Under Islamist group attacks,schools empty out in Nigeria

Most of the teachers and pupils had fled,but some students,one teacher and headmaster Adanu Haruna were still in the compound,one of many rural boarding schools in Nigeria surrounded by forest and farmland.

They made the students line up and strip naked, Haruna said,eyes wide with horror at describing the attack on the iron-roofed school built by British colonisers in the 1950s. They shot them point blank then set the bodies on fire.

The Mamudo government school,charred and smelling of scorched blood after 22 students and a teacher were killed there in the July 6 attack near Potiskum in Nigerias northeast,was the fourth to be targeted by suspected Boko Haram militants in less than a month.

The attacks reveal much about the rebels who are fighting to revive a medieval Islamic caliphate in northern Nigeria,the type of state they are seeking to establish and the impact of their efforts to do so on the African economic powerhouse.

In a video uploaded to the Internet on Saturday,Boko Harams purported leader Abubakar Shekau denied ordering the latest killings,saying Boko Haram does not itself kill small children,but he praised attacks on Western schools. We fully support the attack on the school in Mamudo,as well as on other schools, he said. Western education schools are against Islam 8230; We will kill their teachers.

Boko Haram,a nickname which translates roughly as Western education is sinful,was set up around a decade ago as a clerical movement opposed to Western influence,which the sects founder,Mohammed Yusuf,said was poisoning young minds against Islam.

Yet,security forces and politicians were the main targets of the armed revolt it started after Yusufs killing in a 2009 military crackdown that left 800 people dead. Since those days,Boko Haram has splintered into several factions,including some with ties to al Qaedas Saharan wing.

Before June,there had been only a handful of attacks on the Western-style schools it so despises. An offensive against the insurgents by President Goodluck Jonathan has changed that.

Across northeastern Nigeria,schools are emptying out,threatening further radicalisation and economic decline in a region left behind by the countrys oil-rich Christian south.

Nassir Salaudeen,a teacher whose son was killed in a strike on Damaturu government school on June 16,the first of the wave of recent attacks,said he had put all his efforts into his boys education in the hope he would get a good job.

They killed him in cold blood,just because he was a student and his father a teacher, a tearful Salaudeen said. I regret ever being educated.

For some,the school attacks are a sign the offensive has weakened the Islamist group,which is still seen as the main security threat to Africas leading oil and gas producer.

Given the security clampdown,many of the places like police stations or the military are getting harder for Boko Haram to hit, said Kole Shettima,chairman of the Centre for Democracy and Development. Schools are soft targets.

But the attacks also reflect a radical ideology that resents modernity and yearns to wind back the clock to an era before West African lands were conquered by Europeans.

When Britain established Nigeria as a territory,it agreed to spare the largely Muslim norths leaders the activities of missionaries,who brought Christianity but also education and literacy that gave the south a head start over the north. Over the years,political and economic power shifted to the south and education has played a role in that growing discrepancy. Lack of education and high youth unemployment has helped Boko Harams Islamist ideology to thrive in the north.

The attacks,which UNICEF says have killed 48 students and seven teachers in the past month,aim to scare parents and their kids away from schools. It says: either take your children out of school or put them into an Islamist school we approve of, Jacob Zenn,an expert on the sect at the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation,said,one that teaches only in Arabic and omits courses like science.

The risk isnt worth it. These guys are just mindless, said Mike Ojo,a mechanic in the northeastern city of Maiduguri who is taking his three children out of school.

Many teachers have left too.

I am not prepared to die for teaching. Time to start looking for a new job, said Umar,shrugging. Most of our schools are deserted anyway.