An
under-aged Boko Haram abductee who recently gained freedom from the
sect after being used as a s*x slave for years has narrated her
turbulent ordeal.
File Photo - parents of abducted Chibok girls
“I told my baby, ‘If you were alive I would never leave you. I have no choice, please forgive me’.”
Those were the chilling words of Amina (not real name), to her 28-day
old son, who allegedly died in her hands, minutes before she fled
through the vast Sambisa forest, in a desperate bid to escape the
outlawed terror group, Boko Haram.
Recounting her experience, Amina, aged 20, told an online news
portal, The Mirror that the memory of her tiny baby’s body lying
lifeless in the dust at the base of a tree in Sambisa Forest tortured
her intermittently having been held captive for five years by the group.
But with her baby just 28 days old and very sick, it was too late
for him (the baby) to survive the harsh environment in Sambisa forest as
he took his final breath in her mother’s arms.
“I couldn’t hold down the tears as I saw my child lifeless and about to be abandoned,” Amina, who explained, recalling with nostalgia that she was snatched away from her parents at the age of 15.
Irked by this development, Amina resolved not to go back to her demented captors; since she did not know what lay ahead.
Speaking further, Amina said she, “left him under that tree, hoping on some irrational level it would protect him. His remains are probably still there.”
For obvious reasons, it was gathered that Amina’s case draws
references to the myriad of other young girls, who by virtue of similar
situations, also found themselves in such peculiar state as only a
mother truly terrified and desperate could do such to her baby.
“I was forced into marriage three times, and had a child with each husband,” she tells me, when we meet in Muna refugee camp in Maiduguri, the region’s capital.
When I sit next to her it has only been five weeks since her
escape. Fiddling nervously with her hands, Amina explained that she was
visiting her elder sister in her home town of Baga in Borno State when a
car stopped and 10 Boko Haram fighters jumped out.
“They were purposefully hunting for girls to kidnap,” she explains. When she protested, they beat her to a state of unconsciousness.
When she opened her eyes, she was in the Sambisa forest, an area three times the size of Wales, as she said: “I found myself in a mist of 200 women.”
Recalling further, she said at least one of the girls was a Chibok
schoolgirl as they became friends. She is, to her knowledge, still
there.
“She was also forced into marriage and has a child. She is very
unhappy, her husband has two other wives senior to her and they don’t
give her food. She is hungry, and he beats her,” she said. Amina was immediately forced into marriage with a 40-year-old Boko Haram brute.
“They put a gun to my head. There were women who had refused. But they were tied up and r*ped,” she said. Her husband was vicious.
“He dislocated my arm,” she recalls. She was of course,
r*ped repeatedly. Within a couple of months, she was pregnant. Just four
days after the birth of her son, now four, her husband went with the
terror group to attack a village and was killed. Amina, who said she was
forced to marry again, said: “The second man was 50, he would beat me too.
When I refused sex, he locked me up.” The s*xual assault
on her resulted into another pregnancy. And yet again, seven months into
her pregnancy, this man was killed in a village attack. She gave birth
to a little girl, now three, and with little time to recover was again
forced to marry, to a man in his late forties.
“Almost immediately, I was pregnant again.” Traumatised,
the only time Amina smiled was when she speaks of her children. She
explains although their fathers were evil, she had never struggled to
love them as she stated: “They are all I have. It does not matter.”
It was perhaps this fearsome love which gave her the courage to
flee. Her chance came when her husband got into a fight with another
terrorist, while the community was distracted and eventually she grabbed
the kids, ran for five days and was drinking from puddles all through.
She believed her baby died of starvation as she had no breast milk
to give. Finally last month, she reached a roadside in Maiduguri and
begged strangers who offered to help.
But the case of Amina and her child remains a touchy one
considering the fact that prior to her escape, the Nigerian Army on
December 20, 2016, made an incredible breakthrough against Boko Haram,
rescuing 1,880 women and children held by them in the Sambisa Forest,
and arresting 504 men.
Though her grief is overwhelming; the emotional scars remains a
lifelong as Amina said she was yet to begin the counselling offered by
aid agencies like UNICEF, despite revealing that tests showed that she
is HIV positive.
Most of the time, according to reports, she still looks numb as she
tries to hold her slim body still, perhaps due to the self-training
which she got over the years of abuse to try to be invisible. There is
no expression on her young face.
This is because her body begins to shudder with gutteral, primal,
sobs once she talks about her baby. Thankfully, her parents have
survived and are also there, along with her sisters, her sisters though
happy, are more wary.
“They insult my children,” she says, sadly. While
expressing shock over the kidnap of 276 schoolgirls from their boarding
school in Chibok in April 2014, UNICEF child protection worker, Labaran
Babangida, said the youngest escaped captive he has met is just 10.
“She was repeatedly r*ped and because she is very small she now cannot control her bladder,” he says.
“We cannot find her family.” Another girl, Aisha, who I meet in Maiduguri’s Dalorie refugee camp, was 13 when she was snatched.
Now safe, she is 15, with a seven-month-old baby, Fatima, on her knee – her captor’s child. “He forcibly used me,” she says, embarrassed.
“I was confused, I didn’t know what was right.” These
girls, especially the young ones, are regularly used by Boko Haram as
suicide bombers, too. Just two days after we leave Maiduguri, two girls
believed to be seven or eight detonate bombs in the town’s market
killing themselves, one other, and injuring 18.
On the part of Amina, she was never forced to do this as she claimed that said she knew those girls who were. “One told me she had been told to carry a bomb to a market,” Amina recalls. “I told her ‘Run away, think of the elderly, the children you would kill.
And she did.” However, Saturday Telegraph learnt that 30
girls like Amina have arrived the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs)
camp in the past two weeks.
Interestingly, the camp holds over 40,000, is one of 18 in the
town, and over 40 across the region with over two million persons
already displaced by the terror group.
For many Boko Haram captives, reunion is difficult. Families are
suspicious of the girls, they see them as tainted, their children as
evil.
They also fear they are on a mission to detonate bombs for the
terrorists. Commenting also, the Chief Child Protection Officer for
UNICEF, Rachel Harvey, said the girls often suffer PTSD. She said UNICEF
educates hostile communities too, stressing that: “People believe the babies of Boko Haram could grow up to become a threat. I have heard of babies being killed.”
According to her, Amina is a woman crushed – but not quite, I think, broken. She said Amina is “stubborn” but confessed that: “I don’t want to marry again, I want to be alone and with my children.”
Culled from New Telegraph
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