Feature
By
Philip Obaji Jnr
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria—The
arid town of Gwoza looked like it was finally going to see rainfall after
months of drought, but a devastating attack by Boko Haram turned hope to
despair. Armed with machetes and guns, the militants roared into the northeast
Nigerian town in January 2015. As they jumped from their vehicles, the group
began to burn homes and gather the women and children.
Among the young militants
was a 15-year-old boy whom we’ll call Ahmed. Months before, Ahmed was abducted
from his home in Baga, not long after completing primary school. I met the
teenager in an Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp at Madinatu, not far away
from Maiduguri, the capital of Nigeria’s northeastern Borno State, where I had
spent three days meeting with IDPs and listening.
Ahmed told me he was
kidnapped along with two of his neighbours from their compound, and taken to
the militants stronghold in Sambisa where he was forced to become a soldier.
After just two months training with the jihadists, his recruiters brought him
on the mission to Gwoza.
Well before they set off
for the attack, Ahmed’s superiors told the fighters to capture as many women
and children as they could, and that they would be allowed to “have fun” when
they returned to their base.
“At first I didn’t
understand what they meant by ‘you are going to have fun’ and nobody thought to
explain,” said Ahmed. “Days before we left for Gwoza, they began to show us
what they wanted us to do.”
For the next two days, the
young boys, most of whom were about Ahmed’s age, watched as their commanders
raped women and young girls abducted in earlier raids. The lesson for the boys
was clear: They were learning to subdue a struggling victim during sexual
assault.
“The girls will scream and
cry for help, but [the militants] didn’t care,” Ahmed said. “Sometimes they’ll
be slapped and threatened with guns if they didn’t cooperate.”
While in the act, the
jihadists provided specific instructions to the young militants.
“They tell us to remember
to hold the girl tight on both hands, pinned to the floor,” Ahmed said. “They
said we shouldn’t let a woman overpower us.”
The leaders were making a
sharp departure from previous rules. Previously, even though dozens of women
and girls were held hostage in their camps, young militants were prohibited
from emulating their elders.
“From the day we came,
they [Boko Haram commanders] kept warning us against having sex,” Ahmed said.
“They said women belonged to men and not boys.”
Now, all that changed. A
large number of senior fighters had been killed in one assault by the military,
forcing the militants to take the boys along as part of the mission to Gwoza.
But they knew they had to incite these young teens as well, and they wanted to
replenish their supply of female hostages. Some abducted girls had been married
off, and some had escaped or been rescued by Nigerian forces, leaving the
jihadists with just a handful of female captives to prey upon.
“They wanted us to do a
good job and that was why they said we will have fun when we returned,” Ahmed
said. “I could see that so many young boys were excited.”
But Ahmed wasn’t
interested. All he wanted was a way out of his misery. While others thought of
how they would make the Gwoza mission a success, the boy focused on his own
escape.
As the militants abducted
the women and children and began their journey into the vast Sambisa forest,
some of the captives jumped from one of the pick-up trucks and escaped into the
surrounding bush. Ahmed, who was also in the vehicle, jumped down as well,
pretending to chase the escapees and recapture them. But the boy, like many of
those he ran after, never made his way back to the militants.
“I met up with the girls,
but I encouraged them to keep running,” he said. “They were surprised I did
that.”
Ahmed and the girls ran as
far as they could. They kept trekking from one village to the other as they
looked to reach Maiduguri, the biggest city in the northeast. After spending
days on the road they eventually made it to Madinatu, where they found shelter
in an IDP camp.
“I feel better now having
regained my freedom,” Ahmed said. “I can move around at will, and do the things
I like without bothering about being killed.”
But as Ahmed was trying to
settle into life as a refugee in a makeshift camp nearly 200 kilometers away
from his hometown, his contemporaries fighting for Boko Haram had begun to act
in the same manner as those who recruited them—molesting and raping female
captives.
At least two girls who
escaped from a Boko Haram camp told me they had been raped by “little boys” on
separate occasions just before they made their way out of captivity.
One of them said the
militant who raped her was so little she could “push him away” from her “very
easily.”
“He looked like a
13-year-old having sex for the first time,” said 16-year-old Rukiyat, who was
abducted by the militants in Bama and taken to the jihadists stronghold in the
Sambissa forest. “The only reason he succeeded was because he had a gun.”
Since Boko Haram began its
uprising in 2009, the jihadists have focused much of their attention on
abducting women and girls, the most notable of which was the kidnapping of more
than 200 schoolgirls from their dormitory in Chibok, an incident that gained
global attention. A number of victims became sex slaves of the militants.
“I was raped almost on a
daily basis by different men,” said Rukiyat, who managed to escape one night
when militants who were supposed to be watching the camp had fallen asleep.
“When they became fed-up with me, they asked the little boy, who has often
watched them do it, to take over.”
In the last 18 months,
images of the women and girls emerging from Boko Haram captivity, where some
were forced to marry members of the group, have been very constant. But despite
their freedom from terror and brutality, many victims still face assault and
rape in IDP camps—even from young boys.
A report by Human Rights
Watch (HRW) released in October detailed how women and girls who survived Boko
Haram violence were raped by officials at camps in northern Nigeria where they
sought refuge.
A number of victims who
stayed at IDP camps in Maiduguri told HRW they were sexually abused or coerced
into sex by camp leaders, vigilante group members, policemen and soldiers. Many
of these victims said they were abandoned after becoming pregnant.
But those who have been
victims say the abuse in IDP camps is nowhere as devastating as the torture and
humiliation they suffered from young boys while in captivity.
“It pains me when I recall
that I was raped by a small, dirty boy,” said Rukiyat, who after fleeing Boko
Haram was also raped by a vigilante group member involved in aid distribution
in an IDP camp, after he drugged her wine.
Credit: Daily Beast
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