Readers of The Common Sense may remember the #BringBackOurGirls campaign that went viral in 2014. The hashtag swept across X (then known as Twitter) after Boko Haram, a radical Islamist terror group whose name literally means: “Western education is forbidden,” abducted 276 schoolgirls, mostly Christian but some Muslim also, aged 16 to 18, from the town of Chibok in northern Nigeria. The girls had been sitting their final physics exams when the militants stormed the school.

The campaign drew a global outcry. Celebrities such as Malala Yousafzai, Hillary Clinton, Chris Brown, Forest Whitaker, and even United States (US) First Lady Michelle Obama joined in. The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Sheikh, condemned the kidnappings, stating that Islam forbids both abduction and forced marriage.

Countries from Canada to Israel, the US to China, offered intelligence and logistical support to help locate the girls. The European Union passed a resolution demanding their return.

Despite the global attention, the rescue efforts were patchy. Fifty-seven girls escaped by leaping from trucks as they were being driven into the nearby forest. Over the following years, Nigerian troops managed to free a few more, many now mothers, having been forcibly converted and married off.

Others were exchanged for captured Boko Haram commanders. The Nigerian government, however, refused early Western offers of help, claiming the crisis was a domestic matter.

Ten years later, in 2024, 82 of the girls were still missing.

Not unique

But the tragedy of Chibok was far from unique. Boko Haram had been attacking schools since 2010, leaving more than 10 000 children without access to education. Human-rights groups estimate that by 2015, some 2 000 girls had been abducted as sex slaves, and that over the next decade another 1 400 were taken for purposes of sex slavery.

Between 2009 and 2020, Boko Haram is estimated to have killed 35 000 people through suicide bombings, abductions, and torture. At its peak, the group controlled a territory the size of Belgium before being pushed back by military force.

Boko Haram is not an isolated phenomenon. Its ideology, militant, supremacist, and hostile to modernity, drives conflicts from the Congo to Somalia to Mozambique. Africa, once a bystander to Middle Eastern terror, has now become the global centre of jihadist violence.

This brings us to Gaza.

Same ideology

Two decades after Israel withdrew, Hamas still rules the strip. The context may differ, but the ideology of Hamas and Boko Haram is the same. It is a myth that Hamas only began taking hostages on 7 October 2023, when it kidnapped 251 people, including women, children, the elderly, and foreign nationals.

For a decade before that, Hamas held two mentally ill Israeli civilians, Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, from the Ethiopian and Bedouin communities. Despite appeals from the Pope and others, Hamas refused for years to even provide proof of life.

There were a number of military operations in Gaza in the intervening years but getting the hostages out proved difficult. Hamas, like Boko Haram, made the calculation that the way to get Palestinians convicted of murder and other crimes out of jail was to take hostages and then trade them. A previous deal with Israel with Hamas had yielded 1 027 Palestinian convicts for one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, abducted by Hamas.

One of the aims of Hamas’s 7 October attack was to ignite a region-wide war, drawing in Iran and its proxies in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and the West Bank, to overwhelm Israel on multiple fronts. The hostage-taking was meant to slow Israel’s response and increase leverage in any future negotiations.

Over the next two years, Israel dismantled much of Iran’s: “ring of fire” terror network across the Middle East. Apart from a few leaders luxuriating in Doha, Hamas’s entire command was wiped out.

The campaign in Gaza, however, has been brutal. The war raged in a setting where civilians who supported the actions of Hamas lived above a vast military complex of tunnels, some large enough for trucks, others fitted with lights and air-conditioning, used to hide fighters and hostages alike.

By some estimates Gaza has enough tunnels to get from Johannesburg to Maseru.

Egypt refused to accept refugees, trapping the population in place. Israel, under pressure to both fight and feed, oversaw the delivery of nearly half a million metric tons of aid in the first seven months alone, all while trying to prevent Hamas from stealing it to maintain control.

Propaganda

At the same time, a propaganda war raged across the West. Accusations of: “genocide” flooded social media within a few weeks after the Hamas attacks – never mind that in nearby Syria, the Yazidi people had actually suffered a genuine genocide attempt within the last decade. In fact, a Yazidi sex slave survivor kidnapped years earlier was found in Gaza during the fighting.

Even allowing for the outright propaganda of this war, of which the South African government has been a chief purveyor, no one denies that Gaza has been devastated. Tens of thousands are dead, and whole districts lie in ruins. The last two years have been terrible.

However, for the first time in a long while, there seems to be a genuine peace deal on the table, one to which the Americans, Israel, and the Arab world agrees. Exactly what Hamas’s attitude to this deal is remains to be seen. If it succeeds, and if the last remnants of its terror network are indeed gone, there might be a chance, that the century-long Arab-Israeli conflict could finally give way to regional stability.

Hamas may still boast of repeating 7 October, but its capacity to do so is gone. But even if peace remains elusive, the hostages will eventually come home.

The same cannot be said for the women of Chibok.