On the evening of April 14, 2014, a gang of armed men entered a girls’ boarding school in the northeastern Nigerian city of Chibok and took more than 200 students who had prepared for graduation exams. The young women were taken to the hideout of the remote forest of a little-known Islamist sect called Boko Haram.
For weeks, almost no one seemed to notice that the students were missing. Then the news went viral on Twitter, prompting some of the world’s most famous people – Pope Francis, Kim Kardashian, The Rock, Michelle Obama – to launch a hashtag that lit up billions of phones: #BringBackOurGirls. These four words quickly demonstrated the power of social media to advance a distant cause. Girls have become a global priority. To free them, some of the most powerful countries in the world have sent their armed forces, drones, satellites and sophisticated surveillance equipment. And then, just as quickly, the mind of the Twitter hive spun on its next viral cause, the Ice Bucket Challenge, and never returned.
However, those few days of tweets ignited a security that continues to burn years later. The rescue mission launched in 2014 has evolved quietly and covertly in a military deployment in four West African countries. Nigerian military, US diplomats and terrorism specialists continue to express astonishment that a short series of tweets have so deeply shaped the conflict with Boko Haram and other jihadist groups, which continue to abduct children for fame, leg soldiers and ransom. .
Through hundreds of interviews with officials involved in rescue efforts and with 20 Chibok girls who won their freedom, I found a path of years of distant but unintended results, which neither lawyers nor cynics who have rejected the campaign as “slacktivism” could not have been foreseen.
The frantic international coverage has inspired both a race for women’s liberation and a change in Boko Haram’s tactics. Within months, the group boasted that it had abducted many more young women, redeeming some and sending others as its first suicide bombers. “The hashtag inadvertently provided Boko Haram with a roadmap for using gender-based violence to promote its global brand,” said Nigerian writer Tricia Adaobi Nwaubani, who interviewed more than 200 Chibok families.