Many of the girls are now mothers, but are still under 18.
They were held by the militants for between two and four years in forests,
exposed to rain and sun, used as sex slaves sometimes by more than one man, and
in most cases and had no access to medical care or adequate food. The militants
forced them out of their homes, and they lived with the same men who in many
cases brutally killed their parents before abducting them. After long periods
in the forests, many are unable to trace any surviving member of their
families. They have either sacked their villages or forced survivors to
relocate to unknown places. Some have
opted to start new lives, without any support. Many hawk to feed. Maryam Ali,
now 17, was 14 years old and five months pregnant when she was abducted from
Bama in Borno State and taken to the Sambisa forest and married out to a Boko
Haram militant. “I am from Mayanti a village near Bama. When I got married
about a year before my abduction, my husband took me to Bama where we were
staying. During the attack on Bama, my husband escaped to Maiduguri because the
militants were looking for men to kill. When they came to our house and met me
alone, they took me away. Shortly after, I delivered my first child, I took in
again for my militant husband,” she narrated. “There was no food in the camp
and everybody was hungry. It was a very lawless camp. They would say you were
married to someone but about three or four other men would join him to sleep
with you. One day, I took my child to look for fruits to eat and escaped to
where I got a vehicle that took me to a military checkpoint. The soldiers
brought me to Maiduguri,” a tearful Maryam recounted. “When my husband saw me
with a child and another pregnancy, he fell down and died. I don’t know if my
parents are still alive or in our village. It is after Bama. Nobody can go
there because of the militants. I had never been to Maiduguri. I only came to
join my husband who is now late. I have nobody to help me now. I knit caps to
feed myself. I will soon give birth again. There is nobody to help me. I do not
go for ante-natal care because I do not have money for it,” the teenage mum added.
Sixteen-year-old Hauwa Umar was 14 and a JSS2 student in Bama when the
militants stormed her home, insisted they wanted to marry her instantly and
took her away. Her parents objected. She was young and yet to complete
secondary school, they, said. “Before I could say a word, they slaughtered my
father instantly,” Hauwa recalled. “They also held my mother and slaughtered
her, then dragged me into their vehicle and drove away. They took me and
detained me in a house in Bama where I remained for one month. Nobody talked to
me within that period. It was after one month that they took me to the forest
and forced me to marry the man who killed my parents. I lost my virginity to
him, took in for him and gave birth to a baby girl who died three months
after,” she added. “One day, I saw them drag one young man to our camp, and my
‘husband’ shot and killed him. I became so afraid of him. Three days later he
came in and told me they were going out on an operation. The very day they left
I prayed around 3am and sneaked out of the camp. I trekked for two weeks before
I got to Bama. All my legs were swollen. It was from there that soldiers
brought us to Maiduguri. I want to go back to school but I have nobody to help
me,” Hauwa lamented. Aisha Ibrahim, who is 17 years old, lived with her mother
and two sisters in Kirnuwa, Borno State. The terrorists stormed her village and
took away all the three girls. That was three years ago. She was 14 then. “It
was in the evening, I came out of the bathroom and wanted to dress up when we
started hearing gunshots,” she said. “Almost immediately, some unarmed people
came into our house and said we should all get ready and follow them to safety
because Boko Haram militants were in the village and would come and kill us.
Our mother was so thankful to them and asked us to follow them,” the teen girl
recalled. “We joined them outside our house where they parked about five trucks
with some girls already inside. We didn’t know they were militants themselves
until they took us to a forest and we saw some of them carrying guns. The truck
carrying my two sisters went a different direction. The same day I arrived at
the forest they introduced one Sadiq to me as my husband,” she recounted. “I
lived with them for over two years. Within the period, I followed them to
attack three communities. Whenever we went for attack, they would give us long
black hijabs to wear and cover our faces. They would also give us socks, gloves
and long boots. We would stand on Hilux jeeps. Some of us would be given guns but
I never carried a gun. I was always with a knife,” Aisha added. “The wife of
the amir (commander) was always leading the women. We were always in company of
the men. Our sole duty was to attack and catch women and children. My first
outing was the attack on Monguno. I can remember one pregnant woman we caught
who was shouting that she was the wife of a policeman,” she recollected. “Our
commander’s wife kicked her and she fell down. She trampled on her neck and
said she was the type we were looking for. She asked me to take her to one of
the trucks but I showed the woman the way to escape,” the teenager narrated. In
a separate attack on a village whose name she couldn’t remember, Aisha said
they abducted a woman and took her to their camp but because the woman was not
ready to cooperate with the leadership, they publicly executed her. Aisha said
she became terrified. “But my worst moment was the day I was rescued from the
Boko Haram camp. It started as a normal day until there was the sound of a
helicopter. We all heard the sound but I did not see it. Shortly after the
sound stopped, the commander asked all of us to go into the nearby bush and
pick the supplies dropped by the helicopter. I was there and picked some food
items. I overheard some of the senior insurgents saying we should attack a
nearby military formation,” the girl recounted. “We returned to the camp not
too long when soldiers attacked the camp with heavy artillery. The militants
returned fire and there was a heavy battle that lasted for over one hour. I hid
under a tree and later crawled towards the soldiers. I told the soldiers I was
a captive and they picked me into their truck to Maiduguri along with other
people,” she explained. “On arrival in Maiduguri, I was taken to the camp at
the GGSS. When the school resumed, I saw one of the students that was my
classmate at Kirinuwa. It was that student that took me to where my mother is
staying in Maiduguri. I met my mother with one of my abducted sisters who also
escaped from the camp they took her to after having a serious case of VVF
(Vesicola Virginia Fistula),” Aisha narrated. “We have no access to medication.
We cannot even feed until I hawk sachet water on the streets and make about
N130 daily,” she added ruefully. Dada Umar is a 16-year-old Cameroonian from
Marua who was abducted by the militants at Banki, a Nigeria/Cameroon border
town. Her elder sister, Fatima, was taken and remains missing. At 13, she was
forced to marry one of the militants called Bana, who got her pregnant. “Bana
told me he was from Bama. I was eight months pregnant when I escaped from the
camp one night and found myself in a Nigerian village and I was taken to where
some soldiers had a checkpoint and they brought me to Maiduguri. I was abducted
with only one dress but the militants gave me a lot of dresses. I was in a
French school before I was abducted,” Dada said. Seventeen-year-old Yakaka
Babagana lived with her parents in Bama town until five armed militants stormed
her home and told her father that they would either marry her or kill them and
take her away. Yakaka yielded to the forced marriage to save her parents. “I
had completed my secondary education waiting to get admission into a tertiary
institution. They brought out N2,000 and gave to my father as my bride price
and dragged me into their vehicle and zoomed off. I was in the forest with them
moving from one camp to the other until I took in for my so-called husband,
Bakura, from Alagarno. Bakura left me in one of the camps and went for an
attack when I was pregnant for eight months but he was killed in the attack,”
she recounted. “The commander called me and said my husband died during an
attack and they would give me another husband tomorrow. That same night I
escaped from the camp. I only had a wrapper on me and a scarf when I walked
into the bush as if I wanted to go and ease myself. I trekked for two days and
two nights before reaching a tarred road from where some people in a private
vehicle helped and brought me to Maiduguri,” she added. Maimuna Isa is 16-year-old,
from Zaki Local Government Area of Bauchi State, but was born in Maiwo in Borno
State. Her father was out fishing when Boko Haram raided their village and took
her with a friend, Fatima, into the forest. Fatima took ill and died on their
first day in the forest. “We were in the forest for almost five months before
the amir called me and some other girls and said he would give us out in
marriage that day. One elderly militant was introduced to me as my husband. I
stayed for another seven months without having anything to do with him until
one day when three men came to force me to sleep with him. After some months,
one elderly woman told me I was pregnant,” Maimuna recalled in tears. “I
escaped from the camp one night and met one man in the bush who also escaped
from another camp. Both of us ran into a Fulani settlement and they escorted us
to a military camp from where they brought us to Maiduguri. I never saw them
kill anybody but I saw them training a lot of men on weapon handling and war
techniques,” she said. Reacting, the chairman of the State Emergency Management
Agency (SEMA), Engr Ahmed Alhaji Satomi, said they were able to identify cases
of such people living in IDP camps while others were outside the camps, adding
that the state government was catering for some of them through his agency and
the Ministry of Women Affairs. “Government is proactive under my agency by
catering for those we have been able to identify and also trying to reintegrate
them,” he said. “We have a programme to rehabilitate and integrate them. We
have cases of some that escaped, and some were abducted alongside their sisters
and brothers. The situation is so pathetic. But those in our midst as an
agency, we cater for them, Satomi stated. “We are also advocating for better ways
of getting their lives back. I know there are a number of them in the host
communities. There are some that are too shy to bring themselves to public
domain,” he added. “We are working to come out with a plan for government to
look for them, call them out and get their data. We know that some of them have
trauma which require both medical and mental attention. We will do everything
possible to identify the others,” the SEMA boss said. source (Shehu Abubakar)
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