Bring Back Our Girls
Joe ParkinsonWhat happens after you click Tweet? The heart-stopping definitive account of the rescue mission to free hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls after their kidnapping ignited a global social media campaign that prompted a dramatic worldwide intervention
In the spring of 2014, millions of Twitter users, including some of the world's most famous people, unwittingly helped turn a group of teenagers into a central prize in the global War on Terror by retweeting #BringBackOurGirls, a call for the release of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls who'd been kidnapped by a little-known Islamist sect named Boko Haram. With just four words, their tweets launched an army of would-be liberators—soldiers and drones, spies and glory hunters—into an obscure conflict that few understood, in a remote part of Nigeria that had barely begun to use the internet.
When hostage talks and military intervention failed, the schoolgirls were forced to take survival...