By that November day, the armed Islamists were fast achieving their goal to shut down French, Western-style education. Hundreds of schools had already closed, and teachers gone into hiding. "Fear," a UNICEF report said at the time, was "widespread."
Time and again, the students at Toulfé Middle School looked out the windows, anxiously scanning the school yard. Three weeks earlier, a health center had been attacked in a nearby village and a school building set on fire. A few months prior to this, during an attack at a primary school in Soum, a neighboring province, a schoolgirl had been shot and killed and a teacher abducted. One of these days, they feared, the "jihadists" would come to Toulfé, too.
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