The Great British Brexit Robbery: how our democracy was hijacked

“The connectivity that is the heart of globalisation can be exploited by states with hostile intent to further their aims.[…] The risks at stake are profound and represent a fundamental threat to our sovereignty.”
Alex Younger, head of MI6, December, 2016

“It’s not MI6’s job to warn of internal threats. It was a very strange speech. Was it one branch of the intelligence services sending a shot across the bows of another? Or was it pointed at Theresa May’s government? Does she know something she’s not telling us?”
Senior intelligence analyst, April 2017

07/05/2017

In June 2013, a young American postgraduate called Sophie was passing through London when she called up the boss of a firm where she’d previously interned. The company, SCL Elections, went on to be bought by Robert Mercer, a secretive hedge fund billionaire, renamed Cambridge Analytica, and achieved a certain notoriety as the data analytics firm that played a role in both Trump and Brexit campaigns. But all of this was still to come. London in 2013 was still basking in the afterglow of the Olympics. Britain had not yet Brexited. The world had not yet turned.

“That was before we became this dark, dystopian data company that gave the world Trump,” a former Cambridge Analytica employee who I’ll call Paul tells me. “It was back when we were still just a psychological warfare firm.”

Was that really what you called it, I ask him. Psychological warfare? “Totally. That’s what it is. Psyops. Psychological operations – the same methods the military use to effect mass sentiment change. It’s what they mean by winning ‘hearts and minds’. We were just doing it to win elections in the kind of developing countries that don’t have many rules.”

Why would anyone want to intern with a psychological warfare firm, I ask him. And he looks at me like I am mad. “It was like working for MI6. Only it’s MI6 for hire. It was very posh, very English, run by an old Etonian and you got to do some really cool things. Fly all over the world. You were working with the president of Kenya or Ghana or wherever. It’s not like election campaigns in the west. You got to do all sorts of crazy shit.”

On that day in June 2013, Sophie met up with SCL’s chief executive, Alexander Nix, and gave him the germ of an idea. “She said, ‘You really need to get into data.’ She really drummed it home to Alexander. And she suggested he meet this firm that belonged to someone she knew about through her father.” Who’s her father? “Eric Schmidt.” Eric Schmidt – the chairman of Google? “Yes. And she suggested Alexander should meet this company called Palantir.”

I had been speaking to former employees of Cambridge Analytica for months and heard dozens of hair-raising stories, but it was still a gobsmacking moment. To anyone concerned about surveillance, Palantir is practically now a trigger word. The data-mining firm has contracts with governments all over the world – including GCHQ and the NSA. It’s owned by Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of eBay and PayPal, who became Silicon Valley’s first vocal supporter of Trump.

In some ways, Eric Schmidt’s daughter showing up to make an introduction to Palantir is just another weird detail in the weirdest story I have ever researched.

A weird but telling detail. Because it goes to the heart of why the story of Cambridge Analytica is one of the most profoundly unsettling of our time. Sophie Schmidt now works for another Silicon Valley megafirm: Uber. And what’s clear is that the power and dominance of the Silicon Valley – Google and Facebook and a small handful of others – are at the centre of the global tectonic shift we are currently witnessing.

It also reveals a critical and gaping hole in the political debate in Britain. Because what is happening in America and what is happening in Britain are entwined. Brexit and Trump are entwined. The Trump administration’s links to Russia and Britain are entwined. And Cambridge Analytica is one point of focus through which we can see all these relationships in play; it also reveals the elephant in the room as we hurtle into a general election: Britain tying its future to an America that is being remade – in a radical and alarming way – by Trump.

“Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future.”

There are three strands to this story. How the foundations of an authoritarian surveillance state are being laid in the US. How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire. And how we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future.

My entry point into this story began, as so many things do, with a late-night Google. Last December, I took an unsettling tumble into a wormhole of Google autocomplete suggestions that ended with “did the holocaust happen”. And an entire page of results that claimed it didn’t.

Google’s algorithm had been gamed by extremist sites and it was Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who helped me get to grips with what I was seeing. He was the first person to map and uncover an entire “alt-right” news and information ecosystem and he was the one who first introduced me to Cambridge Analytica.

He called the company a central point in the right’s “propaganda machine”, a line I quoted in reference to its work for the Trump election campaign and the referendum Leave campaign. That led to the second article featuring Cambridge Analytica – as a central node in the alternative news and information network that I believed Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon, the key Trump aide who is now his chief strategist, were creating. I found evidence suggesting they were on a strategic mission to smash the mainstream media and replace it with one comprising alternative facts, fake history and rightwing propaganda.

Mercer is a brilliant computer scientist, a pioneer in early artificial intelligence, and the co-owner of one of the most successful hedge funds on the planet (with a gravity-defying 71.8% annual return). And, he is also, I discovered, good friends with Nigel Farage. Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s communications director, told me that it was Mercer who had directed his company, Cambridge Analytica, to “help” the Leave campaign.

The second article triggered two investigations, which are both continuing: one by the Information Commissioner’s Office into the possible illegal use of data. And a second by the Electoral Commission which is “focused on whether one or more donations – including services – accepted by Leave.EU was ‘impermissable’”.

What I then discovered is that Mercer’s role in the referendum went far beyond this. Far beyond the jurisdiction of any UK law. The key to understanding how a motivated and determined billionaire could bypass ourelectoral laws rests on AggregateIQ, an obscure web analytics company based in an office above a shop in Victoria, British Columbia.

It was with AggregateIQ that Vote Leave (the official Leave campaign) chose to spend £3.9m, more than half its official £7m campaign budget. As did three other affiliated Leave campaigns: BeLeave, Veterans for Britain and the Democratic Unionist party, spending a further £757,750. “Coordination” between campaigns is prohibited under UK electoral law, unless campaign expenditure is declared, jointly. It wasn’t. Vote Leave says the Electoral Commission “looked into this” and gave it “a clean bill of health”.

How did an obscure Canadian company come to play such a pivotal role in Brexit? It’s a question that Martin Moore, director of the centre for the study of communication, media and power at King’s College London has been asking too. “I went through all the Leave campaign invoices when the Electoral Commission uploaded them to its site in February. And I kept on discovering all these huge amounts going to a company that not only had I never heard of, but that there was practically nothing at all about on the internet. More money was spent with AggregateIQ than with any other company in any other campaign in the entire referendum. All I found, at that time, was a one-page website and that was it. It was an absolute mystery.”

Moore contributed to an LSE report published in April that concluded UK’s electoral laws were “weak and helpless” in the face of new forms of digital campaigning. Offshore companies, money poured into databases, unfettered third parties… the caps on spending had come off. The laws that had always underpinned Britain’s electoral laws were no longer fit for purpose. Laws, the report said, that needed “urgently reviewing by parliament”.

AggregateIQ holds the key to unravelling another complicated network of influence that Mercer has created. A source emailed me to say he had found that AggregateIQ’s address and telephone number corresponded to a company listed on Cambridge Analytica’s website as its overseas office: “SCL Canada”. A day later, that online reference vanished.

There had to be a connection between the two companies. Between the various Leave campaigns. Between the referendum and Mercer. It was too big a coincidence. But everyone – AggregateIQ, Cambridge Analytica, Leave.EU, Vote Leave – denied it. AggregateIQ had just been a short-term “contractor” to Cambridge Analytica. There was nothing to disprove this. We published the known facts. On 29 March, article 50 was triggered.

Then I meet Paul, the first of two sources formerly employed by Cambridge Analytica. He is in his late 20s and bears mental scars from his time there. “It’s almost like post-traumatic shock. It was so… messed up. It happened so fast. I just woke up one morning and found we’d turned into the Republican fascist party. I still can’t get my head around it.”

He laughed when I told him the frustrating mystery that was AggregateIQ. “Find Chris Wylie,” he said.

Who’s Chris Wylie?

“He’s the one who brought data and micro-targeting [individualised political messages] to Cambridge Analytica. And he’s from west Canada. It’s only because of him that AggregateIQ exist. They’re his friends. He’s the one who brought them in.”

There wasn’t just a relationship between Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ, Paul told me. They were intimately entwined, key nodes in Robert Mercer’s distributed empire. “The Canadians were our back office. They built our software for us. They held our database. If AggregateIQ is involved then Cambridge Analytica is involved. And if Cambridge Analytica is involved, then Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon are involved. You need to find Chris Wylie.”

I did find Chris Wylie. He refused to comment.

Key to understanding how data would transform the company is knowing where it came from. And it’s a letter from “Director of Defence Operations, SCL Group”, that helped me realise this. It’s from “Commander Steve Tatham, PhD, MPhil, Royal Navy (rtd)” complaining about my use in my Mercer article of the word “disinformation”.

I wrote back to him pointing out references in papers he’d written to “deception” and “propaganda”, which I said I understood to be “roughly synonymous with ‘disinformation’.” It’s only later that it strikes me how strange it is that I’m corresponding with a retired navy commander about military strategies that may have been used in British and US elections.

What’s been lost in the US coverage of this “data analytics” firm is the understanding of where the firm came from: deep within the military-industrial complex. A weird British corner of it populated, as the military establishment in Britain is, by old-school Tories. Geoffrey Pattie, a former parliamentary under-secretary of state for defence procurement and director of Marconi Defence Systems, used to be on the board, and Lord Marland, David Cameron’s pro-Brexit former trade envoy, a shareholder.

Steve Tatham was the head of psychological operations for British forces in Afghanistan. The Observer has seen letters endorsing him from the UK Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office and Nato.

SCL/Cambridge Analytica was not some startup created by a couple of guys with a Mac PowerBook. It’s effectively part of the British defence establishment. And, now, too, the American defence establishment. An ex-commanding officer of the US Marine Corps operations centre, Chris Naler, has recently joined Iota Global, a partner of the SCL group.

This is not just a story about social psychology and data analytics. It has to be understood in terms of a military contractor using military strategies on a civilian population. Us. David Miller, a professor of sociology at Bath University and an authority in psyops and propaganda, says it is “an extraordinary scandal that this should be anywhere near a democracy. It should be clear to voters where information is coming from, and if it’s not transparent or open where it’s coming from, it raises the question of whether we are actually living in a democracy or not.”

Paul and David, another ex-Cambridge Analytica employee, were working at the firm when it introduced mass data-harvesting to its psychological warfare techniques. “It brought psychology, propaganda and technology together in this powerful new way,” David tells me.

Steve Bannon, former vice-president of Cambridge Analytica, now a key adviser to Donald Trump. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

And it was Facebook that made it possible. It was from Facebook that Cambridge Analytica obtained its vast dataset in the first place. Earlier, psychologists at Cambridge University harvested Facebook data (legally) for research purposes and published pioneering peer-reviewed work about determining personality traits, political partisanship, sexuality and much more from people’s Facebook “likes”. And SCL/Cambridge Analytica contracted a scientist at the university, Dr Aleksandr Kogan, to harvest new Facebook data. And he did so by paying people to take a personality quiz which also allowed not just their own Facebook profiles to be harvested, but also those of their friends – a process then allowed by the social network.

“Facebook was the source of the psychological insights that enabled Cambridge Analytica to target individuals.”

Facebook was the source of the psychological insights that enabled Cambridge Analytica to target individuals. It was also the mechanism that enabled them to be delivered on a large scale.

The company also (perfectly legally) bought consumer datasets – on everything from magazine subscriptions to airline travel – and uniquely it appended these with the psych data to voter files. It matched all this information to people’s addresses, their phone numbers and often their email addresses. “The goal is to capture every single aspect of every voter’s information environment,” said David. “And the personality data enabled Cambridge Analytica to craft individual messages.”

Finding “persuadable” voters is key for any campaign and with its treasure trove of data, Cambridge Analytica could target people high in neuroticism, for example, with images of immigrants “swamping” the country. The key is finding emotional triggers for each individual voter.

Cambridge Analytica worked on campaigns in several key states for a Republican political action committee. Its key objective, according to a memo the Observer has seen, was “voter disengagement” and “to persuade Democrat voters to stay at home”: a profoundly disquieting tactic. It has previously been claimed that suppression tactics were used in the campaign, but this document provides the first actual evidence.

But does it actually work? One of the criticisms that has been levelled at my and others’ articles is that Cambridge Analytica’s “special sauce” has been oversold. Is what it is doing any different from any other political consultancy?

“It’s not a political consultancy,” says David. “You have to understand this is not a normal company in any way. I don’t think Mercer even cares if it ever makes any money. It’s the product of a billionaire spending huge amounts of money to build his own experimental science lab, to test what works, to find tiny slivers of influence that can tip an election. Robert Mercer did not invest in this firm until it ran a bunch of pilots – controlled trials. This is one of the smartest computer scientists in the world. He is not going to splash $15m on bullshit.”

Tamsin Shaw, an associate professor of philosophy at New York University, helps me understand the context. She has researched the US military’s funding and use of psychological research for use in torture. “The capacity for this science to be used to manipulate emotions is very well established. This is military-funded technology that has been harnessed by a global plutocracy and is being used to sway elections in ways that people can’t even see, don’t even realise is happening to them,” she says. “It’s about exploiting existing phenomenon like nationalism and then using it to manipulate people at the margins. To have so much data in the hands of a bunch of international plutocrats to do with it what they will is absolutely chilling.

“We are in an information war and billionaires are buying up these companies, which are then employed to go to work in the heart of government. That’s a very worrying situation.”

A project that Cambridge Analytica carried out in Trinidad in 2013 brings all the elements in this story together. Just as Robert Mercer began his negotiations with SCL boss Alexander Nix about an acquisition, SCL was retained by several government ministers in Trinidad and Tobago. The brief involved developing a micro-targeting programme for the governing party of the time. And AggregateIQ – the same company involved in delivering Brexit for Vote Leave – was brought in to build the targeting platform.

David said: “The standard SCL/CA method is that you get a government contract from the ruling party. And this pays for the political work. So, it’s often some bullshit health project that’s just a cover for getting the minister re-elected. But in this case, our government contacts were with Trinidad’s national security council.”

The security work was to be the prize for the political work. Documents seen by the Observer show that this was a proposal to capture citizens’ browsing history en masse, recording phone conversations and applying natural language processing to the recorded voice data to construct a national police database, complete with scores for each citizen on their propensity to commit crime.

“The plan put to the minister was Minority Report. It was pre-crime. And the fact that Cambridge Analytica is now working inside the Pentagon is, I think, absolutely terrifying,” said David.

These documents throw light on a significant and under-reported aspect of the Trump administration. The company that helped Trump achieve power in the first place has now been awarded contracts in the Pentagon and the US state department. Its former vice-president Steve Bannon now sits in the White House. It is also reported to be in discussions for “military and homeland security work”.

In the US, the government is bound by strict laws about what data it can collect on individuals. But, for private companies anything goes. Is it unreasonable to see in this the possible beginnings of an authoritarian surveillance state?

A state that is bringing corporate interests into the heart of the administration. Documents detail Cambridge Analytica is involved with many other right-leaning billionaires, including Rupert Murdoch. One memo references Cambridge Analytica trying to place an article with a journalist in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal: “RM re-channeled and connected with Jamie McCauley from Robert Thomson News Corp office,” it says.

It makes me think again about the story involving Sophie Schmidt, Cambridge Analytica and Palantir. Is it a telling detail, or is it a clue to something else going on? Cambridge Analytica and Palantir both declined to comment for this article on whether they had any relationship. But witnesses and emails confirm that meetings between Cambridge Analytica and Palantir took place in 2013. The possibility of a working relationship was at least discussed.

Further documents seen by the Observer confirm that at least one senior Palantir employee consulted with Cambridge Analytica in relation to the Trinidad project and later political work in the US. But at the time, I’m told, Palantir decided it was too much of a reputational risk for a more formal arrangement. There was no upside to it. Palantir is a company that is trusted to handle vast datasets on UK and US citizens for GCHQ and the NSA, as well as many other countries.

Now though, they are both owned by ideologically aligned billionaires: Robert Mercer and Peter Thiel. The Trump campaign has said that Thiel helped it with data. A campaign that was led by Steve Bannon, who was then at Cambridge Analytica.

A leading QC who spends a lot of time in the investigatory powers tribunal said that the problem with this technology was that it all depended on whose hands it was in.

“On the one hand, it’s being done by companies and governments who say ‘you can trust us, we are good and democratic and bake cakes at the weekend’. But then the same expertise can also be sold on to whichever repressive regime.”

“We believe we live in a free and fair democracy. Which is what, I believe, makes the last part of this story so profoundly unsettling.”

In Britain, we still trust our government. We respect our authorities to uphold our laws. We trust the rule of law. We believe we live in a free and fair democracy. Which is what, I believe, makes the last part of this story so profoundly unsettling.

The details of the Trinidad project finally unlocked the mystery that was AggregateIQ. Trinidad was SCL’s first project using big data for micro-targeting before the firm was acquired by Mercer. It was the model that Mercer was buying into. And it brought together all the players: the Cambridge psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, AggregateIQ, Chris Wylie, and two other individuals who would play a role in this story: Mark Gettleson, a focus group expert who had previously worked for the Lib Dems. And Thomas Borwick, the son of Victoria Borwick, the Conservative MP for Kensington.

When my article linking Mercer and Leave.EU was published in February, no one was more upset about it than former Tory adviser Dominic Cummings, the campaign strategist for Vote Leave. He launched an irate Twitter tirade. The piece was “full of errors & itself spreads disinformation” “CA had ~0% role in Brexit referendum”.

A week later the Observer revealed AggregateIQ’s possible link to Cambridge Analytica. Cummings’s Twitter feed went quiet. He didn’t return my messages or my emails.

Questions had already been swirling about whether there had been any coordination between the Leave campaigns. In the week before the referendum, Vote Leave donated money to two other Leave groups – £625,000 to BeLeave, run by fashion student Darren Grimes, and £100,000 to Veterans for Britain, who both then spent this money with AggregateIQ.

The Electoral Commission has written to AggregateIQ. A source close to the investigation said that AggregateIQ responded by saying it had signed a non-disclosure agreement. And since it was outside British jurisdiction, that was the end of it. Vote Leave refers to this as the Electoral Commission giving it “a clean bill of health”.

On his blog, Dominic Cummings has written thousands of words about the referendum campaign. What is missing is any details about his data scientists. He “hired physicists” is all he’ll say. In the books on Brexit, other members of the team talk about “Dom’s astrophysicists”, who he kept “a tightly guarded secret”. They built models, using data “scraped” off Facebook.

Finally, after weeks of messages, he sent me an email. We were agreed on one thing, it turned out. He wrote: “The law/regulatory agencies are such a joke the reality is that anybody who wanted to cheat the law could do it easily without people realising.” But, he says, “by encouraging people to focus on non-stories like Mercer’s nonexistent role in the referendum you are obscuring these important issues”.

And to finally answer the question about how Vote Leave found this obscure Canadian company on the other side of the planet, he wrote: “Someone found AIQ [AggregateIQ] on the internet and interviewed them on the phone then told me – let’s go with these guys. They were clearly more competent than any others we’d spoken to in London.”

The most unfortunate aspect of this – for Dominic Cummings – is that this isn’t credible. It’s the work of moments to put a date filter on Google search and discover that in late 2015 or early 2016, there are no Google hits for “Aggregate IQ”. There is no press coverage. No random mentions. It doesn’t even throw up its website. I have caught Dominic Cummings in what appears to be an alternative fact.

But what is an actual fact is that Gettleson and Borwick, both previously consultants for SCL and Cambridge Analytica, were both core members of the Vote Leave team. They’re both in the official Vote Leave documents lodged with the Electoral Commission, though they coyly describe their previous work for SCL/Cambridge Analytica as “micro-targeting in Antigua and Trinidad” and “direct communications for several PACs, Senate and Governor campaigns”.

And Borwick wasn’t just any member of the team. He was Vote Leave’s chief technology officer.

This story may involve a complex web of connections, but it all comes back to Cambridge Analytica. It all comes back to Mercer. Because the connections must have been evident. “AggregateIQ may not have belonged to the Mercers but they exist within his world,” David told me. “Almost all of their contracts came from Cambridge Analytica or Mercer. They wouldn’t exist without them. During the whole time the referendum was going on, they were working every day on the [Ted] Cruz campaign with Mercer and Cambridge Analytica. AggregateIQ built and ran Cambridge Analytica’s database platforms.”

Illustration: James Melaugh

Cummings won’t say who did his modelling. But invoices lodged with the Electoral Commission show payments to a company called Advanced Skills Institute. It takes me weeks to spot the significance of this because the company is usually referred to as ASI Data Science, a company that has a revolving cast of data scientists who have gone on to work with Cambridge Analytica and vice versa. There are videos of ASI data scientists presenting Cambridge Analytica personality models and pages for events the two companies have jointly hosted. ASI told the Observer it had no formal relationship with Cambridge Analytica.

Here’s the crucial fact: during the US primary elections, Aggregate IQ signed away its intellectual property (IP). It didn’t own its IP: Robert Mercer did. For AggregateIQ to work with another campaign in Britain, the firm would have to have had the express permission of Mercer. Asked if it would make any comment on financial or business links between “Cambridge Analytica, Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon, AggregateIQ, Leave.EU and Vote Leave”, a spokesperson for Cambridge Analytica said: “Cambridge Analytica did no paid or unpaid work for Leave.EU.”

This story isn’t about cunning Dominic Cummings finding a few loopholes in the Electoral Commission’s rules. Finding a way to spend an extra million quid here. Or (as the Observer has also discovered )underdeclaring the costs of his physicists on the spending returns by £43,000. This story is not even about what appears to be covert coordination between Vote Leave and Leave.EU in their use of AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica. It’s about how a motivated US billionaire – Mercer and his chief ideologue, Bannon – helped to bring about the biggest constitutional change to Britain in a century.

Because to understand where and how Brexit is connected to Trump, it’s right here. These relationships, which thread through the middle of Cambridge Analytica, are the result of a transatlantic partnership that stretches back years. Nigel Farage and Bannon have been close associates since at least 2012. Bannon opened the London arm of his news website Breitbart in 2014 to support Ukip – the latest front “in our current cultural and political war”, he told the New York Times.

Britain had always been key to Bannon’s plans, another ex-Cambridge Analytica employee told me on condition of anonymity. It was a crucial part of his strategy for changing the entire world order.

“He believes that to change politics, you have to first change the culture. And Britain was key to that. He thought that where Britain led, America would follow. The idea of Brexit was hugely symbolically important to him.”

On 29 March, the day article 50 was triggered, I called one of the smaller campaigns, Veterans for Britain. Cummings’s strategy was to target people in the last days of the campaign and Vote Leave gave the smaller group £100,000 in the last week. A small number of people they identified as “persuadable” were bombarded with more than a billion ads, the vast majority in the last few days.

I asked David Banks, Veterans for Britain’s head of communications, why they spent the money with AggregateIQ.

“I didn’t find AggegrateIQ. They found us. They rang us up and pitched us. There’s no conspiracy here. They were this Canadian company which was opening an office in London to work in British politics and they were doing stuff that none of the UK companies could offer. Their targeting was based on a set of technologies that hadn’t reached the UK yet. A lot of it was proprietary, they’d found a way of targeting people based on behavioural insights. They approached us.”

It seems clear to me that David Banks didn’t know there might have been anything untoward about this. He’s a patriotic man who believes in British sovereignty and British values and British laws. I don’t think knew about any overlap with these other campaigns. I can only think that he was played.

And that we, the British people, were played. In his blog, Dominic Cummings writes that Brexit came down to “about 600,000 people – just over 1% of registered voters”. It’s not a stretch to believe that a member of the global 1% found a way to influence this crucial 1% of British voters. The referendum was an open goal too tempting a target for US billionaires not to take a clear shot at. Or I should say US billionaires and other interested parties, because in acknowledging the transatlantic links that bind Britain and America, Brexit and Trump, so tightly, we also must acknowledge that Russia is wrapped somewhere in this tight embrace too.

For the last month, I’ve been writing about the links between the British right, the Trump administration and the European right. And these links lead to Russia from multiple directions. Between Nigel Farage and Donald Trump and Cambridge Analytica.

A map shown to the Observer showing the many places in the world where SCL and Cambridge Analytica have worked includes Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Iran and Moldova. Multiple Cambridge Analytica sources have revealed other links to Russia, including trips to the country, meetings with executives from Russian state-owned companies, and references by SCL employees to working for Russian entities.

Article 50 has been triggered. AggregateIQ is outside British jurisdiction. The Electoral Commission is powerless. And another election, with these same rules, is just a month away. It is not that the authorities don’t know there is cause for concern. The Observer has learned that the Crown Prosecution Service did appoint a special prosecutor to assess whether there was a case for a criminal investigation into whether campaign finance laws were broken. The CPS referred it back to the electoral commission. Someone close to the intelligence select committee tells me that “work is being done” on potential Russian interference in the referendum.

Gavin Millar, a QC and expert in electoral law, described the situation as “highly disturbing”. He believes the only way to find the truth would be to hold a public inquiry. But a government would need to call it. A government that has just triggered an election specifically to shore up its power base. An election designed to set us into permanent alignment with Trump’s America.

Martin Moore of King’s College, London, pointed out that elections were a newly fashionable tool for would-be authoritarian states. “Look at Erdoğan in Turkey. What Theresa May is doing is quite anti-democratic in a way. It’s about enhancing her power very deliberately. It’s not about a battle of policy between two parties.”

“This isn’t about Remain or Leave. It goes far beyond party politics.”

This is Britain in 2017. A Britain that increasingly looks like a “managed” democracy. Paid for a US billionaire. Using military-style technology. Delivered by Facebook. And enabled by us. If we let this referendum result stand, we are giving it our implicit consent. This isn’t about Remain or Leave. It goes far beyond party politics. It’s about the first step into a brave, new, increasingly undemocratic world.

Key names

SCL Group
: British company with 25 years experience in military “psychological operations” and “election management”.

Cambridge Analytica: Data analytics company formed in 2014. Robert Mercer owns 90%. SCL owns 10%. Carried out major digital targeting campaigns for Donald Trump campaign, Ted Cruz’s nomination campaign and multiple other US Republican campaigns – mostly funded by Mercer. Gave Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU “help” during referendum.


Robert Mercer
: US billionaire hedge fund owner who was Trump’s biggest donor. Owns Cambridge Analytica and the IP [intellectual property] ofAggregateIQ. Friend of Farage. Close associate of Steve Bannon.

Steve Bannon: Trump’s chief strategist. Vice-president of Cambridge Analytica during referendum period. Friend of Farage.

Alexander Nix
: Director of Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group.

Christopher Wylie: Canadian who first brought data expertise and microtargeting to Cambridge Analytica; recruited AggregateIQ.

AggregateIQ: Data analytics company based in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Worked for Mercer-funded Pacs that supported the Trump campaign. Robert Mercer owns AggregateIQ’s IP. Paid £3.9m by Vote Leave to “micro-target” voters on social media during referendum campaign. Outside British jurisdiction.

Veterans for Britain: Given £100,000 by Vote Leave. Spent it with AggregateIQ.


BeLeave
: Youth Leave campaign set up by 23-year-old student. Given £625,000 by Vote Leave & £50,000 by another donor. Spent it with AggregateIQ.

DUP
: Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland. Spent £32,750 with AggregrateIQ.

Thomas Borwick: Vote Leave’s chief technology officer. Previously worked with SCL/Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ.

ASI Data Science: 
Data science specialists. Links with Cambridge Analytica, including staff moving between the two and holding joint events. Paid £114,000 by Vote Leave. Vote Leave declared £71,000 to Electoral Commission.

Donald Trump
: US president. Campaign funded by Mercer and run by Bannon. Data services supplied by Cambridge Analytica and AggregrateIQ.

Nigel Farage: 
Former Ukip leader. Leader of Leave.EU. Friend of Trump, Mercer and Bannon.

Arron Banks: Bristol businessman. Co-founder of Leave.EU. Owns data company and insurance firm. Single biggest donor to Leave – £7.5m.

Some names, ages and other identifying details of sources in this article have been changed

The Demons of Lake Chad

The jihadist rebel group Boko Haram, which has found one of its refuges in the labyrinth of channels and islands of Lake Chad, in Africa, has been the cause of a wave of suicide attacks, thousands of abductions and a desperate exodus. The violence of the islamist group, the abuse of local authorities in its fight against terrorism as well as inadequate humanitarian assistance have left millions of people in an extreme situation.

For Djanafa Ali, the name she gave to his fifth child was an act of rebellion. A fleeting gesture, almost retaliation, but one laden with pride. But the person who raped her was less sophisticated: only a matter of weeks after being abducted in April 2015 by the Nigerian Boko Haram fundamentalist group, a jihadist opened the door of the corral where Djanafa was kept along with hundreds of other women – at a guess she calculated there must have been some 700, split up into different groups – grabbed her by the arm and took her off into the woods to abuse her. He had chosen her as his wife and lost no time in getting her pregnant. A couple of days before her abduction, Djanafa had left her four children with her husband in her native village, Méléa, in the hinterland of Chad, to go and look after her sick mother who lived alone on the island of Boudouma, in the middle of Lake Chad. She knew it was a risky journey. The labyrinth of channels around the lake, the natural frontier between Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger and Chad, in recent years has become a refuge for the jihadist group which is hiding in its many islands (Chadian, Nigerian, Cameroonian and Niger). But her mother was ill and so Djanafa set out. A couple of hours after meeting up with her again, Boko Haram reached the island and abducted the young women and children.

Djanafa spares us the details of what happened next. All she says is that they would open the door, grab a woman and give her to a fighter. If one of them refused, they would consider her a prostitute and afterwards either kill her there and then or declare her free for all.

Amongst the hostages there were young girls of 10 to 12, who were also part of the scheme. Djanafa, age 33, was already married, because in her region all the women get married very young, but nobody asked or seemed to think it mattered. The rebel kept her always locked up in a hut and would appear only from time to time to satisfy his urge. She remained kidnapped on the island for eighteen months by the extremist group which had allied itself to ISIS since 2015. She never had a single conversation with her guerrilla husband. He was never once nice to her. He always kept her hungry. Today, four months after escaping and returning to the security of her village of Méléa in Chad, the jihadist threat in the interior of the country has lost its intensity over the last year, even if it is the same on the islands of the lake – Djanafa refuses to utter the name of the man in question.

Names, or choosing to forget them, are oftentimes a sort of revenge. Perhaps the only one that you have left. Thus, the name she chose for the child that the islamist sired on her and who now, age one year, is eagerly clambering on her to take the breast, was Hissein, the name of her deceased husband.

Djanafa fled with several hundreds of women when at the end of 2016, Nigerian army helicopters attacked the island held by Boko Haram. Greater military pressure starting from mid-2015 routed the rebel group from the majority of the territory that they controlled in the north of Nigeria and forced them to withdraw into the impenetrable reservation of Sambisa, on the frontier between Nigeria and Cameroon, and into the labyrinth of tiny islands and channels of Lake Chad. There they are vulnerable only from the sky. As on the day that Djanafa escaped. That morning bullets and bombs killed dozens of militants and hostages, but nearly 500 of those who had been abducted took advantage of the chaos to escape.

Since nobody came to rescue them, they tramped for days to reach the shores of Chad. Crossing the lake from island to island, the tallest women on foot carried their babies on their heads to avoid their drowning. Only a hundred women reached their final destination, although Djanafa thinks – and who wants even to think of it? – that many of them perhaps took other routes. When she reached Méléa, she learnt that her husband Hissein had fallen ill during her captivity and had died. She will not tell her son who his father was when he grows up. « I wouldn’t even dream of it, although maybe someone else will tell him ».

Since being freed, Djanafa has been living in Méléa, a village of straw huts in the middle of nowhere. Nothing but sand and arid bushes as far as the horizon, with the wind searing your skin. At midday life comes to a standstill, slows down to the break, and the men, gathered together in the shade, remain in silence, but for a whispered phrase or two, before submerging once again into a state of lethargy. Only a couple of children making toys out of the mud – a cow, a pot, a radio with a piece of string for earphones – bring any life to the scene. The women would carry on working, two of them grinding grain (very little of it) in a wooden bowl with rhythmic blows. Djanafa lives not far from there. The furniture in her home is sparse. Over the sand she has placed a dark mat , and in the corner there is tiger-striped blanket, a blue plastic bucket, two crumpled pieces of canvas, and on the other side, a silvery bowl. Djanafa lives with her baby Hissein and her four other children, aged between four and fourteen years old, and complains that nobody helps them.

Since they are not in a refugee camp, they receive no food, and her children go hungry. She has a weary look in her eyes and remembers her wounds in a dismal tone of voice. Despite the fact that she is recounting stories of mass rape and horrifying executions, one of her daughters, Fatima, remains all the while at her side, with the concentrated and innocent expression of any child listening to a story or hearing a song. Djanafa is wearing a black tunic with red, orange and yellow details; she covers her head with it and has removed the golden ring in her nose, which in her tribe, the buduma, announces that she is a married woman. Her face is furrowed with scarifications which since the age of six has distinguished her ethnic ity and her family, but these are not her only scars. She has recent ones still on her arms, made on the day of the air attack on the island, during which the jihadist who sired her son died. Little Hissein also has some on his head.

These only half-closed wounds are those of the entire region: Lake Chad, a land shared between peoples from Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Chad, all of whom have been living for eight years now through unbridled violence. The insurgency of the extremist Boko Haram group in the north of Nigeria and its spread through neighbouring countries has caused 50, 000 deaths, thousands of abductions and desperate flight. According to the United Nations, nearly two and a half million people have been made homeless. The majority have abandoned the rural areas where Boko Haram struck more habitually, to seek protection in camps for displaced persons or refugees, in the towns or in the houses of relatives or neighbours.

Despite the fact that faced with the multi-regional military force led by Nigeria and Chad, the jihadists group has lost a good part of the territory they once controlled – in 2014 they still managed to proclaim a caliphate in a region in the north of Nigeria the size of Belgium – and they still retain their deadly capability. To their guerrilla tactics of swift attacks carried out with few resources, they have added the use of ‘suicides’ to maintain their ability to create destabilisation. In the last three years, Boko Haram has carried out more than a hundred suicide attacks, according to data from UNICEF and The Long War Journal, an organisation that monitors the violence of the group. In the first term of this year, 27 young girls have been sent to blow themselves up in the region. On January 1, a little girl, who according to various witnesses, was no older than ten, blew up her suicide belt in a market in Maiduguri.  It is no accident that in 80% of attacks the extremists use girls. Boko Haram takes advantage of women’s and girls’ loose-fitting clothes to conceal on their bodies explosive belts, and often after drugging them with tremadol, sends them off to blow themselves up in markets or mosques.

For the Nigerian analyst and security expert, Fullan Nasrullah, this is an effective military tactic. “It is part of the rebels’ strategy to weaken the morale of the public and the armed forces, and also a way of reducing the pressure on the battlefield, forcing countries to divert scarce resources to protect easy targets”.

The consequences of so many years of fear and the smell of gunpowder are millions of empty stomachs. Hunger has broken out not only amongst those who have fled violence, but also amongst those who cannot cultivate their land for fear or who have suffered from the generalised collapse of the economy: since trade has been stopped by the war and the price of food has shot up, many are deprived of food. The scale of the disaster presages more death: according to the UN, more than seven million people need urgent assistance and famine has broken out in the Nigerian regions most afflicted by the presence of Boko Haram.

Thus, in the areas around lake Chad, the babies have cold hands. At the end of a strip of desert separating Niger from neighbouring Chad, a no-man’s land where the proximity of the jihadists makes a military escort obligatory, Aché Gomborom’s hands are frozen. He has the other symptoms of chronic malnutrition in young children too: ribs sticking out, legs as thin as spindles, a forlorn look. His reactions are slowed down and he wrinkles his face when he’s placed in the hanging scales to be weighed. He barely cries, just emits a monotonous moan, almost no strength left. The gesture of the Chadian doctor treating him is clear: for a child of seventeen months, his weight is alarmingly slight. As soon as they give him back, his mother, Bakou- li Malloum, wraps the child’s naked body in a red shawl and stares at the ground. After a while, he falls asleep and she speaks her mind: “On our island we used to fish and till the land, we had a normal life. Now everything is changed. When Boko Haram comes across you, they slit your throat. How can you go on living here? Bakouli, a native of the island of Kindjira, a small island in Lake Chad, on the border between Chad, Niger and Nigeria, wears two black bracelets on her right wrist and green pendant earrings. The jihadistas stole all the rest.

Although Islam is the religion of the majority in the north of Nigeria and on the banks of Lake Chad, only a couple of tribes, such as the buduma, combine faith in Allah with traditional rites and the few Christians who lived there have fled years ago. The fundamentalists make no distinction: anyone who does not follow their radical version of the faith is  an infidel and must be punished and eliminated. Bakouli is familiar with this deadly contempt. “They say that we are Christians, that’s what they call all of us whom they do not consider to be good Moslems, they say we believe the wrong way. That’s why they kill us. That’s why they slit our throats, why they treat us like animals, unworthy ones”.

At the entrance to the tent which stands in for a mobile clinic, a huddle of womenfolk and emaciated children are waiting their turn in the shade of a tree. There are so many of them that they don’t all fit and some have to stand in the sun. Dozens of flies swarm over their eyes, their noses and the mouths of each child. Nobody even tries to shoo them away. All around about are some 1,500 huts made of branches, straw and sheets of plastic which speak of hundreds of exoduses in the region which have been forgotten. Nearly nine thousand people, formerly inhabitants of the islands, now live in a patch of desert baptised as Magui, at the mercy of aid arriving. The sand is so plentiful that it stops any kind of fast movement, the sun stings your forehead and the wind makes you screw up your eyes as you try to go forward

Ngandolo Kouyo, a Chadian nutritionist from UNICEF, smooths out his white coat before sitting down in a plastic chair and asks us to be brief – « we have a lot of work to do today » he apologises – and he proceeds to analyse the future of his patients. The haste, or maybe the fact that he lives every day side by side with catastrophe, means that he does not mince his words. “These people depend on humanitarian aid; if it doesn’t get through, there will be many deaths. They will all die. That’s for sure. There’s no food or water. They have no health facilities, and where they do exist, they don’t have the means to reach the centres. So there will be many deaths”. In effect, the quiet desperation of Kouyo gives voice in short phrases to the alarm raised at the end of 2016 by 19 international organisations for the defence and protection of human rights  2017: of the 1,500 million dollars requested by the United Nations to tackle the food crisis in the area of Lake Chad, in the first three months of this year only $169 million were received, a little more than 11% of the monies needed.

Some tens of kilometres to the south, the frayed and half empty nets of Barkay Idriss foretell that it is not going to be easy to get out of this rat-trap. As the light of day wanes in Tagal, a village on the Chadian bank of the lake, barely a dozen fish are flapping around on the bottom of his dug-out canoe. The air here is cool, the green of the landscape softens the horizon and from the bank comes the stench of piles of fish placed on wooden grates in the sun. Squatting at the end of his boat, the seventeen-year-old Barkay, surveying the day’s catch, nods his head, half in vexation, half in shame. “The net is very old and the fish, when they stretch it, escape”. His father taught him to fish when he was twelve years old and he now knows all the tricks of the trade. He knows for example that you have to lay the nets early in the morning because shortly afterwards the hippos come along and it is as well to give their fangs and fleas a wide berth. He also knows that it is better to fish in deep and remote waters…and that that is now impossible. “Boko Haram is in hiding on the islands and as we are scared of them, we all fish close to the bank. There are too many of us here, that’s why there are so few fish”.

In the last two years, thousands of people have abandoned the islands to seek relative safety – often the rebels are hiding only a couple of kilometres away – on terra firma, where there is a greater  military presence and the humanitarian organisations can provide assistance. The wave of recent arrivals on the Chadian bank has meant where there is a greater military presence and the humanitarian organisations can provide assistance. The wave of recent arrivals on the Chadian bank has meant a demographic bomb has gone off : the population of the region has already tripled.

Barkay wears a nice pale blue shirt and yellow trousers that are showing their age, but speak of times past, when things were better. When he lived on the islands, he assures us, we would easily earn forty dollars a week, he had a solid canoe and plenty of nets. Now he barely makes thirty dollars a month and has to share his boat with two other colleagues. This he explains with only relative bitterness, for he knows that he is lucky to be able to tell the tale.

He escaped because of screams. The Boko Haram rebels arrived in his village on the Chadian island of Bulari around three in the morning and the first thing they did – “they always do” – was to go for the marabou or healer of the settlement. Since, for the jihadists, belief in spirits and magic powers that the marabou feeds on are a sin, they slit his throat in front of his house. With this gesture they knifed one of the most authoritative voices in the village. “His shrieks woke me and that was the reason I took to my heels”. Like Barkay, hundreds of people left behind their animals and all their belongings only for them to fall into the hands of the jihadists as war booty.

The violence of the conflict has put a stop to the trade routes between all the countries of the area and the economy has collapsed. In addition, the decision of the local governments to ban any kind of trans-border vehicular traffic whatsoever, so as to prevent movement by the jihadists, has combined with another death-blow: since the militants finance themselves, amongst other things, by selling stolen livestock – thousands of heads of cattle, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth – a complete stop was placed on all forms of trading in domestic animals, one of the most entrenched commercial activities in the region. The international fall in the price of oil, one of the bulwarks of the economies of Nigeria and Chad, and the major investment in defence to combat the insurgency of Boko Haram to the detriment of social policies, only deepened the wound.

However that may be, Barkay has no intention of returning home – “What I saw there I never wish to see again, I shall stay here forever” – but his future looks burdensome. He would like to marry and start a family, but he needs money to pay for a wife’s dowry, an agreed quantity of cows or goats to be delivered to the betrothed’s family. Ususally, Barclay points out, it would come to a sum of around 800 dollars, although the figure could vary, depending on whether the girl comes from a rich family or if she has been educated. An unattainable fortune in a place such as this, at a time such as this. But unless Barkay gets this money together, he will be dishonoured. “In our culture, a man must marry. It’s shameful, a humiliation, if you don’t manage to”.

Boko Haram knew how to benefit from this trap hallowed by tradition. Right from the outset, both from its origin in Nigeria and throughout its expansion to neighbouring countries, it has gone hand in glove with poverty and historic injustice: the wealthy southern region of Nigeria, now developed and brimming with modern towns, however unequal, contrasts with the neglect of the impoverished regions of the northern part of the country, with hardly any asphalted roads or infrastructure.

In the Nigerian state of Borno, the region in which Boko Haram originated in 2002, UNESCO estimates that the literacy rate is barely14.5%. In Lagos, in the south of the country, it is at 92%. The radical wing took note: in 2014 there was a wave of massive abductions of women which still persists – the infamous 219 schoolgirls abducted in Chibok, in the north-east of Nigeria were initially one more element of this tactic – to offer wives for free to those who fought with them. Recruitment shot up: the option of having access to a wife attracted hundreds of young men who saw in their allegiance to the group the possibility of having a wife and children and not feeling humiliated for not having married because of not being able to measure up to the cost of the dowry.

Djibirine Mbodou, a seventeen-year-old fisherman who was abducted a year ago and then escaped in January 2017, confirms this. From the security of the Chadian shore, he recalls precisely the night in which the jihadists attacked the island of Galoa in waters belonging to Chad, and abducted the entire population, some seven hundred people. They immediately imposed strict regulations: stealing was to be punished by the amputation of a hand and playing football was liable to the death penalty. Each day they would organise them into groups to pray: “They would shout at us that beforehand we had prayed wrong”. He stated that he still has nightmares, having witnessed a little girl of 14 being tortured because she refused to have sex with a guerrilla, or how they slit the throats of anyone caught trying to escape. Some friends and neighbours opted to enlist voluntarily. “If they didn’t go with them, they were going to kill them anyway, so they didn’t have much choice”. And with them they could rob. If you’re with Boko Haram, you don’t have to pay for food, you can go plundering and marry women”.

Converting to being a jihadist also gives you the opportunity of settling old feuds quickly. Once enrolled and a Kalashnikov in your hands, it’s easier to put an end to a dispute about land with a quarrelsome neighbour, to settle scores with those who years ago stole your bride or avenge your envy of the wealth of an especially tight-fisted acquaintance.

The fundamentalist group has changed to adapt to the times. In the beginning, it wasn’t even called Boko Haram. Starting in 2000, the radical cleric who founded the sect, Mohammed Yusuf, used to roam the streets of the Nigerian town of Maiduguri preaching and advocating a society based on a strict form of Islam and one which was against social injustice. His enemy was the corrupt and inefficient Nigerian state, which he accused of having neglected the north for decades. In his sermons which were attended by increasing numbers, he would repeat the same cry in Hausa: “Bokoisharam!, Bokoisharam!”. It was his way of saying that books – the symbol of Western learning as opposed to the wooden tablets used in the madrassas and Koranic schools – were a sin and at the origin of a failed system. In fact, they did not call themselves “Boko Haram” but went by their official name: “Persons committed to the spread of the teachings of the Prophet and the jihad”. His extremist speech quickly found favour with a population who was both young and had no hope of employment, and the movement developed into a violent youth rebellion, with assassinations of police and members of the Nigerian security forces. Its objective was national: to bring down the government of Nigeria and install a radical version of sharia or Islamic law. The movement also had powerful adherents. Although later the group would fund itself by robbing banks, extortion or plunder, when it began, its ranks included well-heeled godfathers in senior political, religious and financial circles in the north. The assassination of Yusuf at the hands of the police in 2009 while in custody and the summary execution of hundreds of his followers woke the slumbering beast. For months afterwards the leader Abubakar Shekau embarked on a blood-thirsty course of attacks and mass assassinations and used panic as a weapon of control. Ever since that time an aura of terror invests them with power. The mere name of Boko Haram has the power to paralyse…

When asked about the rebels he had lived with, Mbodou, the teenager who spent a year, kidnapped, with them, reflects the normalisation of this fear. On his knees, under a roof of branches giving protection from the sun, his words never show even a hint of resentment. “Who are Boko Haram?

They are the ones who march through the night. If you cross their path, they will slit your throat. They like doing that”.

The panic of nocturnal and surprise attacks perpetrated with naked brutality are the stuff of the tales told in the Lake Chad region. In Baga Sola, the main Chadian town near the lake , they tell a spine-chilling tale: one night, two Boko Haram guys reached a village on the outskirts of the town. They settled in the adobe hut of an elderly man, who, startled and unable to flee, thought that treating them like his best guests was his only chance of survival. He got up early to go and draw water from the well himself to make their morning tea, he put fresh straw under the mats on the bed and even roasted them a goat. He did not try to escape. The last day before leaving, the men from Boko Haram, appreciative of the friendliness of their host, made the following statement: “You have impressed us by your friendliness and devotion to us. You are a good man and deserve to go to paradise. But human beings are weak and you run the risk of mistaking the path and straying. therefore, so that Allah can grant you entry into paradise, we are going to kill you”. They slit his throat. This dialogue, more or less elaborate depending on the narrator, exaggerating to varying degrees the kindness of the old man, but always impossible to confirm because there were no witnesses, demonstrates how terror is penetrating even the region’s tales of the midnight hours. For many, Boko Haram is the devil.

And when you live with Satan, uncertainty makes you have short dreams. Initially, Mbodou hesitates when he is asked what kind of a life he would like to have in the future. “In peace”, is the first thing he says. Then he gets a bit more specific: “What I’d like to do now, if I had the money, is to buy some fishing nets. If I had a canoe and nets, I could survive and well. Apart from that, I don’t know what I could do, I’ve never been to school”. Then Mbodou withdraws a couple of meters and starts praying to Allah. A couple of steps away, a group of kids in shirts from European football teams stand and observe the scene from amongst the branches of a tree full of thorns.

Over and above religious fundamentalism and poverty, there are other factors that explain how a mere handful of fanatics – between four and six thousand well-trained fighters, according to US intelligence – have taken Nigeria, the first economy of Africa, hostage and imposed oblivion and injury on neighbouring countries.

Refugee camp in Dar es Salam, one of the biggest with17 000 refugees, 5 000 of whom are Nigerian.

In Dar es Salam, the biggest refugee camp for those who fled to the Chadian side of the lake, Nasiru Saidu draws both factors with his two fingers in the sand. After smoothing the ground with the palm of his hand, he uses three fingers to make a wavy line and on each side of it he writes two words: lake and Doro, the name of his Nigerian village. Opposite the football pitch where the NGOs organise matches to help the kids overcome their trauma, Saidu remembers the first days of January in 2015 when his life as a seller of fish and onions changed forever. While Paris was trembling from the jihadist attack on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and the entire world was flooded with placards expressing support with the slogan “Je suis Charlie”, on the Nigerian bank of Lake Chad Boko Haram was conducting the worst attack in its history. After crushing a military base in the area, jihadist rebels attacked for five full days, without meeting any resistance, the locality of Baga and another 16 villages. Thousands of people – two thousand victims, according to some sources, although no-one stayed around to count them – were assassinated and thousands more fled in a stampede towards the lake, making for Chad. Saidu was one of them. “When we saw a Nigerian soldier who had wounded by a bullet reach our village, brought by motorcycle, we realised that that attack by Boko Haram was something out of the ordinary”. A couple of weeks ago, after two years without going near it, Saidu gathered up enough courage to visit his old village. Since Lake Chad has been declared a military zone, he had to make a diversion, catch six lorries and travel for four days. All he met with were ashes.

“Nothing but emptiness. In some places there are still bones lying around that haven’t been buried”.

Saidu is 36 and has lost everything except his pride. He speaks unhurriedly but resolutely. “To be honest, what we need are jobs. If we just sit down and wait to be helped, we will never make any headway. Sitting around doing nothing only makes you hungry and a hungry man is an angry man. We don’t want to live off humanitarian aid”.

Although slim, Saidu is tall and stocky. He is dressed in a white tunic, has shaved his head and his features are sharpened by a black goatee beard speckled with a few white hairs. He is continually smiling and exudes confidence. He immediately starts up a conversation with the women drawing water from a nearby well.

At first sight, Saidu looks as if he is cut out to be a leader, maybe because of his plain speaking and the way he avoids seeing everything in black and white terms. For him the jihadists are not the devil and he knows what he’s talking about: he knows several members. He knows about men who enlisted from hunger, because one day Boko Haram men appeared in his village and promised wages and food. In addition, he has, or had, friends or neighbours who weren’t especially religious and who had never committed any offences, but who all the same enlisted with Boko Haram – out of resentment. Abuse by the Nigerian army and corruption, says Saidu, are as much responsible for the present situation as the jihadists. He tells us that as soon as the army got to his village, they abducted a dozen youngsters who were never seen again. Then they brought in the much feared law of one for fifty. “It happened in Baga, in a district called Flatari —he remembers—: a soldier was killed by Boko Haram and soon after the Nigerian army arrived and burnt down the whole district. They slaughtered a whole heap of people: the sick, the elderly, the blind…innocent people. And the only reason was that someone had killed a soldier, but nobody knew who it was”.

The insurgency of the Boko Haram group has caused 50 000  deaths thousands of abductions and a desperate exodus

Local organisations have spent years reporting atrocities perpetrated by the Nigerian army acting under cover of fighting terrorism. And their cry has crossed frontiers. Amnesty International published a report full of videos and evidence detailing torture and mass executions of hundreds of people and Human Rights Watch has condemned abuse of women fleeing the jihadists by their supposed protectors. It has accused the military, the police and officials in charge of displaced persons of raping young girls or asking for sexual favours in return for protection or food.

Djim and Abdoulhassan, two Chadian aid workers in an international agency, speak on condition their names are not published. The first worked for a spell in Nigeria and doesn’t want to go back. “The army there just shoots without thinking”. Quite apart from the fear of jihadists, which makes the soldiers overly trigger-happy when confronted with any tense situation, there are the systematic robberies. Djim learnt the lesson one day he was working late in the office and spent the night in the streets of Maiduguri, in the north of Nigeria. He was stopped by a military check. It made no difference that he explained to them who he was working for and that he was an aid-worker, the soldiers still robbed him. “They just said: give us your money and go”.

At the time when the fundamentalists were in the ascendancy, the paranoia of the Nigerian army, badly trained and paid even worse, turned into a hot country version of Russian roulette. A small bruise could sentence you: if the suspect had anything so much as resembling the trace of a rifle strap on his shoulder, this would be sufficient evidence for accusing him of being a rebel. There were other ways too: inspecting toenails, if they were sunken, for some soldiers this was proof that you had been walking for hours with boots on. The summary verdict, if you were lucky, was that you were accused of belonging to Boko Haram and put in prison. On other occasions the conviction was even swifter and executed in the gutter by the roadside: a bullet in your neck.

During the state of emergency at the end of 2015 in Chad, the Chadian army spread a warning amongst the population which was difficult to misinterpret: any living being remaining on the islands, including animals, will be considered members of Boko Haram. The islands, from having been home to thousands for centuries, became an even more dangerous place than before.

However that may be, the highest authority in the region of Baga Sola, the prefect Dimonya Sonapébé, roundly denies that there have been any civilian assassinations in his territory. The extensive area of the lake and the vast desert makes the task of rounding up the jihadist Boko Haram very difficult

He receives me in the sitting room of his office, dressed in his Sunday best, and immediately places restrictions on any criticism. “In army terminology it’s called a ‘military error’. This kind of thing happens everywhere. Show me the soldier who would shoot his own people deliberately? Never! Errors are made when you want to save a group. It may happen that for their sakes you kill others, and that is regrettable”. When you cite witnesses who report bombing on Chadian soil of villages full of kidnapped women and children, or refugees reporting extra-judicial executions on Nigerian soil, he briskly cuts you off: We are not complaining about anything. We have nothing to reproach of our security forces. We shall cheer them: bravo for having won the battle”.

Neither, must it be said, has the proliferation of civilian control units, called Vigilantes in Nigeria and Vigilance Committees in Chad, Niger and Cameroon, favoured strict adherence to the law. Men with no training or discipline, with household firearms, bows and arrows or machetes, set up check-points at the entrance and exits to settlements to stop incursions by jihadists. They are the law where there is none. There have been times when they have openly confronted a group of rebels in a clear minority and have paid for it with their lives. The vigilantes are volunteers who are trying to protect their own people from a desperate situation.

Abakar Salha and Souleymane Ousma- neissa belong, at least at first sight, to this harmless profile. The first is protected by a mauve turban, the second by a white one, and, armed with a metal detector in their hands, they are screening everyone intending to enter the Baga Sola market, including the camels. If they find nothing suspicious, they lower the cordon tied to the side of the street and give way. If they find something strange, they report it to the authorities. The vigilance committees and the check-points were set up in the region after various suicide attacks in October 2015 in the market and on the outskirts of town resulted in the deaths of more than forty people. Despite the obvious fact that if a similar attack were to be repeated, the lives of both vigilantes would be in jeopardy, Salha has no hesitation in coming to terms with the obvious.