Escaped boko haram victims narrates horrific ordeal

New York-based Human Rights Watch 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
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.