The Shocking Story of Boko Haram’s Forgotten Victims

CANNES, FRANCE - MAY 18: (L-R) Actors Antonio Banderas, Mel Gibson, Ronda Rousey, Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes and Kelsey Grammer hold 'bring back our girls' posters at "The Expendables 3" Premiere at the 67th Annual Cannes Film Festival on May 18, 2014 in Cannes, France.

Photo by Danny Martindale/FilmMagic.

The kidnapping of nearly 300 girls during the bloody Nigerian conflict between the government and insurgent Boko Haram has elicited global sympathy. But our rage is selective. What about the far larger number of boys dragged into hell?

The New York Times Magazine this week offers a truly depressing tale of depravity in Trained to Kill: How Four Boy Soldiers Survived Boko Haram, the result of increasing ingenuity in covering news overseas.

The lengthy account is by Sarah Topol, an Istanbul-based freelance journalist, and is the result of funding by the Pulitzer Center, a nonprofit that supports international reporting at a time of shrinking domestic news budgets. Photographer Glenna Gordon made the images.

This one is a winner and recreates the saga of “the boys from Baga,” a fishing town. They “walked out of hell into a world that didn’t seem to want them,” Topol writes. “The stories they told me about rituals like infant slaughter and bathing your hands in blood have not been previously reported as part of life under Boko Haram. But their stories were consistent, and rumors of such acts have circulated around northeast Nigeria.”

This goes into great detail about what could be as many as 10,000 boys, aptly termed “a stolen generation,” forced by Boko Haram to do unspeakable acts to stay alive. They were trained to be killers — shooting and beheading people, then bathing their own hands in blood — and survived on rice, dates and fear. Read more