On a
long, barren road in northeastern Nigeria, Hafsat Mohammed, squeezed
into a public minibus, saw the gunmen materialise from the bush like a
mirage. 

The 33-year-old was on her way to Maiduguri, the capital of Borno
State and the epicentre of the Boko Haram insurgency, when two Hilux
pickups swerved onto the road ahead.

The minibus stopped. Men in combat fatigues and balaclavas emerged
from the first pickup and aimed their guns at the windshield. They
ordered the passengers out onto the hot tarmac. The second pickup sped
off towards a nearby village.

The men beat the passengers with their guns, jeering and calling them names as they did so.

A former radio journalist-turned-civil society activist, Mohammed
wasn’t usually afraid to speak up; she thought she might shout or
scream, but, instead, she found herself mute.

“I was praying in my mind,” she recalls. “I did not dare pray out loud.”

Then they opened fire.

Mohammed remembers how the dead body of a woman fell on top of her and how she lay there, beneath it.

She heard the screams of two women as they were forced into the
pickup. Then the gunmen were gone, leaving tyre marks behind in the
dirt.

They had killed five passengers, but Mohammed was unharmed. She and
the other survivors, including the driver, got back into the minibus and
drove off.

I first met Mohammed in January 2014, just weeks after the attack.
She was back at her office in a nondescript high-rise in Kaduna city,
the old political capital of the north, gearing up for initiatives to
tackle religious intolerance in Nigerian schools.

For the past year, she had been working at the grassroots,
community-led Interfaith Mediation Centre, founded by a Muslim imam and a
Christian pastor to address interreligious violence.

In sentences often punctuated by a loud, raucous laugh, Mohammed spoke about her work and the attack.

“It motivated me to go back to the northeast,” she said. “It was
something that kept on bothering me: ‘What do you do to conquer this
[violence]’?”

Her answer to that question has been to try to counter violent
extremism by engaging young people at the grassroots level, getting them
to imagine a different future and their individual ambitions for it.

“I was in that bus and I saw hell,” the mother of two reflected. “But it motivates me to work for peace.”

Lifting our voice above theirs

When we meet again, at a bustling salon in the Nigerian capital of
Abuja in September 2015, Mohammed is sitting quietly getting her hair
woven into braids. When they are done, she pulls the slinky hood of a
lilac abaya over the neat, steamed rows and scrolls through Facebook
updates on her phone.

There has been a bombing in Yola, where people fleeing attacks in
Borno are living in IDP camps. “Why would they do this?” she questions
out loud.

“We have to make sure that our voice is lifted in such a way that we
counter those violent messages and ideologies, our voice is heard above
theirs,” she later says.

The following day, she posts a video on Facebook, taken on her phone,
her face obscured by a dark niqab, speaking through tears about the
bombing in the camp.

“I have something that’s really bothering me today and I want to talk
about it,” she opens. “How the Boko Haram insurgents went into an IDP
camp in Yola, in the northeastern part of Nigeria, and detonated a bomb,
in a camp for crying out loud!”
She cannot comprehend what
would make somebody commit such violence against people who have already
lost everything other than their lives.

While at a salon in September in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, Mohammed is horrified to learn of a bombing in a Yola IDP camp [Caelainn Hogan/Al Jazeera]

Escalating conflict

In April 2014, when more than 200 girls from the town of Chibok in
Borno State were kidnapped by Boko Haram, the world seemingly woke up to
what had been erupting around Mohammed since 2009. It is a conflict
that has until now claimed more than 15,000 lives and displaced
millions.

She has watched as her home state has become the hotbed of a war waged by a group invoking Mohammed’s own Muslim faith.

Across the northeast, education facilities have been repeatedly
targeted and, early last year, officials in Borno decided to close
around 85 schools, affecting nearly 120,000 students.

Mohammed wanted her children to grow up in Borno, but an attack on a
school near the one attended by her children was the final blow: she no
longer felt that it was safe for her children to be there.
So, in early 2014, she relocated her father and two young children to Kaduna, a city that has experienced only rare attacks.

But Mohammed didn’t go with them. Instead, she headed further into the epicentre of the crisis in the northeast – to Yobe State

“I thought, what if every individual said, ‘Let’s counter this
message by preaching good’? … I felt obligated to do something,” she
says, explaining why she would choose to put herself in harm’s way.

Photographs of alleged fighters killed by the Nigerian army during an
attack on a boarding school in Yobe disturbed her: they were just young
men, she observed. “It became a problem for me, knowing I have a
brother, I have teenage cousins, I have a son,” she explains.

She wanted to make other young men less vulnerable to the lure of
such groups. “What can we do to prevent it, to show that this is not the
way?” she asks.

Women’s role in countering extremist narratives

The kidnapping of the Chibok girls, the ensuing Bring Back Our Girls
campaign and the rise in the use of young girls as suicide bombers has
made the conflict in Nigeria a key example of the dynamic and
complicated role of women within crises fuelled by violent extremism –
as targets, as propagators and also as leaders in countering the threats
within their communities.

This September, the UN Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee
held an unprecedented meeting on the role of women in countering violent
extremism – often seen as a male dominated domain – with female experts
from Iraq, Kenya, and Nigeria speaking about the issue.

Pastor Esther Ibanga, an activist for interfaith peace in Plateau
State, in Nigeria’s Middle Belt region, believes women play a crucial
role in security issues.

Although in Nigeria their involvement is seen as “taboo and sometimes
quite offensive to the men,” Ibanga says “women civil society groups
tap into the needs of communities, where women and children are
disproportionately impacted by terrorism.”

Many activists share Mohammed’s belief that the best defence against
divisive ideologies is providing a counter message and encouraging
people to speak out.

One such activist is Aisha Yusuf, a campaigner with Bring Back Our
Girls. “Poverty in this country makes you nameless, faceless and
voiceless,” she says. Yet, “we [citizens] have a duty to speak up
against anything that’s wrong”.

But, in some places, people are too fearful to even speak of Boko Haram, she says.

“The question we ask is what narrative are we putting out there to
counter what Boko Haram is saying? What are we telling the people?” she
asks.

“It’s for us to give a different narrative. If Boko Haram is saying
Western education is forbidden, why are they on Youtube? … Why are they
driving cars and using assault rifles? Why are they not using horses and
donkeys or their own legs? These are people saying education is
forbidden but they’re using education.”

While there is no shortage of female activists in Nigeria pushing for
change and fighting injustice, Mohammed admits that it’s not always
easy to be an outspoken woman.

She says most young men are receptive to her work, but some older men have responded differently.

“Some felt I was being disrespectful, that I wasn’t being a lady,
that I should be at home, married, having babies like a baby factory,
but that wasn’t what I was created for,” she says.

“I am confident, I am strong, I am a Muslim, I am an
anti-violent-extremism activist, I advocate against it and I will do
whatever I can to stop it. A lot of time I talk in front of people and
they say, ‘You’re a woman, you don’t need to talk.’ And I say, ‘Yes, I
will talk.’ “

Aisha Yusuf, a Bring Back Our Girls campaigner, speaks at a daily vigil held at the Unity Fountain in Abuja since the kidnapping of the Chibok girls  [Caelainn Hogan/Al Jazeera]

Segregated schools

It was Mohammed’s father, a former air force man, who instilled in
his daughter the gritty confidence she has today. He always told his
children they could achieve anything they set their minds to. “He never
treated me differently as a girl,” she reflects.

And it was in her former career as a journalist in Kano, the largest
city in northern Nigeria, that the roots of her activism were formed.
She would visit different communities and meet people facing violence
and poverty.
Then, in 2007, she turned to civil society work, consulting for internationally funded development projects.

But she wanted to do more hands-on work to make a sustainable
difference on the ground, and so she joined the Interfaith Mediation
Centre in December 2012. 

In her outreach work for Interfaith in Kaduna, a city divided between
north and south, Muslim and Christian, Mohammed saw how religious
intolerance could plant the seeds of extremism and hate.

She and a Christian colleague, Samson Atua, visited schools and
witnessed classrooms becoming unofficially segregated by religion as
communities grew ever more divided. They drew on their own experiences
to show teachers and students that the religious divisions in their
minds were fabricated.

“If the student is Muslim they’re taught, ‘Oh [the teacher] is a
Christian, don’t relate with her,’ or if he’s a Christian, ‘Your teacher
is a Muslim, don’t go close to her,’ ” she says.

“There has been resistance from the Christian teachers and the Muslim
teachers, and we had to give references from the Quran and the Bible,”
she elaborates. “I can sing choir songs and Christmas carols, and the
kids say ‘I dare you,’ and I do. The kids and pastors are surprised,
with the hijab and all.”

When growing up in Kaduna, says Atua, “You never knew who was a
Christian, [and] who was a Muslim.” But now, he says, “hate is the issue
of the day”.

Together they made an effective team: the forthright Mohammed, often
dressed in a purple-grey abaya, her head covering framing her round,
smiling face, and her diamante nose stud catching the light, alongside
Atua, an easygoing, soft-spoken young man in a bright blue t-shirt and
jeans.

She saw playground games where children called out to each other:
“I’m a Christian, you’re a Muslim,” and mimicked guns with their
fingers: “Ta-ta-ta-ta, you’re dead!”

On one research visit, she asked students to draw their homes. She
remembers how one five-year-old drew a picture of trees, smiling people,
animals, and sweets on one side of his piece of cardboard. He covered
the other side entirely in black crayon. “When I asked him why, he said,
‘This end [the black side] is full of Christians, the other is
Muslims,’ ” Mohammed says.

Mohammed waited until school had finished for the day to meet the
boy’s mother, who was shocked. When asked how he got such ideas, the boy
said his religious teacher had taught him that “Christians are no
good”.

Mohammed’s own family has not been immune to this atmosphere of
religious disunity. As a single mother working in Kaduna, her children
live most of the time with her father in Maiduguri.

“I had to be the workaholic, up and down,” she says. “My dad was helping me.” 

Once in Maiduguri, as she was walking past a church with her son, Mohammed told the boy to go and say hello to the pastor.

“Please don’t make me,” her son responded, tugging at her arm to keep walking. “Only Christians can go into the church.”
She made him go and greet the man, who then gave him some sweets.
That church has since been destroyed by Boko Haram, she says.

We need the correct answers, she says, to discredit “those
ideologies, those messages that your children hear on the radio, hear
from friends”.

“Every mother’s dream is to have a child who is successful,” she
continues. If her own son became a fighter, she says, it would be
“heartbreaking … [it would] kill me”.

The names of Nigeria’s states, including Yobe, are represented on the Unity Fountain, a landmark in the federal capital of Abuja [Caelainn Hogan/Al Jazeera]

Yobe State

In December 2014, Mohammed moved to Damaturu, the capital city of
Yobe State, and the alleged birthplace of Boko Haram leader Abubakar
Shekau. For the past year, there have been regular attacks by suicide
bombers in the city.

The primarily Muslim state was carved out of Borno in 1991, and was
one of the northeastern states on which former President Goodluck
Jonathan imposed a state of emergency in 2013, due to the escalating
Boko Haram insurgency.

She joined a regional development initiative as a project manager for
Yobe and became responsible for identifying and supporting campaigns
and projects countering violent extremism, particularly among young
people – or “our nation,” as she calls them.

In Damaturu, an emerging urban centre, daily life continues, despite
the regular threat of suicide bombings, as it does across northeastern
Nigeria.

“People just continue their business after a bomb explodes,” she
says. “If it’s a really bad attack, they’ll put [a] curfew just for a
day.”

Positive messages and dialogue, she believes, can act as a buffer
against the anger and frustration she worries could lead many youth to
pick up guns themselves. In the rousing wake of Muhammadu Buhari’s
landslide election victory in April, Mohammed helped organise a
symposium for around 200 young men and women from across the northeast,
to discuss everything from leadership to jobs.

We were working on “getting youth on their toes,” she says.

Unlike in Kaduna, where she was on the ground mediating and
implementing programmes, in Yobe, Mohammed took a different approach –
catalysing local leaders and grassroots civil society organisations to
make change within their own communities.

Working with imams

In Yobe, Mohammed worked with interfaith initiatives and women’s
groups. One of the most important aspects of this work, she explains,
was gaining the trust of local imams who speak out against extremism and
violence during Friday prayers and often counsel young people.

A UN event this year highlighted the importance of delinking
extremism from religion in countering violent extremism, and Mohammed
sees religious leaders playing a key role in that.

“They are change agents,” she reflects.

“There is a lot of frustration everywhere that makes people join
[Boko Haram] because they don’t even have the money to buy food or go to
the hospital.”

“[There is] poverty, unemployment and frustration that they’re not
getting from [the] government what they’re supposed to be getting,” she
continues.
When people struggle to see a future for themselves and to form ambitions, Mohammed believes trouble follows.

She wants to empower youth to take control of their lives, to know
that they have the right to speak up as citizens and to ask more of
their local government; she wants them to see that staying silent or
picking up a gun are not the only options available to them.

Just reminding the youth to talk about their future can help, she
says, explaining that this is a lesson she has passed on to some of the
young people she has worked with.

“They don’t talk about terrorism, about war; they talk about positive
stuff, about education, about being who they want to be. They talk
about in the future having a family – that’s a great ambition.”

Mohammed speaks to nearly 200 youth in Yobe at a grassroots symposium this summer to counter violent extremism and discuss ambitions, leadership and needs of young people in the northeast [Courtesy Hafsat Mohammed]

Damaturu’s youth

In Damaturu, she spoke to as many young people as she could. Some
came to her house, others she’d find in groups at a park or on street
corners where mobile recharge cards are sold under colourful umbrellas
or at roadside tea and bread stalls.

She spoke to carpenters, bricklayers, and painters.

“They would tell me their ambitions,” she says. “They never got the
chance to go to school, but they had ambitions, they had dreams.”
Many were scared to go to school, even if it were possible; they were afraid that Boko Haram would come to kill them.

“If we go to school, what will happen?” a 10-year-old boy asked her.
She told him he would be safe and that the security forces would watch
over him. He reminded her that security forces had been present when
other students had been killed.

One day, in a market in Damaturu, Mohammed was drawn to a gathering
of young male tailors. They were arguing about why the media called the
Boko Haram fighters Islamic extremists. 

“It’s not religion,” said one man, angered by those who claim Boko Haram is an Islamic movement. “It’s not Islam.”

They were hurt that their religion was being linked to something they
felt was so far removed from their beliefs. “Why don’t they say
‘Christian terrorist’?” asked one, referring to the Charleston church
shooting in the US.

“I’m like, for real? In the market?” Mohammed laughs. “These guys have a point.”

Mohammed, who rejects the idea that extremism or hateful ideology is
particular to any religion, explained to them that because Boko Haram
claims to be Islamic, that’s how people see them.

“Well, they [the media] should have more common sense,” one man
responded. “It really gets on my nerves.” She encouraged him to get his
message out there.

Most of the young people she meets believe the boys who have joined the fighters are being used.

But Mohammed worries that young men, constantly being painted as
potential terrorists, could be marginalised to the point that they end
up fitting that image.

“We get them to say, ‘Okay, I’ll just be it,’ ” she says. “Things
like this can trigger their frustration and make them hate people.”

She says that many of the young men she has met have been approached
about taking up arms, but that they were in no way eager to do so.

“They’re frustrated with the whole issue. They want to go to school,
they want to go farming, but now they can’t because they’re afraid to
move around.”

Helping women

In June, Mohammed registered her own NGO called Choice for Peace,
Gender and Development, to help young people and women whose family
members have been taken, whether abducted or recruited, or killed.

“I feel the pain of other mothers,” she says. “They feel helpless to prevent it.”

In Yobe she tried to encourage women-led initiatives and also to set
up psychosocial support for women who were dealing with trauma.

The use of young girls, some as young as 10, as suicide bombers has devastated communities.

“Girls are heartbroken that [Boko Haram fighters] are using girls as
suicide bombers, that’s something they never expected,” she says.
The young women at the symposium she organised could barely talk about it; instead they just cried.
Each attack leaves her feeling more horrified that anyone could do such a thing. “Even today, it just baffles me,” she says.

In June, Mohammed registered her own NGO to help young people and women whose family members have been taken, whether abducted, recruited, or killed [Caelainn Hogan/Al Jazeera]

Threats

But these days, Mohammed doesn’t feel she’s in a position to help anyone.
The calls began in August: Three different voices, all male. They told
her the same thing: When the time is right, we will find you and we will
kill you. They said they knew where her family was, that if she
continued her work they would harm her daughter. 

“Ever since this recent [threat] … every day I sit alone, I get
feverish, I get sick,” she says. “I get really confused at times, I’m
really scared. I know I’m safe but the thought, it keeps coming.”

In these moments, and in the strained silences when she does not want
to speak or to remember, it is sometimes hard to recognise the resolute
and unshakeable young woman who sat at her desk just weeks after the
attack on the road.

Now, in the early evenings, she is driven home from meetings in
Abuja, the lights of the minarets of the capital’s grand mosque glowing
in the approaching dusk.

She arrives at the gated, guarded housing complex where she lives,
and spends most evenings curled up on the sofa. She fries eggs and
watches television. Mostly stuck inside, Facebook has become an outlet
for her.

But when she thinks of the men in the pickup trucks, or of her
father’s house in Borno, now filled with displaced relatives, her whole
body stiffens. Instinctively, she wraps her arms around herself.

“[Last year], I was fearless; I would go back to Yobe and stay there,
I wouldn’t leave and no one could convince me to leave,” she says.
“But I’ve been holding on strong for a long time and I’m breaking down.”

Her hands clasped on her lap, she says: “Now the trauma is in my head.”
The events of the last few years – the attack on the road; the teenage
son of a cousin who disappeared only for a note to turn up at his home
saying that he refused to join the fighters so they killed him; the
friend from Gwoza who returned home after the army had reclaimed the
area from Boko Haram, and found a ghost town and people’s bones – have
all taken their toll.

“After these phone calls, these threats, all that came back,” she admits quietly.

“I want changes in this country,” she says. But alone in a room that
is not hers, separated from her family for fear of putting them in
danger, she acknowledges that, right now, she needs to look after
herself first. “It’s time to keep my life.”

You can follow Caelainn on Twitter at @CaelainnH.