After Boko Haram

The corpse of a man that Nigerien soldiers said was a Boko Haram fighter lies on the ground in Duji. Troops from Chad and Niger pursued the Islamist group across a northern Nigeria border area, driving them out of a village they held there.

The regional offensive comes as Nigeria, Africa's most populous country and biggest economy, prepares to hold elections on March, 28. Nigeria's elections commission postponed the polls to allow the operation to go forward.

Reuters photographer Joe Penney travelled with Nigerien troops taking part in the offensive and describes documenting the fight against the Islamist group.

A girl drinks water as women queue for blankets and food given out by Nigerien soldiers in Damasak.

Over the past six years, Boko Haram has dominated headlines in West Africa. Kidnapping more than 200 schoolgirls in Chibok, slitting the throats of sleeping boys in Buni Yadi, sending girls as young as ten years old to blow up markets in Maiduguri; the scale of Boko Haram’s violence against civilians seems incomprehensible. How did the group become so strong? What do they want? Who are they?
There is so much opacity surrounding Boko Haram that the most basic information about the group is wanting.
When I landed in Damasak, Nigeria, a town on the border with Niger that Boko Haram fighters had occupied from November 2014 until earlier this month, I got a rare insight into how they ran the town.

Out of the original population of roughly 100,000, only a few dozen of people - mostly elderly men and women and a few small children - remained in the town after the four-month occupation.
When I arrived with Nigerien and Chadian troops, the traumatised and starving survivors were huddled together under the shade of a couple of cicada trees on a sandy road.

A soldier stands in a bedroom in a house that was occupied by Boko Haram militants.

They told of inconceivable horror. Most of the residents fled the town before Boko Haram arrived, but the insurgents caught about 70 people leaving, shot them and threw them off a bridge, leaving their bodies decomposing in the open air as a warning to anyone else contemplating fleeing.
Boko Haram then coerced the remaining young men in town to join them and proceeded to systematically loot the residents’ houses. They seized the nicest homes in town and gave them to their fighters.

Then on March 8, when Chadian and Nigerien soldiers were advancing on the town, Boko Haram rounded everyone that was left (at that point some 400 people, mostly women and children) in the main mosque and fled with them in trucks and on foot, residents said.
A woman named Fana (seen here, pointing her finger) said she only managed to save her two small children by hiding them. A trader named Souleymane Ali said fighters took his wife and three girls. Another man, Mohammed Ousmane, said they took his two wives.

There were drawings of murders on the walls of houses that Boko Haram combatants lived in.
A human corpse lay in the middle of the street, burned and blackened with bones visibly sticking out of the man’s legs, protruding from the yellow leaves surrounding him.

Headlines talk of massacres, but for me the scale of Boko Haram’s violence only became real when I saw it for myself. Photographing this is not easy emotionally or physically, but it is nothing when you think about the level of violence inflicted upon the people of Damasak, or Chibok, or Buni Yadi.
It might be a photojournalistic cliché, but I feel that as Nigeria goes to the polls on Saturday, it is important to show people what is happening in the northeast of the country.

A wall is painted with Boko Haram murals.

Nigerien special forces prepare to fight Boko Haram.

Nigerien soldiers hold positions at the border with Nigeria.

Nigerien special forces prepare to fight Boko Haram.

Nigerien soldiers patrol the border with Nigeria.

Soldiers patrol on a bridge above the Komadougou Yobe river which separates Niger from Nigeria.

A soldier stands guard in front of a military pickup truck at the main market of Diffa. Nigerien and Chadian troops fighting Boko Haram are based in the town.

Vendors sell goods at the main market.

Soldiers walk past a customs signpost.