Escaped Boko Haram Victims Narrate Horrific Ordeal

A report published by New York-based Human Rights Watch has detailed the horrific treatment that some of Boko Haram’s victims were subjected to while in captivity.

HRW spoke to 47 witnesses and victims including 12 of the 57 of the girls who were fortunate enough to escape from the terrorists after being abducted from Chibok, Borno in April.

The victims tell stories of rape, forced marriage and how they were forced to participate in Boko Haram’s crimes in a 63-page report, entitled "'Those Terrible Weeks in Their Camp': Boko Haram Violence against Women and Girls in Northeast Nigeria.”

A 15 year-old girl told of how she was forced to marry one of the insurgents and had to live in his cave:

"He soon began to threaten me with a knife to have sex with him, and when I still refused he brought out his gun, warning that he would kill me if I shouted," 

She added that the "huge man in his mid-30s" raped her every night.

One 19-year-old was ordered to kill a soldier who she had been forced to lure into a trap. She said:

"When they followed me for a short distance the insurgents swooped on them."

"They slit the throats of four of them as they shouted 'Allahu Akbar’,then I was handed a knife to kill the last man. I was shaking with horror and couldn’t do it. The camp leader’s wife took the knife and killed him."

Another victim spoke of how the militants threatened to kill her and her friends after discovering that they were students.

The terrorists reportedly told them:

“Aha! These are the people we are looking for. So you are the ones with strong heads who insist on attending school when we have said ‘boko’ is ‘haram.’ We will kill you here today.”

The Nigerian Foreign Minister, Aminu Wali has insisted that negotiations are still ongoing to free the remaining 219 Chibok girls, who have now spent more than six months in captivity, but the accounts rendered by the escaped victims have raised concerns about the mental and physical trauma that the girls who are still being held might have suffered.