The girls had attended a boarding school near Chibok, an obscure provincial town that is now famous because of the attack on the school the previous April. “All the way up there I’m playing war games in my mind,” he remembered.Īfter three tense hours on the road, expecting to be ambushed by terrorists wielding automatic rifles at any moment, the little convoy rounded a corner and Ensign saw 11 girls and their families and friends waving and yelling at the vehicles approaching in clouds of dust. Marine, had contacts with vigilante groups in northern Nigeria, and thought he might be able to summon them if the going got tough. So they headed north in two Toyota vans, a suddenly meager contingent-Ensign, Rawlins, a driver and one other security guard-dashing down the crumbling two-lane highway through arid scrubland, deeper into remote country terrorized by the ruthless, heavily armed militant group called Boko Haram. “The president looked at me and I looked at her, and I knew what she was thinking,” Rawlins said. Running a college doesn’t often entail making split-second decisions about daredevil forays into hostile territory, but as this Saturday dawned for the energetic five-foot California native with a doctorate in international political economy, it was gut-check time. “They were afraid,” Rawlins later recalled. The chief, Lionel Rawlins, had gone to get the half-dozen security guards that Ensign was counting on to help her with a daring rescue mission, but the guards were asleep, or perhaps pretending to be, and couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be roused. Shortly before six o’clock in the morning on August 30, 2014, Margee Ensign, president of the American University of Nigeria, met with her security chief in the large house that she occupies on campus, in Yola, near the nation’s eastern border, in Adamawa State.
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