Chibok, Nigeria (CNN) -- The
terrifying news began to spread before the gun-wielding Islamist militants made
it into Chibok last month. Villagers began to receive cell phone calls that the
feared extremist group Boko Haram was on the way.
No one knew what the
attack would entail, that it would mean hundreds of schoolgirls plucked from
their beds by a group of extremists who would later threaten to sell them.
"It's like they were
coming for a shopping trip," a villager who witnessed the attack told CNN.
Some lucky girls managed
to escape that night when, after they were loaded into cargo trucks, they made
a dash for freedom.
"We would rather die
than go," one of the girls told CNN. "We ran into the bush. We ran
and we ran."
With fear in her eyes and
voice, the young woman, who asked not to be identified, described the experience
to a CNN crew that made the long, dangerous trip to her village.
She said she and two
friends who had also escaped saw something on fire and headed in that
direction, presuming it was building in the village that had been set ablaze.
Normally, Chibok is pitch black at night.
Officials have said that Boko Haram militants abducted 276 girls from the boarding
school on April 14 and that some escaped into a forest.
Villagers said they
passed along warnings to local police that the terrorists were on their way
that night. They said they received phone calls from family and friends from
surrounding villages and were told that there was a convoy of cargo trucks,
pickups and motorcycles heading their way.
One villager said he was
told, "They are coming for you. Run!"
The villagers said police
called for reinforcements, but none came. Everyone, including the police, fled
into the bush during the attack. But the girls were asleep in their dorms.
The stories appear to
confirm an Amnesty International report that the government couldn't put
together enough troops to head off the attack.
The girl who described
her escape to CNN was still shaken up by the events. When asked to describe
what her kidnappers wore, she responded: "I feel afraid."
Her school is closed, but
if it were open, she says, she wouldn't go back.
Difficult journey
There are many
checkpoints on the roads from the capital of Abuja to Chibok. Some of these are
manned by the military. Others have local vigilantes, armed with machetes,
posted there.
The stops are too many to
count and have turned what should be an eight- to 10-hour trip into a journey
that took CNN's crew four days.
At each checkpoint, someone
will ask where you are headed, poke his head in the vehicle and look around.
Sometimes, he will ask to check passports.
The absence of a security
stop is noticeable when cars turn off the main, paved road onto the
clay-topped, pothole-filled path to Chibok. There are no checkpoints for the
last hour.
The village is home to
hundreds of people, and despite the abduction, life appears to be almost
normal. Children play in the streets; men and women go to work.
The primary place of
business in town, the open-air market, is busy even after nightfall, though not
for long. At the stands, villagers try to charge their mobile phones through
power strips attached to gasoline-powered generators. Rarely does electricity
flow through the grid. Solar-powered streetlights never work.
When the women, children
and elderly go to sleep, the young men station themselves throughout the
village. Every group has its own area of operation where the men -- who work
during the day and must get very little sleep -- do security patrols throughout
the night. Each of them carries a machete, a poisoned bow and arrow or, in some
cases, a homemade gun.
Many in the village said
they hope this will help put pressure on the government to do more to find
their girls.
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