “husbands” and children born in captivity. The fighters surrendered amid a surge in fighting between Boko Haram and its rival, Islamic State West Africa Province. Another woman, taken last year from Chibok, was with them.

Now in the custody of Nigeria’s intelligence agency, the women were being debriefed. Ms. Pogu was taken to the regional capital Maiduguri on Sunday and briefly allowed to see her family.

The development appears to mark a new chapter in a war that has left more than 35,000 people dead and uprooted more than two million. In May, Boko Haram’s longtime leader, Abubakar Shekau, died after a confrontation with Iswap. Since then, his movement has lost battles and territory to Iswap and has suffered mass defections while Nigeria’s government has offered a “safe corridor” to jihadist members and their families who surrender.

Nearly all of the Chibok students still living in captivity are with Boko Haram, said mediators, who hope the group’s disarray can help them negotiate the release of more hostages.

“Most are quitting…thousands of fighters are coming out of the bush,” said one mediator closely involved, who described efforts to free additional Chibok students. A senior Nigerian security official working on the safe-corridor policy said the government was shocked by the number of people surrendering and was preparing an expanded camp to process the returnees: “There could be more of the Chibok girls among them.”

Boko Haram militants seized 276 schoolgirls from their dormitory overnight on April 14, 2014, the evening before their final exams, igniting the #BringBackOurGirls Twitter campaign that transformed them into some of the world’s most famous hostages and a central prize in the war on terrorism.

Some 110 of the hostages are now home: 103 were released in 2016 and 2017, in exchange for five fighters and a cash ransom mediated by the Swiss government. Since 2016, seven more have made their way to freedom. More than 100 remain unaccounted for after 2,677 days—still in Boko Haram custody or reportedly dead.

While Nigeria’s military has sought to frame the mass defections as the consequence of a renewed offensive, security officials have confided that the shift is the product of internecine fighting between the jihadists.

By Friday, more than 1,000 people—330 men and more than 700 women and children—had given themselves up around the towns of Bama, Konduga and Mafa on the edge of the Sambisa Forest, and more across the border in Cameroon, according to Nigerian security officials and mediators. In staged ceremonies, repentant-looking men have been photographed holding placards in English, some saying “Nigerians forgive us.”

The Boko Haram members turning themselves in are largely foot soldiers and civilians the group had effectively enslaved but also include bomb makers, according to security officials. Vincent Foucher, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based conflict resolution think tank, said the news confirmed that Iswap is ascendant and expanding its territory.

“They are content to get new territory which is giving them more opportunity to attack. We’re already seeing instances of that,” he said.

News of the two Chibok girls’ release comes as Nigeria’s high-school kidnapping crisis has reached epidemic proportions, with criminal groups operating across the northwest having abducted more than 1,000 children since December. The attacks—seizing pupils from 11 schools—have rocked Nigeria and drawn calls for urgent action from the U.S. government, the European Union and Pope Francis.

Thousands of school campuses have been closed across for fear of more attacks, leaving close to 15 million Nigerian children out of school—more than any other country in the world.

The criminal groups have copied Boko Haram’s blueprint, abducting children at night from lightly defended school boardinghouses usually located on the edges of towns, and driving them into the vast and dense Rugu Forest as a hiding place and base from which to launch attacks and hold them captive.

The difference is that today the kidnappings are for ransom, whereas Boko Haram abducted principally for ideology: to conscript boys and force girls to marry fighters or to become suicide bombers.

Nigerian security officials are hoping the students’ testimonies will help them identify and locate which Boko Haram commanders are holding the remainder of the Chibok hostages and thousands of other children who have come of age in captivity. After 12 years of jihadist insurgency, 23,992 Nigerians are registered missing with the local Red Cross, the humanitarian agency’s highest toll on earth.

A confidential intelligence memo seen by The Wall Street Journal says the men who call themselves the women’s “husbands” are also thought to be an important repository of intelligence since only high-ranking members were allowed to “marry” the Chibok students, the group’s most valuable commodity.

“What the Chibok girls meant to Boko Haram is what 9/11 meant to Osama bin Laden, ” said one mediator who worked on freeing other groups of hostages. “They made the group a global phenomenon.”

For Nigeria’s government, the civil war is an opportunity and a challenge. The killing of Shekau, Africa’s most wanted man who held together a nebulous cell structure of independent and often antagonistic commanders through fear and murder, has seen the group fray. Some senior commanders, known as Qaids, have sworn allegiance to Iswap, taking their fighters with them. Some have surrendered to the government, while others have chosen to fight.

One mediator involved in previous efforts to free the Chibok hostages said they were confident that many more hostages could walk free, but the chaos inside Boko Haram’s leadership structure was making it difficult to contact the decision makers.

The Chibok hostages who won their freedom have described how they were separated into groups, with some forced into marriage. Those who refused were pushed into slavery—ordered to do manual labor or work in Boko Haram’s clinics treating wounded fighters—deprived of food and regularly beaten.

On Friday, some of the previously liberated Chibok hostages said the news gave them fresh hope they could be reunited with classmates and family. Maryam Ali Maiyanga, who escaped in 2017, was kidnapped alongside her sister, Halima, who remains in captivity. “At night I dream of her and imagine what I will say,” she said. “Now I have more hope I will see her again.”

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